Western double standard

The stories of how outrageously the anti-war protesters in London dealt with those who will bear the consequences of the West’s actions, whatever they are, reminded us again of the double-standards of the peaceniks and other useful idiots. Blinded by their ideology they let the pleas of those who experienced Saddam’s tyranny fall onto deaf ears.

There is also the now institutionalised double standard for racial relations and the double standard on which the entire debate about ‘white imperialism’ is based. Pondering such inconsistencies in people’s positions, I often attributed them to the lack of intelligent and rational public discourse. The short attention span of mass audiences maintained by the mass media enables them to substitute the rational with the emotional.

Or so I thought. And then I came across this early example of double standard by Western politicians that would score a high political correctness count, even in these affirmative action times:

In the early 19th century slavery was almost ubiquitous in the world but the Barbary Coast, stretching 1,500 miles from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Gulf of Sirte in Lybia, was unique in being the only area where white men and women were subjected to it in large numbers. The Barbary pirates, using what would now be called a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam as their pretext, regularly kidnapped Christian livestock from Italy, Malta, Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica and from the ships of all nations sailing the Mediterranean.

Wealth capitves could usually obtain ransom without difficulty. The rest were treated with varying degrees of barbarity. Torture was used to obtain convestions to Islam, “turning Turk”, as Western sailors called it.

The West’s supine attidute towards the horrors of Barbary piracy had long aroused fury in some quarters. Officers of the British navy were particularly incensed since seamen were frequently victims of the trade. They could not understand why the huge resources of the world’s most powerful fleet were not deployed to root out this evil affront to the international law of the sea, once and for all. They could not understand why liberal parliamentarians, who campaigned ceaselessly to outlaw the slave trade by parliamentary statue, took no interest in Christian slavery.

Admiral Nelson wrote in 1799:”My blood boils that I cannot chastise there pirates. They could not show themselves in the Mediterranean did not our country permit. Never let us talk about the cruelty of the African slave-trade while we permit such a horrid war.”

But William Wilberforce, MP, and the other Evangelical liberals, who finally got the slave trade made unlawful in 1807, flatly refused to help. They were concerned with the enslavement of blacks by whites and did not give the predicament of white slaves a high priority on their agenda, an early example of double standards.

So, nothing new under the sun…? History repeats itself…? People don’t change…?

OK, that’ll do.