All other examples you may cite, involving entire nations whose citizens did not decide out of free will to want to adhere to this societal order either failed or have very big problems.
But in many of the cases Ted cited, the citizens actually did choose that way of government, at least inasmuch as democratic elections and constitutionally permissible laws can be called an expression of the will of the citizens. In all those cases, the regime was put in big trouble by outside forces who decided that they didn't like the domestic policies they practised - usually because they involved forcing transnationals to actually, horror of horrors, pay taxes and because they involved confiscating property of the feudal nobility and various colonial charter companies. Actions not entirely without precedent in democratic countries in Northern Europe.
As an aside, I would claim that many, if not most, of the countries Ted cites were not actually communist at all - rather a lot of the deposed regimes in Latin America were developmentalists, which is basically social democracy for third-world countries. The labelling of developmentalist governments as communists was part of the propaganda justifying the various and sundry "interventions," and does not necessarily reflect the facts on the ground.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
Cite your cases - and let's compare them with all the right-wing coups organised by the US and direct interventions by the US this century. Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.
The whole point is that the west was the good side in the cold war, and that moral position cannot be relativised
A moral position can not be argued without an ideological compass of what is right and wrong. A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!
I agree that that's not ideological at all. I don't find it particularly admirable, though.
The bottom line is that for you, life is either ideological, or is not at all, and truth, like good, like justice, are defined according to the ideological compass.
That being said, it's the end of our discussion because I can't debate with a fundamentalist notions that I deem as not relative to any faith. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
Helping a sick man on the street can be a commendable act of principle, if it is founded in some sort of moral obligation to help the less well-off. But if it's simply a matter of gratifying a sense of moral superiority by helping those who are made disadvantaged by a system that you otherwise support, then no, on balance I don't see that as a particularly moral act.
Give a man a fish, and he'll have food for a day. Teach a man to demand justice, and he'll have food for the rest of his life.
We've covered the nature and merits of ideology elsewhere in this thread. And if you feel that acting on a set of gut feelings and superficial impressions that have no connection to each other, no coherence and no requirement of consistency is admirable and something that all of humanity should strive for, well, that's your prerogative.
For myself... not so much.
And some of the principles used to justify free press can be incorporated both in ideologies that are right wing and ideologies that are left wing.
Very few principles are inherently right-wing or left-wing. Most often, the political alignment we assign to a principle has more to do with the context and justification for the principle than with what it says in and of itself.
Another way of putting that is that most principles don't say all that much in and of themselves, unless one knows the context in which they are applied. Which is why some of us keep harping on the fact that you seem to want to divorce principles, actions and politics from their context and history. Because when one tries to do that, one most often ends up with either a load of fluffy generalities or a baggage of implied context that one refuses to examine because one assumes to be liberated from the need to examine context.
The one I quoted was a much more common way to assume power than the one you do
Which is - aside from the dubious truth value of that statement - entirely irrelevant. That a malicious variant of capitalism instigated a dozen or so coups in Latin America that brought vicious capitalist dictators to power in no way invalidates social democratic capitalism as practised in Scandinavia.
Similarly, that a malicious variant of communism instigated a dozen or so coups in Eastern Europe that brought various vicious communist dictators to power in no way invalidates social democratic communism as practised in Allende's Chile (leaving aside the fact that I dispute that Allende was doing communism...).
That the communists in Czechoslovakia came to power in a coup is hardly relevant to how "communists" (actually developmentalists, but I digress) came to power in Chile.
