As a personal strategy for dealing with brutal evil, Chris Floyd often endorses the words of Thoreau: “How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.”
Today Floyd and others highlight Desmond Tutu's embrace of this approach in his shunning of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Tutu refused to speak at a conference at which Blair was paid $238,000 to speak, and asked why African and Asian mass-murdering war criminals are held accountable for their crimes at the international criminal court while Blair and George W. Bush (and the elder Bush and Clinton and Obama and Powell and Cheney and Rice) scamper around the world collecting fat speaking fees, book deals, and peace prizes.
Floyd's other favourite American poet has the answer:
Democracy don’t rule the world
You’d better get that in your head
This world is ruled by violence
But I guess that’s better left unsaid
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