George Monbiot : “Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable” |
The words of Mike Lofgren, published on theamericanconservative.com. He worked for 16 years on the Republican staff of the House and Senate Budget Committees.
George Monbiot quoted Lofgren in an article in Monday’s Guardian, mainly about his own experience of private education in England.
Applying Lofgren's words to the elite in Britain, Monbiot added: “Secession from the concerns and norms of the rest of society characterises any well-established elite. Our own ruling caste, schooled separately, brought up to believe in justifying fairytales, lives in a world of its own, from which it can project power without understanding or even noticing the consequences. A removal from the life of the rest of the nation is no barrier to the desire to dominate it. In fact it appears to be associated with a powerful sense of entitlement.
"So if you have wondered how the current government can blithely engage in the wholesale transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, how its front bench can rock with laughter as it truncates the livelihoods of the poorest people of this country, why it commits troops to ever more pointless post-colonial wars, here, I think, is part of the answer. Many of those who govern us do not in their hearts belong here. They belong to a different culture, a different world, which knows as little of its own acts as it knows of those who suffer them.”
Brilliant. I will read this more than once, to ensure I absorb these extremely wise words.
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