Quote Originally Posted by Banquo
How delicious. No-one has implied my neo-con tendencies for some time now.

I believe that the natural state of Mankind is to be free. So yes, remove these governments and the nations of the Middle East will tend towards their natural state.

Your straw man is to suggest that I would encourage outsiders to effect this change, rather than to allow those people to discover liberty themselves.
Straw man? What straw man?

It was just a belligerent tone to encourage disagreement, that's what it is. All you neocons see enemies and strawmen everywhere.

Anyway, I'll add to your axis of strawmen: current Western notions of freedom are recent. Non-western cultures may not share them at all. What's more devastating, is that I am more and more beginning to believe that our notions of individual freedom, individual dignity are the outcome of very specific historical and social circumstance, which have unduly been generalised into universal values. For example, I can well imagine some counties prefering nuclear annihilation over Beirut's Pink Floyd concert. My anti-cultural relativistic worldview is beginning to crumble.

Devastating, because I could accept that someone would with his whole heart thinks his society's ultimate goal lays in subordination to faith, or a more social concept of freedom, or what not, while still believing that they had it all wrong and that the natural state of mankind is to be free.

This dichotomy is hidden in the language of non-western cultural emancipationalists as well. How often have we not heard expressed ideas like 'freedom for Afghani women is to wear the hijab', or, 'freedom in our society is collective, not individualistic'. The point here is that they use the word 'freedom' in this deceitful manner, where the more proper phrase would be 'by any fulfilment of our society's deepest values and norms'. That is, they have taken over the normative value of the word freedom, without the material aspect. Because they have been thought through a western dominated discourse that freedom is the highest good.

Something similar is going on with the word 'democracy'. Why on earth does Mugabe even pretend to be democratically elected? Surely, voting at the tip of a sword is the complete opposite of a democratic and free vote. Mugabe does it, because he too, confuses, or deceits through hope of this confusion, the nominal and material value of the status of democracy.

One of my main problems lays in my newfound understanding that western freedom is a progressive notion of freedom. Not progressive in a political sense, but in a social sense. It requires the notion of a changing society. But, as a society necessarily changes over time, then so too must its values. Hence, the impossibility of naming these values universal.

More worryingly, I notice that once again I find myself unable to post a cohesive essay in the time remotely acceptable for a forum post. Rewriting the above rubble into comprehensible English and something vaguely resembling a meaningful structure would take me hours. I need to hone my writing skills. Or learn to structure my thoughts. Or simply get an eduction.