The cult was not hypothetical. Practically everything I wrote in the post was true. Including the repression of the mystery cult and the support of members of the mystery cult for Roman imperial expansion.
> Actual queer lives were destroyed. Why do we need to
> deal with hypotheticals?
> Why don't we stick to the actual situation at hand?
Because you refuse to face the basic moral question. Also hypothetical questions often clarify moral questions.
If you explain your moral stance in relation to the atrocities "we" support through our government and how your opposition to the Castro regime will lessen the oppression of anybody in the world, then we will be getting at the nub of the matter. But most people in these United States, at times my self included, can't even "see" our own responsibilities and the atrocities we commit. They only see the atrocities of our "enemies". But as I said in my opinion, in the current state of affairs the only enemy is at home, not in Cuba, or among fundamentalist Muslims, or anybody else.
> The Castro government persecuted queers. The question
> on the table is what is the appropriate response to the
> fact of this persecution.
The question on the table is where does our moral responsibility lie? Is it with our own human rights violations or are we responsible for the human rights violations of the people we oppress and violate. If you face this entry level question then other questions may be faced afterward, but not without taking into account whether your words and actions will help to increase or decrease the oppression of others. Simple question but hard to answer.
> Finally, would persecution of women or Backs or Jews or (fill in the blank)
> be a minor wrong?
In some sense the question is the same as it was with Saddam and Iraq.
Of course in that case the atrocities were much worse and deeper. But also the atrocities were directly sponsored even encouraged by the U.S. government and its foreign policy intellectuals, among others. One way for the U.S. government to stop atrocities in Iraq under Saddam would of course been to stop committing, supporting them, and creating the conditions in which they continued. That course was never taken. One way for the U.S. people, privileged intellectuals especially, to try to stop the atrocities committed in Iraq would be to organize against the government promoting those atrocities, their own government. Until that is done, in this and similar cases, all else is hypocrisy. Not your hypocrisy or "their" hypocrisy, but our hypocrisy.
The fact that that we are unable to come to terms with the hypocrisy in these matters, even conceive of it as-hypocrisy, is how, "theoretically"* hypocrisy connects up with ideology.
Jerry Monaco
*( I use the word "theoretically" in scare quotes with sarcasm in my voice because this thread is the same as the thread on the elite obscurantism of the intellectual priesthood when it comes to our ideological "blind spots", right in the center of our "vision". The hypothetical I presented is precisely in the situation that all "human rights" intellectuals are in when criticizing the human rights of our enemies, and sometimes of our friends. And the institutions of the intellectuals serve to transmit the ideologically "produced" hypocrisy of us all. )