If your opponent supports some group of people on account of its being oppressed, persecuted, marginalised etc, assert that he/she actually supports their beliefs and culture. Suppose for example, your opponent expresses his solidarity with some oppressed Catholic peasants in Latin America, he is necessarily a supporter of neo-feudal theocracy, sexual repression, draconian anti-abortion law etc, in league with reactionary anti-Enlightenment forces etc
Say things like:
Are you really comfortable being on the same side as someone who believes that a piece of bread is the flesh of God??
1 comment:
Clearly an astute observation, but your particular example is, rhetorically-speaking, a particularly well-chosen one. Since the Catholic peasants of Latin America exist only in terms in of a locality - they live in Latin America, and are peasants - they cannot in fact be understood to constitute, by any of us here in Europem any kind of threat, imaginary or otherwise, to the universalist claims of the Enlightenment project. At most, they might simply be regarded as a hinderance.
Clearly, the real example you are drawing on is the Muslim question. When does defending individual Muslims from the oppression, persecution and marginalization that they are quite clearly suffering from turn into a contingent case for supporting political Islam - an universalist ideology that does possess planetary counter-Enlightement claims of its own? It isn't atavistic primitivism elsewhere that bothers the anxious racists of divine Europe, but rather, it is the fear that "our way of life is under attack."
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