Hypocrisy Everywhere


After Ecuador decided to grant asylum to Julian Assange in their embassy in the UK, the Brits announced that all options were on the table: including storming the embassy to take Assange by force. Really, UK? Isn’t their embassy supposed to be territory of Ecuador by international law? Or does sovereignty have no meaning for the empire on which the sun was never supposed to set?

Talking of which, did you think Ecuador did that to piss off the West? No, that wasn’t the only reason. They’ve done the same with Belarus in the past: in 2008, Ecuador granted refugee status to a Belarusian army captain, Barankov. Who then started a blog criticizing Belarus’s authoritarian ruler, Alexander Lukashenko, over corruption and other crimes. So is Ecuador the new America, the new “give me your persecuted” land? Not so fast. After a recent visit by Lukashenko to Ecuador, the Ecuadorians have started a court case to decide whether to extradite Barankov to Belarus!

If Belarus is here, can Russia be far behind? Russia came out all moralistic condemning the UK over the Julian Assange episode. In the same breath, the Russians jailed those “guilty” of the Pussy Riot. Yeah, Russia, you are all about whistle blowers and free speech!

The Americans and their “special friend”, the Brits, denounce Syria’s rulers for oppressing the rebels. But they also looked the other way when the Saudis helped Bahrain suppress an equivalent uprising a few months back.

So OK, we can agree that every nation is a hypocrite. But are they all equally bad? Not by a long shot. Because, everytime a Western power practices double standards, you will immediately see a whole lot of criticism in all forms of the media and the Net from their own citizens. You could count on your fingers the number of non-Western countries where such criticism is allowed. So while they are all hypocrites, don’t kid yourself into believing they are all equally bad.

Comments

  1. KumarAugust 25, 2012 at 4:45 PM

    Sure enough, we get another instance of hypocrisy emanating from the domain of politics. Your observation is correct I think.

    I was generally under the impression that you held the view that one shouldn't expect right behavior from people, in particular from people in high positions. Because of that, I am happy with your lament. It is better to hold ideas of right and wrong, even if we know that the good and bad of the world together are as eternal as the universe (at least as much as the universe can be eternal).

    By the way, I read an opinion that Julian Assange did overstep the limit, which led to his landing into such trouble. That is indeed bad because it has done some damage to the cause of fighting the wrongs of the people who hold power. Only after coming to know of this view did I realize that just exposing everything is not a good strategy to check the rot and decay of our societies. We must be careful because we are trying to take up a battle against very organized and mighty establishments of the world. And, the politicians are the most ruthless of all beings, and they have so much of official machinery and resources at their disposal. We have to do things intelligently and carefully too.

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