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Message: <blockquote data-quote="edgewaters" data-source="post: 3458468" data-attributes="member: 51529">I don't want to get too political here either, but even political correctness is not an individualistic philosophy, it is about social engineering which places limits on the individual to achieve an imagined collective benefit (social harmony, egalitarianism, etc).Catholicism never had any particular conception of human rights in the secular sense of the term. It had a spiritual or philosophic notion of recommended good behaviour and valued altruism highly, but no notion that humans could or should expect such in their dealings with other humans let alone society at large - in fact, suffering at the hands of your fellows was predicted and assumed to be a test of faith and forgiveness. The focus is, again, on limiting the individual for collective ends (in this case, a Christian society which would be harmonious etc). Similarly, criminal law acts in the same manner. The actions of the individual are curtailed and punishments proscribed on the basis of the damage that might be done to society. Through limiting the individual, the theory is that society will benefit.Secular human rights are a different sort of beast, they presume the existance of individual rights and forbid society from infringing on them - not to achieve a collective benefit, but because, by the theory of enlightened self-interest, the collective would benefit as a side-effect of promoting the individual above the society. There are few parallels where the focus is on limiting the society, rather than the individual.Though all nations in WW2 demanded sacrifice, few Western nations suborned the individual to the state and/or the revolution in peace time as the USSR, or Marxist thought in general, did.And, btw, Brecht was not a Soviet, he was a German Marxist who fled when Hitler came to power and spent most of his productive years in the US (until McCarthyism, when he fled again to East Germany, where he promptly died a year or two later).</blockquote>

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