Behind the Veil of Western Glory

Now we have climbed up into Warsaw on our itinerary I look back upon our visits with the CEELI institute and RFE/RL. During both visits I found that the people we met with were able to respond to our question but were very careful about how they chose to answer them. When questions were fielded to RFE/RL about government agency funding the responses were short and quickly diverged from what the question was asking. RFE/RL was particularly good giving very PR style answers without letting too much reflect poorly back upon the company. Questions concerning the Hungarian Revolution and RFE/RL's involvement were particularly hard to get a clear answer. The President instructed us to Google an author who was made out to be some sort of expert upon the revolution. This left me with the impression that the company itself does not often look back upon those times and tries its best to move forward, though I feel like they might be neglecting the lesson to be learned from RFE's efforts during the Cold War. On the other hand they were very good at presenting material explaining their new uses of media including television, SMS and social networks.

My visit to CEELI, an international institute that studies rule of law encouraged me even more to consider what the role western style governments and if they were truly appropriate for people who have not developed egalitarian framework in society and do not revere personal freedoms the way that our multi-party democracy does. Our guide was able to explain that the institute holds conferences on rule of law specializing in everything from intellectual property to human trafficking which judges from many developing nations attend. The prospectus of the institute (from what I gathered) was to encourage the reign of justice and to resist legal corruption withing the standards of law in these developing countries. Though this sounds to be a reasonably inoffensive way of achieving proper rule of law, I find that this could easily be a polite way of saying that they wish to demolish the aspects of developing systems that the west would find to be unjust, thus editing legal systems to fit western interests. Dr. Puchala affirmed more of my thinking when he asked what would happen if their mission was ineffective and our guide was only able to give a highly optimistic ideological answer that asserted that there were common legal principles that did away with societal oppression and fought against disparity, and those principles could be accepted by any system with enough tweaking. I drew from this a parallel to communism, as Marxist theory suggested that certain principles could be applicable for all sorts of people and that there was a general yet supreme method of government that most any thoughtful person would accept in light of its theoretical benefits. That too was quite ideological because communism confronted ideological barriers in the west similar to the barriers that rule of law is facing in the developing world. There will always be some degree of people who reject our methods of achieving justice and differentiation in opinion as to what justice is.

More to come today, I made a friend last night who's working for imagine comp put on by microsoft.

- Will F.