Can't Get you Out of my Head- Part 4

 

See here for my review of Part 3: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2021/04/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head-part-3.html. Part 4 is called: But What if The People Are Stupid? and that question coming from elitists is of course rhetorical. See here for Part 4: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p093wz8v/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head-series-1-4-part-four-but-what-if-the-people-are-stupid and: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E68jz8ElLo8. One phrase I recall very well from my early childhood was "Vietnamese boat people". I didn't understand what that meant, but I realized that they were people who lived in a far off part of the world who were suffering badly. The children's TV show Blue Peter collected money for them. Years later I learned that they were refugees who fled their homes in Vietnam following the final victory of the communist north in 1975. They bolted from the country by sea on any craft they could find, sometimes on overcrowded vessels that were not designed for long voyages. Their plight split the leftist community of the time because the left had supported the Viet Cong northern guerrillas' fight against the American-backed south. Some, like Jane Fonda, regarded the boat people as the enemy because their reason for fleeing was that they had collaborated with the capitalist southern regime of Nguyen Van Thieu. She thought they should be abandoned. Her fellow singer Joan Baez, who had stood beside Ms Fonda in the antiwar movement, supported the boat people. She said they were still human beings, mostly children. It shows how people sometimes put political ideals above common humanity. This has also recently been exposed in South Africa, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2018/08/land-seizures-in-south-africa.html. Charity is sometimes abused and even some of the funds for Bob Geldof's Live Aid were simply used as another weapon in the Ethiopian civil war. This had caused the horrific famine that inspired the Western public to part with millions of pounds. At the same time the first transgender activist, Julia Grant, was facing the challenge to be who she believed she really was.
 
Meanwhile, in China, Mao's ex, Jiang Qing, was put on trial for treason and mass murder. She was sentenced to death. China was run by a heartless bureaucracy. They tried to appease the growingly angry masses by creating a "democracy wall" where people could post flyers and sell pamphlets on any subject they liked. However, this got out of control and resulted in the infamous Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989. The problem in China was similar to the one Isaiah Berlin prophesized in The Trap, see the background link at the bottom. How much good can "negative liberty", individualism without demanding outside change, really do in a world where change is needed? There is a growing feeling around the world that the government no longer benefits the people it is supposed to govern. There was a public outcry in 1999 when Tony Martin, a Norfolk farmer, was being constantly attacked by local gypsies and he shot one of them dead. Surely, wouldn't he be acquitted by pleading extreme provocation? No, he was jailed for life. The government have stopped being the people's representatives and instead are merely administrators of a global technocratic hegemony. Were they ever anything else really? We are now in a new era which is post-democratic and nobody knows exactly what to call it. What name will it be given? What will happen to Jiang Qing? I'll have to watch Part 5 to find out.
See here for more background: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2016/10/hypernormalisation.html.