{"id":5813,"date":"2009-06-22T18:31:25","date_gmt":"2009-06-23T02:31:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=5813"},"modified":"2009-06-23T18:20:59","modified_gmt":"2009-06-24T02:20:59","slug":"a-thought-experiment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2009\/06\/22\/a-thought-experiment\/","title":{"rendered":"A Thought Experiment"},"content":{"rendered":"

Daniel Halper writes in The Weekly Standard<\/em> today<\/a>:<\/p>\n

On \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Early Show\u00e2\u20ac\u009d this morning, Obama said that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153what we can do is bear witness and say\u00e2\u20ac\u201cto the world that the, you know, incredible demonstrations that we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve seen is a testimony to\u00e2\u20ac\u201cI think what Dr. King called the\u00e2\u20ac\u201cthe arc of the moral universe. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s long but it bends towards justice.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

Perhaps this is so, but Martin Luther King didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t \u00e2\u20ac\u0153bear witness\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to the civil rights movement in America\u00e2\u20ac\u201che was a courageous participant. Obama now has a choice: Will he be a courageous participant or a weak witness? Will he declare that the elections in Iran were rigged, or will he continue to say that he does not know?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As Halper is probably aware, there is one fairly significant difference between King\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s relation to the civil rights movement and Obama\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s relation to the current protests in Iran. King was, indeed, a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153courageous participant\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in the civil rights movement, but he was an American and a leader of the movement itself. Obama, by contrast, is neither an Iranian nor a leader of the Iranian protest movement \u00e2\u20ac\u201d rather, he is the leader of a rival power that has a fraught history with Iran.<\/p>\n

It is fairly obvious that the level of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153participation\u00e2\u20ac\u009d that would be desirable, or effective, for a homegrown civil society leader would be different from that of a rival foreign leader. But to illustrate this obvious fact more sharply, consider the following thought experiment. In 1963, as King delivers his famous speech to the March on Washington, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev delivers a public message of his own to the protesters. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We would like to tell these brave voices of freedom,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Khrushchev says, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153that they have the full support and solidarity of the USSR. The Soviet Union and the United States Communist Party are ready and willing to perform any measures within our power to help our American brothers and sisters obtain their rights from this oppressive regime. And although Dr. King pretends that he holds no hostility toward the American capitalist system of government itself, and wishes only to secure the ideals of the American founding for all of its citizens, we all know that he and his supporters really yearn for complete regime change in Washington. We in Moscow will do whatever it takes to help you achieve this goal.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

Let us ignore the question of Khrushchev\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s intentions here: whether he is motivated by genuine sympathy and desire to aid the civil rights marchers, or a more cynical hope of destabilizing a rival government, or a narcissistic and self-righteous wish to take credit for the marchers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 achievement in order to feel better about himself and appease his domestic critics. (And before anyone gets up in arms about \u00e2\u20ac\u0153moral equivalence,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d let me note than I am not equating Obama\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s America and Khrushchev\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Russia, merely noting that Obama and Khrushchev occupy structurally similar positions as leaders of distrusted rival powers.)<\/p>\n

Let us focus only on a simple tactical question: would Khrushchev\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s statement aid the civil rights movement? Would it be welcomed by King and his associates? Why or why not?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Daniel Halper writes in The Weekly Standard today: On \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Early Show\u00e2\u20ac\u009d this morning, Obama said that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153what we can do is bear witness and say\u00e2\u20ac\u201cto the world that the, you know, incredible demonstrations that we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve seen is a testimony to\u00e2\u20ac\u201cI think what Dr. King called the\u00e2\u20ac\u201cthe arc of the moral universe. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s long but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":70,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-5813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/70"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5813"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5818,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5813\/revisions\/5818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5813"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=5813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}