‘Double standard’

Dear Editor:

RE: Morally reprehensible, March 19. 

I read Murray Stevenson’s letter with jaw-dropping consternation, such was the selective amnesia and the situational and self-serving ethics of the author.

He noted that Trump was “duly elected” to the presidency, but conveniently failed to mention that when Joe Biden was selected via the same legal process, Trump incited a violent insurrection in a craven and desperate bid to retain power. 

Stevenson then proceeded with an absurd delineation between the recently assassinated Ayatollah Khamenei of Iran, as an “actual dictator” and the “hateful” comparison to Trump in a political cartoon previously published in our local journal. So upset was he with this juxtaposition, that he demanded an apology from the publisher. 

Hogwash! We have freedom of the press here. I agreed with the artist’s depiction. As American journalist Finley Peter Dunne said, “The purpose of a free press is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.” Trump has gone to extreme lengths to muzzle press freedoms, an undeniable characteristic of a dictator.

Any crime that Stevenson attributes to Khamenei, I can likewise ascribe to Trump: extrajudicial murder (blowing up alleged drug boats); threats, intimidation, imprisonment and killing of civilians (ICE agents); imperialist aggression (unilateral and illegal incursions into Venezuela and Iran, the illicit oil blockade of Cuba, annexation threats toward Greenland and, of course, Canada). 

One gags at the egregious double standard.

Whatever platform of moral superiority the author claims to occupy, I regard it as a shaky and unstable structure. I respectfully suggest that this is what happens when loyalty to an ideology clouds the critical thinking process. 

I will not remain silent in the face of this flawed reasoning – not in my community, not in my country.

Allan Berry,
Fergus