No Double Standard

Posted on June 1, 2005 in Atrocity

Imagine this scenario: you’re sitting in a courtroom, listening to the trial of a man who killed your — choose a loved one, any truly loved one. His lawyer stands up and makes this argument to the jury: “My client has killed one person. One human being. Let’s do some comparisons. Richard Speck killed six nurses. John Wayne Gacy buried more than a few in his basement. The Manson Family went from house to house slaying heiresses and movie stars. And the king of them all, Juan Corona, killed 24 migrant farm workers. Compare what my client did to those. One person. Only one person. You can’t equate what he did to what they did. Therefore, you should acquit.”

Sound far fetched? It’s the very argument given in defense of human rights violations and atrocities given by James Chen over at Majikthise:

Time for a reality check. Read Anne Applebaum’s “Gulag”, and then take a math class. Learn about “significant figures” and “orders of magnitude”. Then tell me how you can rationalize no differences between the 100,000,000 deaths attributed to communism and the 50,000,000 deaths caused by Germany/Japan to 70,000/unknown being held in jails.

From looking at his blog, James is so jingoistic that if a soldier slaps a civilian he’ll jump up and cry that the soldier’s civil rights were being infringed because he couldn’t kill the man! I think this will be the first and last time that I mention him.

How often must we say that a human rights violation is a human rights violation is a human rights violation? If Stalin and Hitler had killed only one man or woman each, that would still be cause for alarm. Our leaders do not possess the right or the privilege to take human life or torture a person or detain them without proof of crime. This is the principle which underlies our Constitution and guides our justice system. Or at least it did until people like James began polluting it with their skewed mathematics.

I do not believe that James Chen would vote for the acquittal of the man I described. Which demonstrates yet another problem with the wRong: they bend the rules to allow their excesses and crimes to go unpunished. This is why you should not listen to James Chen or any other Right wing pundit: they have one system of standards for those who don’t buy into their mythology and another for themselves. You can’t trust them: they’re just not honest.

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Here’s one for the Left: Cuba and Venezuela together may not have as many political prisoners as the United States at this time. Nevertheless, I feel it is important to read Amnesty International reports and take action to see that these individuals are released. If we are to set standards for human rights, then we must apply them even to nations which we may admire or at least feel are unjustly persecuted.

A human rights violation is a human rights violation is a human rights violation. Even when the number of political prisoners at Guatanamo exceeds the number in the rest of Cuba, we must continue to address the issue of political persecution wherever it may happen, however many it may effect.

Bet you James and the other flunkies of the Right can’t say that to their own.