Professor Crispy wonders how the media can so consistently fail to understand why people might be suspicious of government. (There's a parallel here between this and continuously asking 'why do the terrorists hate us?', by the way.) Well, I imagine for a certain sort of person it is genuinely difficult to conceive of Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia as the same kind of thing as his country.
If you live with sufficient comforts - police that tend not to harass you, steady employment or reasonable welfare payments, nice houses with nice neighbours - then that's what you associate with government. The institutions of power can't possibly be killing people overseas; they're so friendly! I don't believe that the cops unjustly killed that poor man; my uncle is a policeman and he would never do that.
Unfortunately, governments are not people, and the existence of a few good people somewhere in the vast hierarchy of control (Elizabeth Warren, maybe?) no more proves the overall benevolence of government than Oscar Schindler proves that the Nazis were pretty cool guys.
No comments:
Post a Comment