Moral Bankruptcy, Left and Right
By
Jacob G. Hornberger
March 21, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "FFF"
- When it comes to foreign policy and
the U.S. government’s imperial and
interventionist role in the world, it is
sometimes difficult to determine which
faction of statists — liberal or
conservative — is the more hypocritical
and morally blind.
Consider
the following editorial in today’s
New York Times entitled “The
U.S. Should Not Be Egypt’s Accomplice.”
When I read that title, my immediate
reaction was, “Okay, this is going to be
a solid editorial calling on the U.S.
government to stop partnering with and
supporting, especially with money and
weaponry, the brutal, tyrannical
military dictatorship that has long
ruled Egypt.
As
I began reading through the editorial,
it was clear to me that the Times’s
editorial board does recognize that the
Egyptian regime is, in fact, a
tyrannical regime.
Egypt has long been ruled by an
unelected military dictatorship, which,
in and of itself, connotes tyranny. But
it is certainly not a benign tyranny.
When it violently ousted the
democratically elected president of the
country — the man who Egyptian voters
had elected in a national presidential
election — the dictatorship then
proceeded to arrest him, round up his
supporters, and jail or kill them
without any semblance of due process of
law.
The military dictatorship also dissolved
the parliament and then later
reconstituted it as a rubber stamp for
its dictatorial edicts. Judges do what
the military dictatorship tells them to
do.
The regime dominates the economy,
especially through ownership of a vast
array of commercial businesses, which it
runs as monopolies. That is, no private
competition is allowed.
Everything is done in secret, especially
expenditures.
The press is censored.
The regime has the omnipotent power to
round people up, incarcerate them,
torture them, and execute them without
due process or trial by jury and
exercises that power. In fact, the
dictatorship’s expertise in torture was
one of the principal reasons why U.S.
officials selected Egypt to be one of
their rendition-torture partners in the
so-called war on terrorism.
Egypt is an example of tyranny par
excellence. It ranks right up there
with the military regime of Augusto
Pinochet, a military dictatorship that
the U.S. government installed into power
in 1973 and then proceeded to partner
with and support with money and weaponry
to ensure that it maintained its iron
grip on power within the country.
The Times clearly sees that
Egypt is run by a tyrannical regime. The
editorial states:
…. a military coup in 2013 that
overthrew the [Muslim] Brotherhood
and paved the way for more
repression. As Mr. Sisi cracked down
on the Islamists — including a 2013
massacre of protesters that killed
more than 800 people … Egypt’s
worsening human rights abuses….
But his tactics have been draconian
and counterproductive. His
government has persecuted violent
and nonviolent Islamist groups with
equal zeal and without due process.
It has maligned and harassed human
rights activists, rendering their
work all but impossible. And it has
smothered what remains of the
political opposition.
So, as I got to the end of the
editorial, I fully expected a full-scale
assault on the U.S. government’s support
of this tyrannical regime and a
full-throated call to terminate any
further U.S. monetary and military aid.
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Instead, the editorial ended in a weak,
hypocritical, morally blind whimper. The
Times writes:
The United States needs to be able
to work with Egypt. But Washington
should not make any more concessions
without real reforms in Egypt’s
approach to human rights and
governance. Before talks between the
two governments advance, Egypt
should be required to release Aya
Hijazi, an American-Egyptian
humanitarian worker who has been
arbitrarily detained in Cairo since
2014.
That’s the mindset of empire, a mindset
that holds that the U.S. government
should do its best to rein in its
dictatorial and tyrannical partners and
allies but otherwise continue to work
with and support them.
The Times is wrong. There is no
need for the U.S. government to work
with, support, or partner with Egypt’s
tyrannical regime or, for that matter,
any other tyrannical regime in the
world. It can and should put a permanent
stop to the flow of U.S. taxpayer funded
cash and military armaments to such
regimes (and, for that matter, all other
regimes), especially since such support
is used to re-enforce the dictatorhip’s
repression of its citzenry.
This is what empire does to people’s
consciences and principles — it warps
them and perverts them. Unlike what
happens under a constitutional limited
government republic empire makes people
think that it’s necessary to maintain
the allegiance and loyalty of allies and
partners, including the brutal,
tyrannical ones.
Of
course, it’s not the first time that the
U.S. empire has supported and partnered
with brutal, tyrannical regimes. I’ve
already mentioned Pinochet of Chile.
Also coming to mind is the Shah of Iran,
who the U.S. government, operating
through the CIA, installed into power
and then trained his and much-feared
domestic police force known as Savak.
Another example: the brutal military
dictatorship in Guatemala, which the
U.S. government installed into power in
1954 after ousting the democratically
elected president in another CIA coup.
Installations of dictatorships and
partnerships with dictatorships have
long been a core tenant of the U.S.
Empire and the U.S. national-security
state, with the full support of both
left and right.
At
the end of its editorial, the Times
takes Donald Trump to task for
“encouraging brutal, anti-democratic
leaders in the Philippines, Turkey, and,
of course, Russia.”
That is truly a laughable morally blind
and hypocritical obtuseness. The fact is
that every Democratic and Republican
president has encouraged and supported
brutal dictatorships ever since the
advent of the U.S. national-security
state in the late 1940s, with the full
support of both liberals and
conservatives.
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and
president of The Future of Freedom
Foundation. He was born and raised in
Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in
economics from Virginia Military
Institute and his law degree from the
University of Texas. He was a trial
attorney for twelve years in Texas. He
also was an adjunct professor at the
University of Dallas, where he taught
law and economics. In 1987, Mr.
Hornberger left the practice of law to
become director of programs at the
Foundation for Economic Education.
©
The Future of Freedom Foundation
