beneath notice
不值得注意
不值得注意
主题：心理学专业英语词汇(B) ...
beneath contempt
beneath notice
不值得注意的
beneceptor
良性感受器 ...
基于53个网页-
【beneath】什么意思_英语beneath在线... ...
beneath notice 不值得注意 ; 在下方 ; 无足轻重 ; 使用蹑手蹑脚
Something Beneath 地心异兽
Beneath pure 有澄净 ; 里只要澄净 ; 每天澄净 ...
基于35个网页-
皇冠正版/地道英语系列o读寓言故事说地道英语 (平... ...
Froof Positive前车之鉴
Beneath Notice无足轻重
Why the Ant Is a Thief本性难移 ...
基于29个网页-
使用蹑手蹑脚
使用蹑手蹑脚(Beneath Notice)的时候,会更加不容易吸引敌人的注意
基于4个网页-
不值得某人注意
低信念冷却
这个问题不值得注意
微不足道的;无足轻重的
更多收起网络短语
不值得注意
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What he said is beneath notice.
他说的不值得注意。
It is beneath notice.
这不值得注意。
And the white men sat eating as if the food was beneath notice.
而那两个人坐着大吃大喝，仿佛食物是唾手可得、不值一提的事情。
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Many ordinary Afghans defied the risks to get out and vote&Photo: AFP/Getty
Facing exploding missiles and defying the menace of suicide bombers, just under half of those eligible to vote in Afghanistan appear to have turned out at polling stations last week. That is about the same as the percentage of British voters who participated in our last round of local elections – and nobody was threatening to amputate their fingers if they voted. Imagine that. There must be something to this idea that oppressed people actually do want a say in how they are governed. Or to put it more portentously, that the hunger for human freedom is universal.
Which is not to say (as the cynics and anti-American diehards are rushing to point out) that these desperate proceedings – whose results may have been rigged and which had to be conducted under conditions of ferocious security – were an exercise in full-blown democracy. Or that, in itself, they were an expression of civic freedom in the sense that we understand it in the West. Nobody makes that claim, and the people who take such pains to deride it are deliberately missing the point. Even if these elections had been a scrupulously fair contest between competing parties whose integrity was beyond question, that alone would not necessarily have entitled Afghanistan to membership of the Enlightenment Club of countries which run on the principle of government of the people, by the people and for the people.
Democracy involves much more than the occasional casting of ballots. Holding elections, even with a universal franchise, is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition, for a country to call itself "free". At least as important is the idea of the rule of law – of a judiciary that is independent of political control, of politics itself being subject to legal constraints and of a citizenry with guaranteed constitutional rights.
In the United States, the presidential inaugural oath is administered by the chief justice of the Supreme Court, in symbolic recognition of the ascendancy of the law over political power. Of course, political opinion evolves in determining what constitutes an inalienable right: the founding fathers did not conceive of slavery as an abrogation of human liberty. (Thomas Jefferson was, famously, a slave owner himself.) And until quite recently in human history, hardly anyone believed that women should be included in the right to choose a government. There is still a degree of disagreement, even among modern democracies, about limitations on free speech, or the right to dispose of one's private property.
But at any given time, whatever the fashion in human-rights discourse, the principle of the sanctity of law (and of the individual's recourse to it) must be upheld. The failures to reach this idyllic perfection are legion: there is patent inequality of access to justice even in the most developed nations, and no one pretends that the protection of civil liberties is anything but imperfect in any country. But it is the aspiration that distinguishes the truly free societies, and the licence they give to those who seek to correct those imperfections.
Nor is the simple process of voting for individual politicians enough to qualify. The Soviet Union had regular elections, as did its satellites (which usually styled themselves "Democratic Republics"), but the candidates all belonged to the same side: they were nothing more than delegates to Communist party bodies supposedly chosen to represent their local communities.
The importance of opposing parties, each with its own political programme, is often overlooked by the naively well-intentioned, who believe that the remedy for cynicism is to fill parliament with independent candidates who would owe allegiance only to their own electorates. In fact, without parties, and manifestos, and even some sort of whipping system to enforce consistency, there can be no such thing as a clear mandate for any government, and so no possibility of meaningful choice for the voter.
In the advanced Western countries, we have developed a particularly intellectual approach to these matters: our parties do not argue just about immediate policies or practical decisions, but are expected to stand for entire philosophies of government, and of the social good. Political leaders must embody moral values, expound economic theories and present their electorates with coherent applications of those abstract principles if they are to be credible. Elections are fought – at least officially – on the most idealised plane of precepts and propositions and arguments.
All of this sophisticated apparatus is far removed from the killing fields of many of those countries in which we are hoping to introduce democracy. No one pretends that Afghanistan is remotely close to that condition. Given the tribal and even criminal nature of the most powerful elements in its society, there may be no prospect in the foreseeable future of its achieving some 18th-century ideal of human rights and civic participation in government.
What should we conclude from that? That we are wasting our time in helping to defend its population from the tyranny of a hateful and life-destroying ideology? Or that democracy is a local phenomenon suited only to Western cultures whose idiosyncratic history has given rise to rarefied ideas about the worth of the individual, which it is fatuous – or downright wicked – to try to export to other countries?
There are a good many people whose answer to both these questions would be "yes". Which is where the significance of the Afghan elections comes in. Are those who argue this way, who see the whole attempt to (as they would have it) "foist" democratic processes onto an alien culture as a waste of time, prepared to tell those Afghan voters that they were wasting theirs? Are the people who risked their lives to vote to be written off: told that they are unworthy or unready (which is really the same thing) to determine their own political fate?
I am amazed by commentators on the Left who assume this patronising, ex-colonial attitude, which declares whole countries, whole populations, to be incapable of self-government even in the face of this astoundingly moving evidence: the Afghan voters defied the threat of death and mutilation to participate in the electoral process.
However minimal their influence may turn out to be on the actual political progress of their country, however ineffectual their individual votes may prove in a compromised, flawed election, they were prepared to risk their lives. Which of us, whose privileged democratic stability is so taken for granted as to be almost beneath our notice, should be able to dismiss their courage as futile and irrelevant?
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