Ciao!

The enlightened aristocracy

Robert Fisk's latest column in the UK's Independent is interesting. He's opposed to the upcoming war against Iraq. But he also points out that the trouble w/ much of the anti-war left is, well, its aristocratic arrogance. Here's an excerpt:

The people with whom these liberal academics should be building bridges are the truck-drivers and bell-hops and Amtrak crews, the poor blacks and the cops whose families provide the cannon fodder for America's overseas military adventures. But that, of course, would force intellectuals to emerge from the sheltered, tenured world of seminars and sit-ins and deal directly with those whose opinions they wish to change.

.....

[W]hen I told a lecturer in Austin that I had asked hotel staff and air crews to turn up to my lectures on the Middle East and America -- and that all had come -- I was treated with a kind of weird amazement, puzzlement that I should bother to ask such unpromising material to think about the Arab-Israel conflict mixed with faint pity that I should ever expect them to understand.

Maybe that's why so many anti-war protesters rail against "bourgeois" values. After all, it's bourgeois values that destroyed aristocratic privilege and argued that everyone -- regardless of wealth, status, or education -- had the same political rights.

Posted by Miguel at 04:44 PM

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