Ah, but many of the same people, particularly music people, who boycotted apartheid South Africa had little or no problem with Cuba's totalitarian dictatorship, which banned "decadent" Western popular music and even the music of major Cuban musical figures like Celia Cruz for being against the regime. In other words, righteousness can be rather, uh, selective.
Ah, but many of the same people, particularly music people, who boycotted apartheid South Africa had little or no problem with Cuba's totalitarian dictatorship, which banned "decadent" Western popular music and even the music of major Cuban musical figures like Celia Cruz for being against the regime. In other words, righteousness can be rather, uh, selective.
That wasn't exactly the point of this article or of my comment, but you're not wrong. The "yes but" idealization of Cuba by North American leftists has always baffled me. Even last summer's protests, during which Cubans demonstrated for "libertad!" and for which crime people are still in jail, was downplayed or ignored by the left. Ideologically driven true believers see only what they want to see.
My point, which could have been more explicit, was that when the supposedly righteous are demonstrably willfully blind, not to say hypocritical, their righteousness is questionable and may be something else, like fashionable correctness or covert opportunism.
Yes, I get that. It's not a point "the supposedly righteous" will ever concede, because political correctness and ideology supplant objectivity and critical thinking every time.
But also, objectively speaking, apartheid was a terrible yoke for South Africans of color to bear, and it needed to go away. It took the suffering and determination of many people over a long period of time, including the 27 years Mandela spent in prison as the face of the movement, to bring about that absolutely necessary change. Nothing and nobody is pure in this world, but sometimes good things happen in spite of human corruption and imperfections.
The issue is not the nature of apartheid, but what's really behind people's positions and actions, which may or may not be as advertised. False virtue is repellent in principle, even if it can sometimes act to good effect.
Ah, but many of the same people, particularly music people, who boycotted apartheid South Africa had little or no problem with Cuba's totalitarian dictatorship, which banned "decadent" Western popular music and even the music of major Cuban musical figures like Celia Cruz for being against the regime. In other words, righteousness can be rather, uh, selective.
That wasn't exactly the point of this article or of my comment, but you're not wrong. The "yes but" idealization of Cuba by North American leftists has always baffled me. Even last summer's protests, during which Cubans demonstrated for "libertad!" and for which crime people are still in jail, was downplayed or ignored by the left. Ideologically driven true believers see only what they want to see.
My point, which could have been more explicit, was that when the supposedly righteous are demonstrably willfully blind, not to say hypocritical, their righteousness is questionable and may be something else, like fashionable correctness or covert opportunism.
Yes, I get that. It's not a point "the supposedly righteous" will ever concede, because political correctness and ideology supplant objectivity and critical thinking every time.
But also, objectively speaking, apartheid was a terrible yoke for South Africans of color to bear, and it needed to go away. It took the suffering and determination of many people over a long period of time, including the 27 years Mandela spent in prison as the face of the movement, to bring about that absolutely necessary change. Nothing and nobody is pure in this world, but sometimes good things happen in spite of human corruption and imperfections.
The issue is not the nature of apartheid, but what's really behind people's positions and actions, which may or may not be as advertised. False virtue is repellent in principle, even if it can sometimes act to good effect.