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In an excellent opinion piece in Saturday's Post, Linda Fowler pointed out that the Amendment 2 boycott of Colorado didn't really damage any of the anti-rights crowd.
Instead, any decline in convention business hurt liberal Denver rather than right-wing Colorado Springs. The people who suffered most were motel maids, janitors, waiters-not rabid tax-exempt ministries in Colorado Springs.
And, the only businesses to actually fail because of
the boycott have been gay-owned bed and breakfast
establishments whose patrons from other cities honored the
boycott and avoided trips to Colorado.
This is typical; boycotts and sanctions sound like a good way to fight your opponents, but in practice, they harm everyone except the people you're really after.
Some years ago, a liberal friend chastised me for
drinking Coors as we swapped lies in a saloon. You're
supposed to be boycotting that stuff,
he insisted.
But what's the point?
I argued. Suppose you
succeed and the family has to sell the brewery. How much
more right-wing nonsense could they promote if they didn't
also have a big business to run?
That is scary. One Mountain States Legal Foundation
is more than enough,
he said.
Suppose sales really fall off from your boycott,
I added. Then rank-and-file people will lose their jobs.
That's no way to support your laboring brothers.
Consider the sanctions against Iraq. President Bush insisted that we had nothing against the people of Iraq; we wanted to hurt Saddam Hussein.
So who gets hurt? Iraqis died by the thousands in bombing raids; Saddam Hussein is alive and well. Normal Iraqis lack food and medical supplies, thanks to the sanctions, but if Saddam Hussein has ever missed a meal on account of the sanctions, that fact has not been recorded.
The arms embargo in the Balkans doesn't seem to hinder the ethic cleansers, but it keeps their opponents from fighting back. The Haitian elite didn't seers to suffer from the recent oil embargo, but it has been cruel to ordinary citizens who just wanted to go about their lives.
For more than 30 years, we have refused to do business with Cuba, and the main result is that the Cuban people suffer terrible deprivation while Fidel Castro remains very much in power.
South Africa may have defied this dismal trend; there, the white power structure began to change after years of sanctions and boycotts. But it's also likely that black South Africans, reliant on factory jobs produced by foreign investment, suffered more than the Johannesburg elite.
A boycott sounds like such a great way to fight your enemies. But in fact, it hurts only your friends and potential allies.
Why isn't there a better way? Probably because enemies are rich and powerful, in a position to arrange matters so that come what may, they won't get hurt. Such is the way of the world, and until that changes, not much else will either.
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