Re: RE: Hoax

[kjkhoo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Ricardo Duchesne wrote:

>You can add China to the list, but my point is that Debray,
>Chomsky and others dismissed western reports about the
>extermination this regime was carrying against its own people -
>those who drove cars and used oil, simply on the grounds that non-
>westerners were incapable of such crimes. We now know that
>every race and ethnic group on earth that has had the opportunity
>has killed, infected, exterminated, and assimilated others: the
>West has no monopoly on this, and should be praised for
>cultivating the very ideas you now advocate.

Leaving aside the apparently deliberate misconstrual of what Chomsky
was attempting to do in his coverage of the then Kampuchean
situation...

the West has no monopoly on those ideas, and really, "cultivation" is
a gross distortion of what the West has done, at least from the
perspective of those of us outside the West.

Sen's Development as Freedom points out several instances of such
ideas which long pre-date the contemporary West's promotion
(cultivation implies some really serious effort of application) of
them -- a promotion, need one add, fulfilled more in the breach than
in the observance. Unless, of course, one chooses to ignore the
continued Anglo-American actions in Iraq, not to mention the
consistent support for Israeli policy and bloody-mindedness.

Incidentally, curious isn't it, that any talk of Asian values should
meet with such outrage, and the inevitable scare quotes, whereas "the
West" can be bandied about with apparent self-evident status, minus
the scare quotes and the capitalised "W".

KJ Khoo