inside the man

Saturday, April 10, 2004

Marx as justification for G. W. Bush's foreign policy

I stumbled across this one year old article today and was immediately drawn to the author's use of Marx to justify the most recent US invasion of Iraq. A brief quotation will illustrate my fascination:

But all of this is lost on the man who simply pays another man to build his home for him. He is free to imagine his dream house, and to indulge in every kind of fantasy. The proper nature of the material need not concern him - gravity doesn't interest him. He makes the plans out of his head and expects them to be fulfilled at his whim.

If we look at the source of the Arab wealth we find it is nothing they created for themselves. It has come to them by magic, much like a story of the Arabian nights, and it allows them to live in a feudal fantasyland.

What Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein have in common is that they became rich because the West paid them for natural resources that the West could simply have taken from them at will, and without so much as a Thank You, if the West had been inclined to do so.


What are we to think of these comments? While I am neither a philosopher nor a political scientist, I am fairly certain that a Marxist could arrive at similarly negative conclusions regarding George W. Bush's rise to power. The entire article is filled with similar misapplications of the thoughts of famous philosophers and questionable historical recall - I found it a thoroughly enjoyable read.

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Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Returned to working as a Management Consultant, specializing in risk, security, and regulatory compliance, with Fujitsu Canada after running the IT shop in the largest library in the South Pacific.

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