Michel -- you are correct. It was RFK -- slightly better than JFK -- but the response is the same.
With regard to the success for failure of the American experiment and model of a society based on liberty and a strict separation of the government from the ordinary lives of the citizens in a manner that protects civil rights by preserving privacy -- allowing for governmentally focussed social action only in cases of real and great need -- I think Vaclav Havel put it best.
[quote:vjo3lekd] Twice in this century, the world has been threatened by a castastrophe; twice the catastrophe was born in Europe, and twice you Americans, along with others, were called upon to save Europe, and the whole world and yourselves. The first rescue mission -- among other things -- provided significant help to us Czechs and Slovaks ...
(T)he United States was making enormous strides. It became the most powerful nation on earth, and it understood the responsibility that flowed from this. Proof of this are the hundreds of thousands of your young citizens who gave their lives for the liberation of Europe, and the graves of American airman and soldiers on Czechoslovak soil.
But something else was happening as well: the Soviet Union appeared, grew, and transformed the enormous sacrifice of its people suffering under totalitarian rule into a strength that, after World War Two, made it the second most powerful nation in the world. This was a country that nightly gave people nightmares, because no one knew what would occur to its rulers next ...
All of this taught us to see the world in bipolar terms, as two enormous forces, one a defender of freedom, the other a source of nightmares...
So you (Americans) may have contributed to the salvation of us Europeans, of the world, and of yourselves for a third time ... And now what is happening is happening: the totalitarian system in the Soviet Union and most of its satellites is breaking down and our nations are looking for a way to democracy and independence...
What does all this mean for the world in the long run? Obviously, a number of things. This is, I am firmly convinced, an historically irreversible process, and as a result Europe will begin again to seek its own identity without being compelled ...
As long as people are people, democracy in the full sense of the word will always be no more than an ideal; one may approach it as one would a horizon, in ways that may be better or worse, but it can never be fully attained. In this sense you too are merely approaching democracy. You have thousands of problems of all kinds, as other countries do. But you have one great advantage: you have been approaching democracy uninterruptedly for more than two hundred years, and your journey towards that horizon has never been disrupted by a totalitarian system. Czechs and Slovaks, despite their humanistic traditions that go back to the first millennium, have approached democracy for a mere twenty years, between the two world wars, and now for the three and a half months since the seventeenth of November of last year. [/quote:vjo3lekd]
If we are at a crossroads in our theory of government, as you suggest, it is the crossroads the Czechs and Slovaks, and the rest of the world, faced between the two world wars. There is democracy -- stinking of America as it does -- on the one hand. There is totalitarianism, with its (to again quote Havel) "legacy of countless dead, an infinite spectrum of human suffering, profound economic decline, and above all human humiliation" on the other. England, the US and Western Europe took the best road at this crossroads; Eastern Europe, for reasons beyond the control of its peoples, did not. Given that history, the choice of roads is easy -- and it continues down the road of Western Classic Liberal rights and democracy; not down the road of total government action, disguising control and humiliation of basic humanity as care for the citizens.
A clear majority of the citizens of the CDS are deeply committed to privacy and the rights guaranteed by the UDHR. We want our government to build and maintain our sims -- but not interfere with our lives. Your project simply goes too far -- much too far.
That said, there are a number of good ideas -- more modest, more wise, more reasonable ideas -- that CARE shares with the SP and other parties. I look forward to working with your successors in CARE's leadership on these issues.
However, a complete reform of the CDS government and social structure is not on the agenda. We will not go town that road to complete control of the CDS by the government, complete control of the government by CARE, and complete control of CARE by you.
It won't happen.
Beathan
Let's keep things simple enough to be fair, substantive enough to be effective, and insightful enough to be good.
