East Asia Affairs

 "Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all."

- John W. Gardner

In this democracy there are two main political extremes, socialists and capitalists, when the left/right spectrum emerged in the early French revolutionary era the now familiar extremes of communism on the left and fascism on the right were simply not present and leftward ness and rightward ness were based on one's attitude towards the traditional monarchic style of government.

There are a range of issues today that both sides fight bitterly over, abortion, gun control, homosexuals, narcotics and who can forget foreign policy. The fact that there are differences in opinion is not the issue; it is the modes in which they employ to sway moderates. Moderates hold the real power in a democracy and since the far left and right both thirst for that power they have done and continue to do anything to further their cause by shocking them onto their side.

The far right employs some morally questionable tactics to sway moderates, demonizing, misquoting and downright lying, but the reason why the left are more known to employ these tactics is because they have one of the largest mediums in the world today on their side, Hollywood. Do not be fooled, the far right is just as bad as the left.

Let’s highlight one issue, abortion. The left say that the rights of women takes preference over the life of an unborn baby while the right say the right of the unborn baby to live takes preference. Now let’s apply John Gardner’s quote into this debate. What the left and the right have done is to over simplify a complex and varying situation and converted it into a punch line.

Just because the left is fighting for women’s rights do you think the left has the right to lessen the significance of giving birth to another human being, should the left equate pregnancy to indigestion?

Just because Conservatives are fighting for the rights of the unborn baby, does it give them the right to violating a woman’s right to her own body, why do Conservatives who are tough on crime so lenient with anti-abortionists who murder abortion providers? If Conservatives are so pro-life then why not allow birth control devices to be more freely available?

Foreign policy, the most debated issue around the world today. A word of warning to every reader, I lean more towards the Conservatives on this issue.

The left think the world is black and white, good and evil, they think that there are moral absolutes. They believe diplomacy can work without the threat of military action if the talks fail, they also believe that if the United Nations call an emergency session, the conflict will halt until the UN decides what to do.

Here is something you would never hear from Michael Moore, Presidents and Prime Ministers are elected by each respective nation, the President of the United States is elected by the American people for the American people and no one else, name one Presidential candidate who wanted to donate a billion dollars to an African nation based on solely humanitarian reasons and actually went on to win the Presidency. Name one leader of a nation who won an election by saying they wanted to spend their taxpayer’s money for a nation that the voters never heard before.

Next time you see a homeless man on the streets, begging for loose change, stop and watch how many men and women in expensive business suits walk past the homeless man pretending they were too busy to find loose change in their pockets. Young people, University students who hate George W. Bush and his evil Neo Con cronies for not being generous with third world countries walk past the homeless man just like President Bush would do.

What leftists would call negotiation to stop genocide, the leader of Sudan would call a delay tactic to finish off what he started, the ethnic cleansing of his nation. What leftists would call negotiations to stop North Korea obtaining nuclear warheads, Kim Jong Il would call it the tying down of America’s hands in public opinion while they proliferate nuclear weapons. Negotiations and diplomacy works and has a definite place in a nation’s arsenal, but there are countries and leaders who treat their own people with such contempt, they will not stop, they will not halt until a barrel of a gun is pressed firmly on their forehead.

I know that that last statement was shocking and even vile, but in the end 2 million Sudanese were ethnically cleansed while the United Nations Security Council refused to put the issue on the table for several months, this was right after the Secretary General Kofi Anan and other important people in the UN stood in front of CNN, BBC and every other media outlet and said “never again, never again” after the 1 million dead in the Rwandan massacre.

After the 1994 agreement (appeasement) between North Korea and the Clinton Administration, where North Korea would receive two 50 megawatt light water nuclear reactors for civilian energy use and 500 million tones of oil, we now find out that North Korea admits to never stopping their nuclear program and US officials estimate that a nation that frequently attacks its neighbours and kills and tortures its own citizens, now has a small amount of Nuclear weapons.

Tell me, why do both Democrat and Republican Presidents continue to prop up and defend oppressive dictatorships in the Middle East often at the expense of true democratic elections? Michael Moore and George Clooney will tell you its oil and only oil. They are partially right, having oil interests in the Middle East is a factor. What Moore and Clooney will not tell you is that the oppressed hate the United States, they plot the downfall of the US.

So the United States spends billions to help stablise Saddam Hussein, the former royal family of Iran, et al instead of spending hundreds of billions more and sending thousands of American soldiers home in body bags, it is the lesser of two evils, its not black and white its mere different shades of grey. I do not hate Michael Moore or George Clooney for what they say, I hate them for what they do not say. Instead of bringing both sides of the argument and letting the public decide, they make up our minds for us and tells us to believe in what they decided.

“America is only interested in oil…” you go to the edge of your seat and you say “and…, and!”, nothing, you sit in the cinema and wish Moore would not oversimplify a complex and volatile situation, you look at the faces around you in the dark cinema and with the flashes of light from the footage of explosions from an American made bomb you see naive University students nodding their heads and miming the words “right on!”. You look back at the movie screen and you get treated to a montage of old George W. Bush photos while the music eludes to the fact that President Bush used Cocaine during his stint in the air force. Of course Moore would never actually say it without any proof.

While the far right and the far left call each other the enemy and attack each other like enemies would, the moderate left and the moderate right merely label each other the opposition. The extremists are the killers, the murderers and the liars, on the far left, the Chinese Communist Party killed an estimated eighty million Chinese citizens in their fifty year history, Stalin killed twenty million Soviets, Lenin killed millions before him and Kim Jong Il and his father killed millions upon millions during their five decades of power. While on the far right, Hitler killed eleven million including six million Jews and the Klu Klux Klan, one of the ultimate symbols of the far right killed thousands and terrorized millions.

The reason why these governments/organisations choose to kill is because they have the ultimate belief that they are right, that their cause is just, to maintain the status quo, because they are the symbol of what is “pure”. That is extremism.

The recent Muslim violence against Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Mohamed is a prime example of extremism, Muslims believe that violence and murder is wrong but if it is concerning their religion of Islam, well, murder and violence, especially against innocent civilians is perfectly justified.

The Klu Klux Klan also thought violence and murder was wrong, except against black people, Jews, Asians, homosexuals, anybody who did not believe in the lord Jesus Christ. Can you see a parallel trend here? Both in the opposite side of the religious spectrum yet their principles are almost identical, their methods are almost identical.

In a time where moderates should rule, fear is griping every democracy in the world, the left and the right are on their soap boxes and are playing to every fear you have about the world today, this is the time where moderates must rise, it is time to push aside the two polar opposites and establish reason and logic and not political ideologies.

Extremism is the blight on the world today, so next time you feel the urge to slander George W. Bush, Hollywood or Al Queda make sure it is for the right reasons. One thing Mao Zedong and Adolf Hitler never did was to question their position and to listen to the other side. Do not make the same mistake.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction

http://www.religioustolerance.org/abo_viol.htm

http://www.carnegieendowment.org/static/npp/agreed_framework.cfm