Human Rights in the New World Order All Content © HiddenMysteries - TGS (1998-2005) Please send bug reports to the Information .
*Noam Chomsky
Speech delivered at Liberty's Human Rights Convention, Central Hall, Westminster, 16th June 1995
Taken with their permission from the transcription provided by Liberty
(was: National Council for Civil Liberties)
21 Tabard St, London SE1 4LA.
E-mail liberty@gn.apc.orgIncludes Q&A session.
Plus my own endnotes with full links - Rae West.
If we want to investigate the topic of human rights in the 'world of today and tomorrow', the announced topic,1 if we want to discuss that in a serious way, we have to begin obviously by focusing attention on the major actors in the world arena and their practices and their guiding values and goals, and these of course we determine not by listening to the words, which are cheap, but by looking at their consistent practice. So we therefore focus attention primarily on the world's dominant power and the "principal architects of policy" within it - I am borrowing a phrase from Adam Smith referring in his day to the "merchants and manufacturers" of England who mobilised state power. He pointed out that they ensured that their own interests were "most peculiarly attended to", however "grievous" the impact to others, including the people of England.2 Now that is a truism and remains true. It was restated earner in this century by the leading American philosopher, John Dewey.
Paraphrasing the truism, he pointed out that "politics is the shadow cast by big business over society" and that there are only limited possibilities for advancing human rights or freedom or democracy if we pay attention only to the shadow and refuse to look at the substance - again a truism.
Well, I will adhere to the truism and also follow the reasonable course of focusing attention on be world's most powerful and dominant nation, without intending to suggest or imply that anyone else is any different, just less independent and less influential and therefore less destructive, usually. So I will start by looking at the power that fifty years ago "assumed, out of self-interest, responsibility for the welfare of the world capitalist system". I am quoting noted diplomatic historian Gerald Haines, who also happens to be the senior historian of the CIA. This is a highly regarded monograph on the US takeover of Brazil in 1945. That is when the US was finally powerful enough to expel its main enemies,3 France and Britain, from the Western hemisphere and to take over "the colossus of the South", as it was called, in recognition of its extraordinary riches and potential. So the US took over the colossus of the South and, quoting Haines again, turned it into a "testing area for modern scientific methods of industrial development".
In fact we learn quite a lot about the tonight's topic by seeing what was achieved by close American tutelage for half a century in this optimal testing area. Couldn't get a better test: enormous resources, tremendous potential, no interference, just perfect to see how the testing area works.4 Well, there were achievements. One of the most dramatic was the installation of the first neo-Nazi national security state in the hemisphere in the early 1960s.5 It is a big country, so there was a quick domino effect. The purpose was to ward off the threat of parliamentary democracy, which was beginning to get out of control. And indeed it was considered a great achievement. It was described by Kennedy's ambassador, Lincoln Gordon, as "the single most decisive victory for freedom in the mid-twentieth century". Really important. He then went on to become the president of a great university. The regime and the resulting terror were welcomed not only by liberal democrats but particularly by the business world, which was awed by what was called the "economic miracle" that resulted. Brazil was described as "the Latin American darling of the business community" by Business Latin America, the main business journal for Latin America. In 1989, when Haines wrote, he described the outcome as "a real American success story". "America's Brazilian policies were enormously successful", bringing about "impressive economic growth based solidly on capitalism".
So there is a good testimony to our goals and values and a very good indicator or what lies ahead under near optimal conditions with no interfering factors, like the Cold War, to obscure our guiding values. There was not a Russian in sight, of course.
Well, the success is quite real. US Investors and a tiny elite6 profited enormously, meaning it was an economic miracle in the technical sense of the word, kind of like Mexico in the last few years. Mexico is a recent economic miracle until December 1994. The number of billionaires in Mexico went from one in 1987 to 24 in 1994,7 mostly cronies of the president who benefited from what is called "privatisation", which means the giving away of public resources to your rich friends and family. From 1993 to 1994 praises were rising to the skies. The number of billionaires went from 13 to 24, rising just about in parallel with poverty. According to the Mexican government, the proportion of the population living in extreme poverty increased from 13% to 24% in the same years, 1990 to 1994. Wages fell about 50% for the population during the economic miracle. Starvation increased; misery increased; billionaires increased. It was terrific, a real economic miracle. Of course, profits for Western investors were going through the roof as well. That was until December 19th. Then something happened. In fact, what happened was perfectly obvious in advance to everyone, except apparently the economists in the World Bank who either were or pretended to have been surprised,
Going back to Brazil, during its period of economic miracle, 1970 to the time that Haines wrote, the numbers were really good. The growth rate was about twice that of much lauded Chile under Pinochet and its successors. That is now the star pupil, Brazil, suffered a collapse, like Mexico, and automatically shifted from triumph of capitalism to illustration of evils of statism, if not Marxism. That is a transition that takes place quite effortlessly in the intellectual culture and, indeed, routinely as circumstances require.
Meanwhile at the peak of the miracle, the overwhelming majority of the population, maybe 80% or so, were living in utter misery, some of the worst conditions in the world. There is no doubt that they would have regarded Eastern Europe in the same years as an absolute paradise. That is a fact that also teaches some obvious lessons, which are not drawn with quite impressive discipline, because they are the wrong lessons. US aid and support during the period of the worst terror and torture also teaches some lessons, as does the same story while the other dominoes were falling, and murderous neo-Nazi regimes5 were being established throughout the hemisphere, always with enormous US support and aid. By that time the Russians were indeed involved, becoming the leading trading partners of the Argentine neo-Nazi generals5 and in general consorting quite happily with the worst killers and torturers everywhere, being junior managers in the process of bringing democracy and freedom to the region.
