…slaughtered and tortured, as the Inquisition ordered
Posted by davidncl on January 3, 2009
At first I supposed that I would be able to deconstruct the rhetoric of the enemy, phrase by phrase – showing it to be illogical and incoherent but that task has proved so much harder than I expected because there’s so little to get a hold of deconstruct.
Let’s take as an example some suppose utterances by David Cameron as reported by the Guardian:
“We need a more ethical capitalism,” Cameron told Vine.
“I don’t think the answer to the current crisis is to tear up the market system and go back to 1970s-style socialism, but we do need a more ethical capitalism in which we recognise that business has real responsibilities.
“Business is not just about making money. It is also about acting in an ethical way and I think we need to build a more ethical capitalism in Britain as we come out of this dreadful recession.”
At one level it’s really hard to attack this because basically it’s just a stream of nice sounding words which mean nothing. It’s meant to invoke feelings in you I suppose, a bit like Obama’s “hopey-changey” shtick is. It so mushy and vague he might as well be saying “I’m for goodness. Goodness is good business. I know you want to be good and I want you to be good. Good is good, we will make people be good.”.
At another level it has a much darker subtext about striving for the perfectabilty of man on earth. If this remark puzzles, perhaps you could do read Hayek’s “The Road To Serfdom”. Bastiat’s “The Law” (a slim volume) is also good but he didn’t get to see it done on twentieth century scales and so misses the full scale of the terror.
