>If A, B, C, D and E are the same, and yet I advocate that A be treated
>differently from B, C, D and E, then I have a double standard.
>
>If B, C, D and E has committed more egregious wrongs than A, and yet I call
>for harsher penalties against A, I have gone beyond a double standard to
>engage in affirmative discrimination against A.
>
>In this context, the question begs to be asked: why do I single out A for
>such discriminatory treatment? And when A has been an object of historic
>prejudice and discrimination, of oppression, the rationale for that
>discriminatory treatment has to be "extraordinarily suspect," whether one
>chooses to face up to it or not. I can appreciate why folks who think of
>themselves as good lefties may not want to face up to the fact that what they
>advocate falls into this category, but that does not change the fact that it
>does.
>
>And in this context, consistency is the sign of a single, nondiscriminatory
>standard, and of nondiscriminatory treatment. No cliche about consistency can
>change that reality.
Consistency, like "the Western Civilization," would be a good idea, but U.S. imperialism can't allow it:
***** Iraq Under Siege: Ten Years On by Anthony Arnove
...The UN adopted the sanctions four days after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and reaffirmed them after the brutal 1991 Gulf War, which claimed tens of thousands of lives, expelled Iraq from Kuwait, and in the process reduced the country to a "pre-industrial" state, as a UN-led delegation observed just after the war.1 Sanctions were allegedly extended to disarm Iraq of its biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. Little was said at the time about the contradictions of the United States and other members of the Security Council -- the countries responsible for the overwhelming majority of sales of arms in the region and internationally -- voicing such concern over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Even less was said about some other inconvenient facts, among them that the Iraqi government had developed its destructive and repressive capacity with the support and encouragement of its friends in Washington, London, and other Western capitals, and that Israel had a nuclear weapons arsenal of some two hundred warheads and continued to occupy southern Lebanon, as well as the territories it had illegally seized in 1948 and 1967, in violation of numerous unenforced UN resolutions....
<http://www.monthlyreview.org/1200arnov.htm> *****
Yoshie