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.
