[Gllug] [OT] Hero vote

[Dermot Moynihan]

At 11:39 14/04/03, Adrian McMenamin wrote:

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Rev Simon Rumble [<mailto:simon at rumble.net>mailto:simon at rumble.net]
>Sent: 14 April 2003 11:27
>To: gllug at linux.co.uk
>Subject: Re: [Gllug] [OT] Hero vote
>
>On Sat 12 Apr, Peter Adamson bloviated thus:
> >
> > You can vote for Linus to be Time (europe edition)
> > hero of the year...
> >
> > Though ppl might want to know
> > 
> <http://www.time.com/time/europe/hero/>http://www.time.com/time/europe/hero/
>
>I'm afraid I can't possibly vote for someone who wrote a useful and
>revolutionary piece of code when he's up against such impressive
>competition.  Just a cursory glance brings out Vaclev Havel and Nelson
>Mandela, two people who brought about "regime change" and liberated
>their people from brutal and oppressive systems without bloodshed.


Presumably you are unaware that at the height of the Indonesian slaughter 
of the East Timorese Nelson Mandela accepted a donation of $10 million from 
Suharto. I wonder what Mandela would have thought if Ramos Horta had been 
offered and accepted a similar donation from the government of South Africa 
shortly after some notable massacre of black South Africans.

Mandela has had his moments but that was certainly not one of them.

Also, Vaclav Havel has supported every act of aggression by the US and has 
consequently been feted by such luminaries as Clinton, Bush and Blair. I'm 
reminded of his address to Congress where he described the US as the 
"defender of freedom". He suggested that the backbone of our actions must 
be "responsibility - responsibility to something higher than my family, my 
country, my company, my success". Noam Chomsky with his usual low tolerance 
of hypocrisy suggested:  "responsibility to suffering people in the 
Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Timor, Indochina, Mozambique, the Gaza 
Strip, and others like them who can offer direct testimony on the great 
works of the 'defender of freedom' ". (All quotes are from Chomsky's 
Deterring Democracy.)

Caring for one's own constituency to the exclusion of others equally 
entitled to freedom from oppression hardly merits the title heroism. And 
that's being gentle - what springs to mind are words like "collusion".

I would suggest that your definition of *hero* could do with some refining.

Rgds
Dermot



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