India's Sandalistas
Friday, May 02, 2008
During the ride in to my conference one morning this week, I heard an interesting report on NPR about a phenomenon in India that sounded eerily familiar: American-born Indians returning to their ancestral homeland to work for left-wing causes, most notably environmentalism.
"Trash is just trash," says Vinay Prakash, a young businessman who is helping create one of India's first waste-recycling companies, EcoWise Waste Management. "Primarily, we don't have any, any sense of category of waste. It's just waste with us."Completely unmentioned in the short summary page at the NPR website, however, was something from the audio report (available at the above link) that sounded like music to my ears -- a native Indian woman who wouldn't have any of the doomsday global warming hysteria spouted by the "ABCDs", as the American do-gooders are known over there.
But young Indians who grew up in Britain, Australia and America are now arriving here, hanging out with Indian friends, and important conversations about climate change and the [environment] are starting. [bold added]
If you don't have time for the whole audio, start at about the 4 minute mark for that. There's also a guy who confuses his interviewer by expressing a love of a new mall that sprang up in his area. "This is exactly what [my friends] aspire for," he says. But then, shortly after that, the subject returns to what leftists really find stimulating: garbage.
The phenomenon of Americans -- raised with all the material benefits of capitalism, but without an appreciation for its virtues or its intellectual foundation and with the belief that it is harmful -- going out into the developing world to undermine its progress by implementing bad ideas is hardly new. The same thing happened in Nicaragua back in the eighties:
"I am just back from Central America," proclaimed James Matlack last April on the steps of the Capitol as he tried to get arrested for protesting Contra aid. "I feel we have to keep faith with those who struggle." He is not alone: each year some 15,000 to 20,000 Sandalistas (a name that pays tribute to their footwear) fly south to Managua and then flock to Washington, D.C., claiming spiritual solidarity with the Nicaraguan people.The biggest differences between the Sandalistas and the ABCDs appear to be that the Sandalistas were, as a group, far less productive than the ABCD's, and that the privileges the Sandalistas enjoyed came much more from the government of the country they were descending upon than those of the ABCDs.
Nevertheless, each group is working to spread and implement ideas from the left that would, in undiluted form, hamstring and ultimately destroy any country that implemented them consistently, including the United States.
-- CAV
2 comments:
If there were a grain of truth in the altruistic fiction that the West is reponsible for the plight of the Third World, this would be it.
It is no accident that the rhetoric that emanates from those directly responsible for their poverty should sound like it was lifted directly from some third-rate Leftist university screed; they often were educated there! Such an education works so well for this purpose.
Well then, what about the cases where the dictator was never educated in the West -- or at all? What if they simply latch onto these ideas as convenient rationalizations for their actions? To such people, I say: those ideas work quite well for the purpose in this mode also -- so what difference does it make?
All right, then suppose the murderers simply lift it off the Daily Kos website without caring to understand its meaning -- maybe they don't actually like Kos and want to make him and his site look bad. If that were so, the rhetoric would have a completely random character -- but it doesn't; no, the words of the Left are nearly always the ones chosen. After all, when you have a task to do, why not make use of the most proven ones available for the job?
Sometimes the laguage has what the Left's defenders would call a "right-wing" character, which also work very well for that purpose -- but a cursory inquiry into the matter reveals that what they actually mean are the National Socialist sort of "right wing", which being in fact merely the Left's disowned siblings, becomes a meaningless distinction. They work just as well for the purpose, because they carry the same payload to the same end-of-road.
So, detective, how many fingerprints do we need on the murder weapon before we start to get the pattern?
Curiously, no one has ever attempted to enact a dictatorship by means of advocating *and implementing* capitalism and individual rights. Nobody morally disarms people by exhorting their right to exist. No one has ever demanded that the people selfishly pursue their own personal goals en route to enslaving them. No one has ever tried to rally a flock of followers under the flag of individualism.
You see, those ideas just don't work for that purpose. Such is absurd on its face. That road just doesn't go there -- not even in our nightmares.
"So, detective, how many fingerprints do we need on the murder weapon before we start to get the pattern?"
Your questions about education answer that one very well.
You need an education -- and that would be the opposite of what the "progressive" school calls an education, to be able to see, on more than a concrete level, that there is no such thing as a free lunch.
The "masses" as leftists like to call the legions that they have neglected or actively sought to harm, fall for the free lunch and fail to see history repeating itself so many times it would be laughable if it weren't so tragic.
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