There's a good Chomsky quote about this: "Actually, the principle that I think we ought to follow is the principle we rightly expected Soviet dissidents to fol

There's a good Chomsky quote about this: "Actually, the principle that I think we ought to follow is the principle we rightly expected Soviet dissidents to follow. So what principle did we expect Sakharov [a Soviet scientist punished for his criticism of the U.S.S.R.] to follow? Why did people here decide that Sakharov was a moral person? I think he was. Sakharov did not treat every atrocity as identical-he had nothing to say about American atrocities. When he was asked about them, he said, "I don't know anything about them, I don't care about them, what I talk about are Soviet atrocities." And that was right-because those were the ones that he was responsible for, and that he might have been able to in­fluence. Again, it's a very simple ethical point: you are responsible for the predictable consequences of your actions, you're not responsible for the predictable consequences of somebody else's actions."