THE LEFT’S TU QUOQUE

I AM SURE YOU HAVE EITHER heard, seen, or been subject to a logical fallacy, whereby, in the case of the latter, you offer the opinion to someone that, for instance, president Mugabe of Zimbabwe is a tyrant who beats, tortures, and starves his people. Only to be told that British colonialism did much worse on the continent of Africa.

            Or, with the behaviour of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist organisation currently in control of the Gaza Strip, which daily sends rockets in laissez-faire fashion into Israel: where the Left’s reply would be that Israel has done far worse under the occupation.

            Tu quoque is from the Latin for “You, too” or “You also”. It is most frequently deployed by the Left in this country who despise their country’s past and often call upon it to repel criticism of, in the modern age, the behaviour of those who they represent, whether in Cuba, the Gaza Strip, or, as they once did, Colonel Gadaffi, and President Saddam Hussein; as well as any other Third World country’s leadership that takes a stand against the “colonial” West.

            I used this appeal to hypocrisy myself when I was young. I am now 61 years old; but I did, in my twenties, join the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and as such had to defend the Soviet Union. I did so by deploying this very hypocritical canard.

            When in 1968 Russian tanks invaded (I would have said rescued) Czechoslovakia from its Prague Spring, on the 5 January-21 August; I had to defend the Soviet states’ actions; I drew my opponent’s attention to Vietnam and what America was doing in that country. For nothing the Russians were doing in Czechoslovakia could compare, for instance with what happened in the village of My Lai in March of that year, when the American army massacred a whole village of more than 400 peasants, where men, women and children were killed.

            This “You too” hypocrisy gave me a way of justifying the cruelties conducted by the Soviet Union from its inception. There was no part of the cruel history of the Soviet  Union that could not be justified by tu quoque if the Left in the West so wished.

            The favourite theatre for examples of tu quoque, were to be found on the readers’ letters page of the Guardian. I read the paper avidly almost on a daily basis for over 24 years, and many of those writing to the letters page used the very tu quoque in their arguments that I had deployed myself. I read the Guardian when great journalists like James Cameron wrote for it, and his pieces alone justified the cover price, as they would have today. But the Guardian changed. It bought into the modern liberal Left-wing agenda that encompassed Multiculturalism and political correctness.

WHEN A MORAL DEFENCE for a given action is so weak that you have to use tu quoque in order to justify your position, then you have no right to an opinion using such a device.

            Such a device is, at the very least , the result of lazy thinking. For each example of human folly are so very different from each other. In the case of the My Lai Massacre; it represented a criminal act conducted by soldiers acting on their own behalf, and certainly without the orders of the president  of the United States of America.

            As far as the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia is concerned. Its implementation carried the full weight of the Soviet state. Which meant the whole body politic and judicial apparatus of the soviet state was behind it, giving it its legitimacy.

            There are fundamental differences between My Lai and Czechoslovakia, and they should not be put on an equal basis - such logical fallacies are tu quoque.

            While tu quoque does not  monopolise liberal thinkers, it is this Leftist part of the political spectrum that has spread its influence within the debating chamber; whether within broadcasting, or the printed media.

            The modern Left had been taught at university, by modern Left tutors (circa the 1960s) ; and as such have indentured themselves to tu quoque.

            In no other country can such a device be used wholesale; because in no other country have they produced such a generation that despises their country’s history as do those educated among the modern British Left.

            It is the loathing and hatred for your country and its history that leads you to embrace such a dialectical weapon, as tu quoque.

            Each aspect of British medieval and modern history may draw well scrutinized observations of comparison with each other, but it requires the academically minded and well read to explain such comparisons; and not the politically prejudicial, yet academically tutored Left-wing proselytisers, who stand ready to advance and demonstrate their bigoted outpourings that label their opponents hypocrites - care, it seems, for the academic niceties escapes them.