That is the title of a new article by Brendan O'Neill, editor at Spiked-Online, which details how Western liberals provided the ammunition for inhuman deeds and massacres in the name of "human rights."
Says O'Neill:
"There is 'world outcry' over the behavior of the Egyptian security forces yesterday, when at least 525 supporters of the deceased Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi were massacred. The killings were ‘excessive’, says Amnesty, in a bid to bag the prize for understatement of the year; ‘brutal’, say various handwringing newspaper editorials; ‘too much’, complain Western politicians.
"Such belated expressions of synthetic sorrow are not only too little, too late (hundreds of Egyptians have already been massacred by the military regime that swept Morsi from power); they are also extraordinarily blinkered. To focus on the actions of the security forces alone, on what they did with their trigger fingers yesterday, is to miss the bigger picture; it is to overlook the question of where the military regime got the moral authority to clamp down on its critics so violently in the name of preserving its undemocratic grip on power. It got it from the West, including from so-called Western liberals and human-rights activists. The moral ammunition for yesterday’s massacres was provided by the very politicians and campaigners now crying crocodile tears over the sight of hundreds of dead Egyptians."
The Western liberals' crocodile tears are just a mere cover-up for the fact that the US national-security state loves the Egyptian dictatorship, as Jacob Hornberger pointed out. Hornberger says that some Americans are "agog at the U.S. government’s indifference to the military coup in Egypt and to the dictatorship’s brutal massacre of peaceful demonstrators. They just don’t get it. The U.S. government loves Egypt’s military dictatorship as much as it loved the Chilean military dictatorship that took power in 1973 and proceeded to rape, torture, or kill tens of thousands of peaceful Chileans."
And let's not forget the persecution of Lynne Stewart (see here, here, and here) for alleged crimes against the U.S.-backed Egyptian military dictatorship and for supporting the Egyptians' right to revolt against it. As the great libertarian entrepreneur and commentator Lew Rockwell said two years ago in a prescient and relevant piece, "it is always an occasion to celebrate when the tyrant is overthrown." That applies even if a worse regime follows it. Even with the mixed to negative results of the French Revolution, it was wonderful that the monarchist regime was booted out despite the evil that Robespierre and the Jacobins brought on.
So while we may object to the new government that the Egyptians might form in place of the current government, we should still celebrate when a tyrant is overthrown, because, as Thomas Jefferson said in the Declaration of Independence, "when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security."
Says O'Neill:
"There is 'world outcry' over the behavior of the Egyptian security forces yesterday, when at least 525 supporters of the deceased Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi were massacred. The killings were ‘excessive’, says Amnesty, in a bid to bag the prize for understatement of the year; ‘brutal’, say various handwringing newspaper editorials; ‘too much’, complain Western politicians.
"Such belated expressions of synthetic sorrow are not only too little, too late (hundreds of Egyptians have already been massacred by the military regime that swept Morsi from power); they are also extraordinarily blinkered. To focus on the actions of the security forces alone, on what they did with their trigger fingers yesterday, is to miss the bigger picture; it is to overlook the question of where the military regime got the moral authority to clamp down on its critics so violently in the name of preserving its undemocratic grip on power. It got it from the West, including from so-called Western liberals and human-rights activists. The moral ammunition for yesterday’s massacres was provided by the very politicians and campaigners now crying crocodile tears over the sight of hundreds of dead Egyptians."
The Western liberals' crocodile tears are just a mere cover-up for the fact that the US national-security state loves the Egyptian dictatorship, as Jacob Hornberger pointed out. Hornberger says that some Americans are "agog at the U.S. government’s indifference to the military coup in Egypt and to the dictatorship’s brutal massacre of peaceful demonstrators. They just don’t get it. The U.S. government loves Egypt’s military dictatorship as much as it loved the Chilean military dictatorship that took power in 1973 and proceeded to rape, torture, or kill tens of thousands of peaceful Chileans."
And let's not forget the persecution of Lynne Stewart (see here, here, and here) for alleged crimes against the U.S.-backed Egyptian military dictatorship and for supporting the Egyptians' right to revolt against it. As the great libertarian entrepreneur and commentator Lew Rockwell said two years ago in a prescient and relevant piece, "it is always an occasion to celebrate when the tyrant is overthrown." That applies even if a worse regime follows it. Even with the mixed to negative results of the French Revolution, it was wonderful that the monarchist regime was booted out despite the evil that Robespierre and the Jacobins brought on.
So while we may object to the new government that the Egyptians might form in place of the current government, we should still celebrate when a tyrant is overthrown, because, as Thomas Jefferson said in the Declaration of Independence, "when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security."
