On my way to a larger point about rights and wrongs (and, you guessed it, those torture memos), I'd like to recommend Bret Stephens in the WSJ today as an example of why conservatives have little to offer on the outrages of repression and mistreatment. Stephens starts, solidly enough, with a point that bears repeating: if we care deeply about governments that move into territory where they shouldn't and cause havoc, we really should be paying more attention to what Russia has been doing to Chechnya. But Stephens can't resist being sucked into the fashionable conservative math of the moment: proving that liberals are too sympathetic to the treatment of Palestinians, while ignoring the mistreatment of others.
Final calculation: With an "outrage" ratio of 6.6 to one, but a proportional kill ratio of one to 13 (at the very low end), it turns out that every Palestinian death receives somewhere in the order of 28 times the attention of every Chechen death. Remember that in both cases we're mainly talking about Muslims being killed by non-Muslims.
I'll admit this math exercise is a bit of a gimmick. But it raises a worthwhile question: Why is Palestinian life so dear in the eyes of the world -- and Chechen life so cheap?
Stephens isn't just being "gimmick"-y; he's using a sort of blanket "if one is outrageous, why no the other" logic that might work except that conservatives, really, don't give much thought to either situation as a moral outrage. It's just that traditional dislike of Russia, and the flailing attmpts to revive the right by rehashing old grievances (none so powerful as the old Red Scare), make focusing on Russia a new cause du jour.
This sort of relativism isn't new - conservatives use a similar false argument to suggest feminists weren't concerned about women in Afghanistan being forced back into abayas and other restrictive garments under the Taliban, a sign that "feminists" didn't care about some women, only ones that fit a certain PC expectation. That proved to be nonsense - as the only fly-by-night concern for Afghan women turned out to be the Bush Administration's, as they lurched around trying to figure out what the best strategy in Afghanistan was. Freedoms for women... well down the list of concerns they actually pursued. Feminist concerns for the treatment of Muslim women - still high up on the list.
It's not that the left approaches these social justice concerns perfectly; that brings us back to admitting that Stephens has a point that concern for Chechens has been an "out of sight, out of mind" exercise, mainly. But if someone's concerned about the Chechens having a chance to live without fear of a foreign government intervening in their affairs and randomly killing their citizens... it's probably the people who oppose random government interventions and casual citizen killing.
For years, lefties have been treated to blinkered debates with conservatives over "moral authority" - most of it nonsense about getting to decide who's not worth treating decently, and the doing just that. That, ultimately, is neither moral, nor authoritative. Moral authority, really, is setting some objective standards, holding to them, and asking others to, as well. The reason to speak up for the Palestinians - while admitting that the overall Israeli/Palestinian conflict is a complex topic where no side is all right or all wrong - is because no civilian population, really, should have to deal, as they do, with indiscriminate police actions by another state's government.
That principle, ideally, also applies to the Chechens. But Stephens, like many conservatives, isn't really on about a principle - because a principled set of concerns would face, honestly, that both situations are terrible and require our involvement. Instead, Stephens wanders away from any direct discussion of Chechnya (try and find any policy solution he'd suggest to deal with Russia in that piece, I dare ya) into a fairly direct dismissal of the Palesinians being worthy of any concern at all. He's not saying, in the end, we should be more concerned about Chechnya than Palestine, or even mutually concerned about both. His argument, really, is that we can't be bothered with either of them. You want an outrage... start there.
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