Thursday, April 27, 2006

Idealism and demagogy

The problem with any individual or movement is that it places himself or itself into an unfair position from the start, if it adopts, what is considered high moral values in the western society. When abiding those principals, you handicap yourself while competing with an opponent who doesn't play by your rules.
History teaches us that in those cases, the opponents don't hesitate to use this for their advantage. Therefore this path is very difficult, and very few people manage to not go astray. Even fewer, succeed in achieving position of power. These individuals are adored, feared or worshiped.

There is other kind of people. Those who pretend to be from the fist group, use their rhetorics, but do not hesitate to break their alleged principals to achieve their goal. Those are demagogs and hypocrites. Unfortunately the last are much more numerous, and some times dangerous.

Now lets apply it to the modern politics. Both groups occupy the whole political spectrum, but it is noticeable that the most dangerous of the second group are the two opposite edges, while sharing many similarities. Two most prominent examples in modern history are fascism an communism. I will not discuss their similarities, since there were many studies that would do that much better than I possibly can.

Todays public sentiments and opinions made the far right groups to be considered unpopular, their rhetorics - bad tone, while oblivious to the demagogs of the far left. I may like, or dislike members of the first group, despise the demagogs, and it doesn't matter which side they belong to.

Watch the racists, who pretend to be minority rights defense groups. Watch the violent anti war activists, who dare to call themselves pacifists. Watch the xenophobes who call themselves patriots.
Watch them and know what they are. Demagogs and hypocrites. Don't let them fool you.

1 comment:

Irina Tsukerman said...

To be honest with you, sometimes the line between idealists and demagogues crosses, when idealists are ready to do anything for the sake of their ideal and place their ideal above the people that ideal is supposed to be helping.