He's nice, he has egalite to a fault, all this inclusivity horseshit -Stephan Fry- "If you're white and privately educated and you start talking about the virtuosity of western enlightenment, then it sounds as if you're basically grinding a boot into the face of Muslims and the third world."- what if you're not privately educated, but poor, white and self educated ? What if Fry himself hasnt considered perhaps that we're doing them a favour too.?
Look at it from their point of view. Being from somewhere without welfare and seeing a country with welfare as well worth joining because its a better standard of living; its aspirational and we all have a tendency towards the honeypot, especially if we have no honey. They see the welfare card as some inexplicable pipe-leak worth imbibing (and that's its intention, a kind of bait) while going on with ones usual business - one cannot expect people to softly change, or choose our customs, and to be better than they themselves already think they are, thankyou v.much. its sinfully optimistic and vestigially condescendingly presumptuous to do so.
The only outcome of extending ourselves to the full letter of all liberal possibilities, of sharing as much as possible via taxes is that we'll spread too thinly, perhaps to the point of implosion. This is obviously happening in all "1st world" countries. Implosion being the loss of identity to the abyss of global culture, which is to say, any culture but this one, all those countries outside of our amazing liberal European playground empire, who all appear horrifically blase about liberal directives, you know - human rights, not too mention gay, animal, women's rights (and our true born natural liberals, T. Benn, M. Thomas, J. Pilger, H. Pinter never fail to criticises firstly the wretched annuls of imperial America and Europe's sanguine envelopment in it)*.
The paradox is we have so much concentrated here in the first place because we did exactly the inverse to begin with. Yet no one but the most zany conservative at the excessive fascist end of the right wing is suggesting we
(in full fascist excess) return to the closed-rank racialist colonial capitalist piracy of our preceding centuries. Yet it can and has been(?) argued that the real cream of the colonial era is only really being reaped now (the lower echelons haven't had it so good). That is the only justification for sharing with the third world victims of our conquistadors - because we are still milking them with our byzantine trade constructs continuing to befuddle and systematically fleece those underducated (unschooled in economic & legal jargon) natives of our planet. This is the authentic grand crime which no amount of welfare, liberalisation or inclusionist politicking here in the European Union of Nations will remedy. Its welfare and overpopulation on one hand and a spade on the other, to the one who is down in a dark deep hole known as elsewhere, being encouraged to dig himself in further.
*The crime of the U.S. and its military is perhaps the desire to replicate, rather than import a totalitarianism, contrary to the academic intellectuals belief that we invented it. Eastern nations have always had the air of monopolizing despotism not too mention cultural exclusivity - e.g. Japan, until the late 19thC banned all foreign influence vehemently and they were imperialist, not the conquered.
Fry Link:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2010/sep/12/stephen-fry-interactive-show-profile
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