( Interesting article. Although it is about Europe, but applies to USA also. Biden promised humane treatment of refugees at border, but with thousands fleeing towards US border, Biden is reverting back to Trump policy. Is this hypocrisy a necessity?)
“Why is hypocrisy so odious?” asked the political theorist Judith Shklar almost half a century ago. Hypocrisy, she argued, is a necessity, a recognition that we are human and imperfect and that we cannot but transgress. The calling out of hypocrisy, Shklar observed, can often be more socially corrosive than the hypocrisy being called out.
There is, however, a different, darker form of political hypocrisy, too: the embrace of ideals to camouflage or justify that which otherwise would be unjustifiable. It’s less a case of personal hypocrisy than of the institutionalisation of political double standards. And, as two issues last week illustrate, the flaunting of double standards is becoming a feature of our age. First is the Home Office attempt to provide immunity for Border Force officials who kill migrants; second, the controversy over philosopher Kathleen Stock’s “gender-critical” views about trans rights.
A long time ago, this summer in fact, the government’s story was that its policy of “pushback” against Channel migrants was intended to save their lives. “The people-smugglers don’t care about the lives they endanger“, the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, tweeted. She warned social media companies to take down posts “glamourising” migrant crossings “before more men, women and children die in the Channel”.
Last week, the government announced that, among the revisions to the Nationality and Borders Bill, it will give Border Force officers immunity from prosecution if they kill migrants in the course of their work, so long as they were acting “in good faith”. The death of migrants, it seems, matters only if it happens at the hands of the wrong people.
However contemptible the new policy, it is nothing new. It is an approach common to virtually every rich nation today. From Greek border guards attempting to capsize dinghies full of people to Libyan coastguards, acting on behalf of the EU, shooting at migrants, “deterrence” at whatever the cost has long been the policy. It is what has led Western nations to close off almost all legal routes to migration and then blame migrants for adopting dangerous illegal ones. It is what has driven EU nations to abandon rescue operations in the Mediterranean while criminalising rescuers as “people traffickers”. It is what has led them to accept the 30,000 people who have drowned in the Med over the past 30 years as a price worth paying for Fortress Europe. By framing the problem as primarily one of evil smugglers, and their policies as necessary to bring down such people, politicians and policymakers can scrub their conscience clean and justify policies, such as providing immunity to immigration officials, that are actually responsible for the deaths.
The issue of free speech, as much as the immigration debate, is swaddled on all sides in hypocrisy and double standards. Last week, the universities minister, Michelle Donelan, wrote an op-ed bemoaning the state of British universities. Where once “we had debate and critical argument”, she argued, now there are “physical threats and often complete intolerance of all opposing ideas”.
posted by f.sheikh