The stupidity of good people

I don't maintain that all good people are stupid, but many of the noisily good appear conspicuously stupid, as they participate in one moral panic after another.

Just now there is a moral panic about Zimbabwe.

I think that many people cannot face the fact that cruelty corruption and misgovernment are universal, and even extreme forms of those ills are very common. It is therefore consoling to concentrate on the affairs of one small ill governed country, to attribute its ills to a very small number of people, and to plan to remove them. The recently favoured scapegoats have been Yugoslavia and Iraq, and now it's Zimbabwe. I offer no excuses for the misrulers of those places, but do deplore concentration on them almost to the exclusion of other news.

It helps people forget the misdeeds of countries that are too powerful to be confronted like China, an autocracy that oppresses about a fifth of the world's population, and the USA that has forced corruption and organised crime on the entire world with its absurd drugs war.

Mathew Parris recently wrote an excellent article about Zimbabwe.