{"id":110,"date":"2007-11-06T10:37:17","date_gmt":"2007-11-06T15:37:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/2parse.com\/?p=110"},"modified":"2007-11-06T10:37:17","modified_gmt":"2007-11-06T15:37:17","slug":"john-laughland-loon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/?p=110","title":{"rendered":"John Laughland, loon"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his column over at the Guardian, Laughland has taken a very interesting concept for an article – as demonstrated by his subtitle: “It is no accident that those who advocate war for humanitarian reasons end up justifying torture” – and neglected to explore the subjec<\/a>t.\u00a0 Laughland instead has chosen to muddy the moral issues at stake.\u00a0 Described by Wikipedia as a “a British eurosceptic conservative journalist, academic and author”<\/a>, he manages to take moral relativism to Chomskian levels.\u00a0 Right here is a glimmer of the article he might have written:<\/p>\n

It is therefore no coincidence that the US administration that justifies its wars in the name of claims about humanity and its right to liberty also advocates the use of torture to protect these.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He then goes on to implicitly question the genocides of the post-World War II era and to mock the fact that people think someone should have intervened.\u00a0 Apparently, Laughland, whom the Guardian <\/em>called the “PR man for Europe’s nastiest regimes”<\/a> – and then apparently gave him a column – took some lessons from World War II that few others did.\u00a0 Neither Neville Chamberlain’s trip to Munich nor the Holocaust seems to have made much impression on Laughland; apparently the lesson he has taken is that we must avoid war at any price.\u00a0 This is a position Gandhi took as well – in the midst of Hitler’s crimes – and I can certainly imagine someone making a strong case for it.<\/p>\n

Laughland is not that person: he seems to understand the weakness of his position, and rather than forthrightly stating that we should allow genocide because state sovereignty is the most important virtue, he tries to deny that these crimes take place.\u00a0 He says that he is opposed to humanitarian interventions, and then explains that the interventions were not all that humanitarian.\u00a0 These are two distinct points.\u00a0 The problem is that he declares his opinion if Position A and tries to justify it by citing a support of Position B.<\/p>\n

Laughland concludes his article using a familiar phrase from the pre-World War II period:<\/p>\n

We need instead to renew the deep conviction that seized the collective conscience of mankind in 1945 that the international system, and the ideas that underpin it, should be structured so as to ensure peace at any price.<\/em> [my italics]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Unfortunately, I think those currently promoting this most recent article are realizing what Laughland is saying.\u00a0 Laughland believes the only principle that should be used to organize international affairs is state sovereignty.\u00a0 I don’t know many liberals who would support that.\u00a0 And I personally believe there are greater principles that are often at stake.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In his column over at the Guardian, Laughland has taken a very interesting concept for an article – as demonstrated by his subtitle: “It is no accident that those who advocate war for humanitarian reasons end up justifying torture” – and neglected to explore the subject.\u00a0 Laughland instead has chosen to muddy the moral issues […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,23,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-foreign-policy","category-history","category-morality"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8qcx-1M","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}