One of the things I've been wondering about the Soviet Union is whether Saddam learned to fake having massive amounts of military ordinance from them. They both sure caved easy.
The Soviet Union caved easily because it caved from inside. The ordinance was real enough – it may or may not have worked, but nobody wanted to find out – but it wasn’t made to deal with that kind of opposition.
As for MTV -- I don't watch it anymore, I don't like rap, hiphop, or boy haircut bands. I have a hard time believing that the world is watching rappers, salivating at the thought of their women showing their booties in public and their young men dripping with blingbling.
I don’t watch it either, but a pretty damned large part of the world certainly seems to. MTV, of course, is a stand-in for western “culture”, and I think it fairly clear that the widespread desire to emulate western “culture” is what will ultimately bring the Islamists down, along with the North Koreans, Burmese, and the rest of the isolationist crowd.
Edit: this all seems so trivial when I think about what's going on in the Sudan. Talking about MTV as a beacon for the world seems sort of sickening when I think of black women being systematically raped with the approval of the powers that be because they are black… To the extent that MTV perpetuates the stereotype of black women as sex objects, that is not something to be proud of.
There’s a bit of irony there, no? In cultures where fundamentalist morality holds sway and women are kept as invisible as possible, we find barbarities like mass rape and honor killing. In cultures where the media are free to flaunt sexuality as they please, women receive stronger legal protection than they do anywhere else in the world. That doesn’t suggest a causative relationship between media extravagance and violence against women. Free, prosperous societies will always stretch – and usually break – the boundaries of traditional morality. That’s what happens when people are free. |
