Quote of the day

As Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian points out:

Readers of the American and British press over the past month have been inundated with righteous condemnations of Ecuador‘s poor record on press freedoms. Is this because western media outlets have suddenly developed a new-found devotion to defending civil liberties in Latin America? Please. To pose the question is to mock it.

It’s because feigning concern for these oppressive measures is a convenient instrument for demeaning and punishing Ecuador for the supreme crime of defying the US and its western allies. The government of President Rafael Correa granted asylum to western establishmentarians’ most despised figure, Julian Assange, and Correa’s government then loudly condemned Britain’s implied threats to invade its embassy. Ecuador must therefore be publicly flogged for its impertinence, and its press freedom record is a readily available whip. As a fun bonus, denunciations of Correa’s media oppression is a cheap and easy way to deride Assange’s supposed hypocrisy.

(Apparently, activists should only seek asylum from countries with pristine human rights records, whichever countries those might be: a newly concocted standard that was conspicuously missing during the saga of blind Chinese human rights activist Chen Guangcheng at the US embassy; I don’t recall any western media outlets accusing Guangcheng of hypocrisy for seeking refuge from a country that indefinitely imprisons people with no charges, attacked Iraq, assassinates its own citizens with no due process on the secret orders of the president, bombs funerals and rescuers in Pakistan, uses extreme force and mass arrests to try to obliterate the peaceful Occupy protest movement, wages an unprecedented war on whistleblowers, prosecutes its Muslim citizens for posting YouTube videos critical of US foreign policy, embraces and arms the world’s most oppressive regimes, and imprisoned Muslim journalists for years at Guantánamo and elsewhere with no charges of any kind.)

But this behavior illustrates how purported human rights concerns are cynically exploited as a weapon by western governments and, more inexcusably, by their nationalistic, self-righteous media enablers.

Related articles

• Feigning care for human rights while condemning Wikileaks and Ecuador (antonyloewenstein.com)
• | Jingoism Unlimited: Human rights critics of Russia and Ecuador parade their own hypocrisy! (truthaholics.wordpress.com)
• Rafael Correa hits back over Ecuador’s press freedom and calls of hypocrisy (guardian.co.uk)
• Ecuador: We’ll Respect Belarusian’s Human Rights (abcnews.go.com)
• Ecuador hopes for talks on Julian Assange – Xinhua (news.xinhuanet.com)
• Dispute with Britain over Assange can take years – Correa (english.ruvr.ru)
• Julian Assange sex claims not a crime in Latin America – Ecuador president (guardian.co.uk)