In Afghanistan and Iraq, American and other western soldiers are fighting to promote (who said “impose”?) western values.
On Friday, near new York, a Walmart employee was trampled to death in the rush as a crowd of shoppers burst into the store at opening time. Elsewhere in America, two people were shot in a dispute in a branch of Toys R Us.
In the UK, an elected member of Parliament in the main opposition party has been arrested and held by police on suspicion of disclosing information to the public: information about alleged government cover ups that have no bearing on national security.
In the UK we have a child killed in a violent street incident about once a week. About 3 kids a week are killed by their parents or guardians.
On the eve of Armistice Day, an 89 year old war veteran was beaten and robbed in his own home by a gang of people ranging from teenage to in their fifties.
Your mission, should you accept it, is to explain to someone from the East in 50 words what Western values really mean.
I think your question is a fair one, but not for the reasons you give. In the US and the UK there is an active press, perhaps too active in scouring the landscape for just such stories and then reporting them with shock and indignation as if the history of humankind isn’t riddled with violence against and indifference to human life.
I doubt very much that Afghanistan and Iraq aren’t the sites of incidents which go unreported where murder and violence are done to women who have the misfortune to be raped or fail to cover themselves properly or to families practicing the wrong religion.
I believe that we do have an obligation to explain western values to those for whose benefit we wage war. But honestly, not for the reasons given here.
I’m not saying they’re better off than us in Afghanistan or Iraq. Far from it. (I am a supporter of Amnesty, having joined after one particularly vicious instance of public abuse of a woman in the “east” pushed me to make the decision I’d been putting off for too long.)
But different isn’t necessarily worse.
In strict Muslim countries, they have no alcohol. In the west, we have a massive problem with alcohol abuse, resulting in illness, violence, death and crime. Children of 8 and 10 have alcohol problems in some towns.
In strict Muslim countries, women are abused by being kept out of sight and forbidden to go out unchaperoned. In the UK, women are under pressure to look good, lose weight and show their flesh - and we have a huge rate of unwanted teen pregnancies, abortions, rapes, and a massive problem with sexually transmitted diseases amongst the young.
In Afghanistan it was until recently an offence to fly a kite. How trivial. In this country, there are certain words that cannot be broadcast at certain times of the day, or printed without asterisks. How trivial.
We bomb the Afghan poppy fields - but the problem isn’t that they are growing opiates, it is that our children are buying them.
As some of you may have spotted, I am not a religious man, but I do recall a story about a mote in the eye.
I find it amusing that this response was considered to be so carefully crafted that it needed editing. I wonder how difficult it would have been to make a spelling or grammar error while composing this post.
Don’t mind Greg. He is, in fact, smarter than most people. But he is also encumbered by the need to point it out. And, like Billy, though in a much terser way, a master baiter.
Some may recognize myself in this post. However, in all fairness to the Truth, it would help if we specified the specific Western values at play here, if any. Not everything that occurs in the West reflects Western values. And some of what occurs reflects values that are in conflict in the West.
For example, carrying concealed weapons is illegal, as is shooting people over toys, robbing veterans and others, and killing children.
To the extent these actions are illegal, can they really be held up as Western values?? Most Westerners do not endorse the values that led to these tragedies.
There will always be those among us who do not share our values. Does that need to be explained?
And we have the choice to drink or not drink. Also in the US we had the experience of Prohibition, ending in the 1920s. It didn’t work out.
Western women have the choice of playing along with the fashion game or not. In business or politics, of course, they have less choice. In Muslim countries, are the teen pregnancies legal?
Plus you can’t print those words (local equivalents) in Afghanistan either, can you?
Can’t argue that one. If they stop growing it there, it’ll get grown somewhere else.
Although somewhat excited by the marginally lewd reference I must still suggest that, for you, this is rather like living in a glass home and throwing stones.
Of the 48 “Muslim” nations, a number are democracies, and a number do not allow religion to play any role in the state.
Like “Christian” nations, some oppress women while others support their liberation. Some like the USA oppress the GLBT community, while others like Spain liberate GLBTs.
And did anyone read that the USA church whose members paid a LOT to keep gays from having civil rights, may have done so criminally?
Wait a minute. I had a bacon lettuce tomato sandwich just last week. They’re not oppressed in the US and why would they have to be liberated in Spain? Get a grip, Billy.
I refute the “western” label as opposed to “east” (or whatever you choose).
Having been raised in a muslim country I just feel that human beings crave for the same things … there may be different social experiments and paths and I think that the good thing about globalisation is that different parts of the word can borrow from other parts and imagine a distinct social experiment. But the distinction about “west” is historical and should not be part of any sketchy generalisation. Now the good thing about the initial post is to pinpoint terrible contradictions in the context of our lives (and so lead us to more humility!) … but human rights are not “western” bias (as some fundamentalists try to explain).
