Battleangel

I found this peculiar article (”Liberal: stop arms deal with UAE”) this morning. Some liberal MP wanker is outraged that Sweden is selling weapons to the United Arab Emirates because the country, for starters, lacks universal suffrage, or indeed any form of suffrage. The real hypocrisy is evident when said MP declares that she is an avid supporter of arms exports in general, just as long as receiving states are “democracies”. That is just simply double standards since the implication is that non-democratic regimes are more prone to resort of aggression, thus consequently democratic regimes by definition are not. And this is quite frankly what you’d expect of liberals from Mill and onwards. They stand as champions of a great many freedoms and a high and mighty vocabulary on the one hand but on the other they would quickly limit those freedoms based on an arbitrary rule set. Freedom and equality is for everyone, but not everyone is created equal apparently and so “barbarians” need not apply. But it sure sounds fancy. At least until you realize that democracy and barbarism are just empty slogans that people have been hitting each other over the head with for millennia.

And besides, we’ve heard it all before. First and foremost in the justification of the ownership of the most egregious weapons known to humanity, namely nuclear weapons, where this “barbarian clause” is put to good use. Because according to doctrine, weapons don’t kill, people do. It’s incidentally the same basic argument that is used for hand gun ownership as well. And people of western liberal democracies, not to mention their sophisticated leaders, are obviously of much higher moral character. Ipso facto, these states can grudgingly be trusted with these terrifying weapons.

So here we go again, loudly deploring the sale of weapons to “barbarians” while happily selling weapons to “democracies”. “Democracies” that may or may not stand up to scrutiny and that regardless of their lofty titles are behaving worse than any dictatorship. “Democracies” that may one day crumble and fail even the nickelodeon definition of democracy employed by these liberals. So for crying out loud, make up your mind. Either we treat every customer the same or we stop exporting weapons altogether.