Collective Civic Responsibility Vs. Individual Freedom
Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2001 1:16 PM
Subject: Re: bunpeiris, Your opinion could be worth…$1,000.00!
I never collected a penny for writing from Americans or for that matter, from anyone else. Never mind. A man has to do what he has to do. His has to give his two pennies worth. All must contribute to the humanity, hell or thunder.END BEGINNING. So I see you have bothered to ask me of an opinion of mine. A top of the rack punk; the lead hack of the pack. There is no doubt this is a part & parcel of your American advertising & propaganda. You are purely driven by commercial interest. Americans, for sure, know how to make money: they would collect everything ranging from our opinions to our garbage, recycle, repackage, brand & market it. They have all the Imagination & all the courage coupled with vast resources of a continent to follow up with tremendous innovation. From Asia only Japanese could stand with them.But there are many others who are willing to lend their ears to the opinions of the Romans, Citizens, & friends. Let’s add Indians too, after all they are one billion now. Nobody listen to Chinese but they have their way & say & get others to say very sorry even when no offence was intended. That’s Chinese Chop Suey cum Kung Fu dish for you to be seasoned with American produced Soya Sauce. But then again, those that are willing to be simply polite & others who are genuinely sympathetic to the opinions of others are partly responsible for the chaos of our world. Everybody with an opinion end of taking up arms & causing violence: murder & mayhem; destruction& chaos & then others say that ex-marine thought different. (sorry for American slangbang English) Thought different my bum. The baby killer. May you burn in hell Bloody McVeigh!
Bring prosperity by killing 1.7 million. The 1.7 million Killer of Killing Fields himself was killed by a mosquito. John Lennon sang “Imagine”. Imagine no races, no religions, all for all & all are all. Lennon was gunned down. Today we are faced with million mutinies.. About a decade ago I happen to read a book review of a book written by one of the finest writers of our time. Even before start reading the article it dawned on me what it could be all about. The Name of the Book is
“Million Mutinies ” & the name of the writer was V. S. Naipaul. It is only in January 2001 that I got a second hand copy of the book by American second hand bookseller powells.com. Thy Pax Americana, the kingdom of Dot.Com lands on your desk. Yet your heart is a blank book: your so called new world order is in wherever you can stand to your advantage with no ethics of consistency at all. Nobody wish to have a leaf of it. Having said that, we mustn’t forget philanthropists of the caliber of Andrew Carnegie, Bill Gates & numerous others.
Now to drop a big brick & drive the Indian friends mad, allow me. Indians with their passion & penchant for taking up colorful language named the last civil disobedience against then ruling British, “mutiny “. They were clamouring for their bounty: India. With all that long civilization & all those pretty maids-Miss Words with such sexotic faces & exotic names such as Aishwarya, Sushmita, Diana, in a row, with all those unashamed ancient erotic carvings on, with those epics, Mahabaratha, Ramayana with only Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey to take up the gauntlet, the land of Kama Sutra among million other magic, India is a divine bounty indeed.
Former IRA terrorist, the master bomber Shane Paul O’Doherty, renouncing violence
Duties Vs Responsibilities: Law & Order Vs Justice 8 Protection of the weakest
1.There is technical Progress, but this is not the same thing as the progress of humanity as such. In every civilization this process is very complex. In western civilization-which used to be called Western-Christian but now might better be called Western-Pagan-along with the development of intellectual life & science there has been a loss of serious moral basis of society.
During these 300 years of western civilization, there has been a sweeping away of duties & an expansion of rights. But we have two lungs. You can’t breathe with just one lung & not with the other. We must avail ourselves of rights & duties in equal measure. And if this is not established by the law, if the law doesn’t oblige us to do those, then we have to control ourselves.
When Western society was established, it was based on the idea that each individual limited his own behaviors. Everyone understood what he could do & what he could not do. The law itself did not restrain people. Since then, the only thing we have been developing is rights, rights, rights, rights at the expense of the duty.
Dissident Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Noble prize for Literature in 1970)
2. Solzhenitsyn & I differ most sharply over the defense of civil rights, freedom of conscience, freedom of expression, freedom to choose one’s country of residence, the openness of society.
For me, these rights constitute the basis for a fully human life & for international security & trust. I have no doubt whatsoever as to the value of defending specific individuals. Solzhenitsyn assigns only a secondary importance to human rights & fears that concentrating on them may divert attention from what he sees as more important matters.
Father of Russian Nuclear Bomb, dissident writer Andrei Sakharov (Noble Prize for Peace in 1975
3. The words law & order have so frequently been misused as an excuse for oppression that the very phrase has become suspect in countries which have known authoritarian rule. Some years ago, a prominent Burmese author wrote an article on law & order as expressed by the official term “nyein-wut-pi-pyar”. One by one he analyzed the words, which liberally mean ‘quiet –crouched-crushed-flattened,’ & concluded that the whole made for an undesirable state of affairs, one which militated against the emergence of an alert, energetic, progressive, citizenry.
There is no intrinsic virtue to law & order unless ‘law’ is equated with justice & ‘order” with the discipline of a people satisfied that justice has been done.
The Buddhist concept of law is based on “dhamma’, righteousness or virtue, not on the power to impose harsh & inflexible rules on a defenseless people. The true measure of the justice of a system is the amount of protection it guarantee to the weakest
Aung San Suu Kyi (Noble Prize for peace in 1991)
Weep with these novels as if the reality itself wouldn’t do
Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
http://www.online-literature.com/hardy/tess_urbervilles
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
http://www.online-literature.com/victor_hugo/les_miserables