 4/10 Good --- www.myantiwar.org http://www.myantiwar.org/feeds/rss/aggregate_1.xml
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Wednesday, September 03, 2008 --- 76 days ago http://www.ukwatch.net/article/waiting_for_the_barbarians
| In his verse ?Waiting for the Barbarians?, Greek poet Constantine Cavafy describes a country where all public life focuses on its enemies. Citizens wait in the forum because ?the barbarians are due?. The emperor and consuls are dressed in their finest garments to impress the barbarians when they arrive. Normal laws are suspended, and parliamentary debates cancelled during the present barbarian danger. Then the worst possible news reaches the city: ?... the barbarians have not come. / And some who have just returned from the border say there are no barbarians any longer.? The barbarians? failure to materialise hurts more than their expected arrival ? after all, ?... what?s going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution.? A generation of Western politicians grew up during the Cold War, when the fear of the ?barbarians? of Russia and China was used as a key to international and domestic politics: all confrontations between the West and developing nations were recast as battles between freedom and communist tyranny. Anti-communism dominated home politics during the 1950s, and remained a significant force right up to the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Ideas to the left of the Democrats in US, or of social democracy in Europe, were often painted as illegitimate relations of the communist enemy. Some leading politicians seemed disorientated when the barbarians of the Soviet Union ceased to exist as a u ... |
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Anytime
