(JustPatriots.com)- Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, has remarked that it is impossible to govern a society in “today’s atmosphere” because people don’t even want to hear things we disagree with, as she claims is occurring with the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Clinton remarked following a talk at Georgetown University on the impact of the Good Friday Agreement that the information atmosphere in which we live requires so much immediate reaction, sometimes utterly unthought. She said it generates so much rude, threatening speech targeted at those attempting to achieve hard things.
Clinton has said that the Good Friday Agreement, reached in April of 1998, has lessons for the present. The political struggle in Northern Ireland had been raging for decades, but it was finally put to rest by the peace deal.
Clinton brought up previous president Bill Clinton’s contentious decision to provide a visa to Sinn Fein’s long-term leader Gerry Adams in 1994. A BBC story from 2019 quotes Adams as saying that Clinton’s action “helped to prepare the way for the IRA peace seven months later.”
Hillary stated that we don’t listen to anything against our beliefs. It’s not a refusal to hear other points of view; we don’t want to listen to folks we’ve already decided are beyond our comfort zone. If that’s how you approach the world, she said, you’ll never be able to successfully run a society or keep the peace for a long time.
Hillary told her listeners that Russia’s “violence” in Ukraine is an attempt to “dehumanize the Ukrainian people: They are not worthy of existence, so why should anyone care if they are bombed into oblivion?”
She urged people to establish common ground despite the complexities of the modern information landscape.
Because “demonizing and scapegoating are merely acceptable methods” in today’s information climate, “we all have to do some major soul-searching about how we interact with one another,” she added.