This "success story" for foreign investors and a small elite, that is a fraction of the population, reflects the guiding values of the tutors and the designers. Exactly as in Adam Smith's day, it does not matter how "grievous" is the impact on the lower orders. The implications for the future are pretty obvious, particularly when we discover that there is nothing unusual about that, in fact it is absolutely routine and in fact virtually exceptionless, maybe totally exceptionless.8 That is the way the goals and the values guide policy quite generally and in fact at home as well, a rather important fact. I'll come back to it.
These fundamental values were recognised quite clearly about 350 years ago by very lively and independent working class press in the United States in mill towns a couple of miles from where I live, the centre of the American industrial revolution, which incidentally happens to have been achieved as has invariably been the case by radical violation of the market discipline that is rammed down the throats of the poor. The factory girls and the mechanics - that is what they were called - of Lowell Lawrence, in their press deplored what they called the New Spirit of the Age, Gain Wealth forgetting all but Self - something which they regarded as a degrading and depraved doctrine, which they bitterly condemned and resisted, as indeed they have been doing after almost two centuries of intensive effort to instil the new spirit of the age.
These efforts to institute the New Spirit of the Age, reached extraordinary levels in the past few decades. That is probably the most important feature of the modern era. I will come back to this.
Well, "the masses", as they are commonly called in the business press and in internal government documents, pose continuing problems, both abroad and at home. Abroad they pose the problem that was recognised by Winston Churchill in 1914, when he reminded his cabinet colleagues that "we have got all we want in territory, but our claim to be left in unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions, mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less reasonable to others than to us", for some reason. That requires regular doses of terror as in Brazil during the Kennedy, Johnson years - recall that was the peak period of American liberalism - or today, again revealing the substantial irrelevance of the Cold War.
To take the favourite example, instead of my picking an example, let's let the Clinton administration pick its example. Their example is Haiti. They now put that forth right now, as the prime example, I am quoting, of the "immense opportunities of the new world opening before us, as we consolidate the victory of democracy and markets". That is the National Security Advisor Anthony Lake, who is kind of the intellectual of the administration. speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations right after the American troops landed in the restored democracy.
I'll spare you the shameful history, including one of the prime examples of what is known technically as "Wilsonian idealism" - Wilson's murderous invasion of Haiti, which killed several thousand people, re-established slavery, established the rule of the National Guard to control the people, while turning the whole country into an American plantation, later into an export platform for assembly plants where workers, mostly women, try to survive on 5-10 cents an hour, working 12 hour days under impossibly miserable conditions. That is also what is called an economic miracle. In fact, during the 1980s, when this was going on, USAID described Haiti as becoming "the Taiwan of the Caribbean". Meanwhile real wages were dropping 50%. What was let of the agricultural system was being destroyed by the usual development policies, as they are called.
In fact everything was going just fine until 1990, when Washington committed a tactical error. They allowed a free election. The reason was that they were confident, as was everyone, that their own candidate, with enormous resources and so on - their candidate was Mark Bazin, a World Bank official - everybody assumed he would just walk away, win easily and continue with the economic miracle. Well, the problem is nobody was paying attention to what was going on in the hills where the peasants live and the slums of Port-au-Prince and so on. What was going on there was something pretty remarkable. The peasants in the hills and the slum dwellers had created a very vigorous and lively civil society, with grassroots movements and unions and all sorts of other things, and in fact it was powerful enough to sweep into office their own candidate, with an overwhelming majority, just shocking everybody. The standard line these days is that we have to go back to Haiti and teach them democracy, because these backward people don't understand it. Outside of a real commissar culture,9 anyone would just crack up with laughter watching this. We could go to Haiti and go up to the hills and learn something about democracy.
The US turned at once to undermining the elected Aristide government in every possible way to correct the error. Seven months later it was overthrown in a military coup. That set off three years of brutal terror. The Organisation of American States called an embargo. Washington at once undermined the embargo, namely by exempting US firms, saying they were doing this for the benefit of the people in Haiti. The only way to benefit the people of Haiti is to exempt the US firms from the embargo. The New York Times had an article where they described how they were "fine-tuning" the embargo, because of our human rights interests. So they exempted US firms. Trade in the first year of the military regime was not much below the norm. It increased 50% under Clinton, when he took over. The Bush and the Clinton administrations both informed the Texaco Oil Corporation that the US government would allow their illegal shipments of oil. They informed them that the shipments were illegal, but they said they could do it with impunity, because nobody would do anything about it. Oil is of course the major factor in an embargo. So the oil kept flowing happily to the junta and the rich coup supporters.
You could sort of see it but it was not known that it was authorised by the Bush and the Clinton administrations until Sunday, the day before the troops landed. There was a Justice Department leak of an inquiry into the authorisation. It was no secret. I was monitoring the AP wires that day, because it was obvious that something was going to happen in Haiti. That was when Jimmy Carter was there, meeting General Cedras and his "slim attractive wife" - I don't know if you have read all that stuff. But while this was going on, the Justice Department leaked the story. It was all over the AP wires. It was the main story of the day. It was impossible to miss. They kept repeating it, big story, never been any embargo, never been any sanctions. Both administrations had told the oil companies: you keep shipping oil illegally, we're not going to do anything about it.
I wrote an article the next day about Haiti, but my article was going to come out in six weeks or so. I wrote it in the past tense, as if everybody knew all this, because it was obviously the big story of the week. I was wrong. It was totally suppressed. On Monday, the day of the invasion, there was nothing. I got interested, so I did a databank search on it. On Tuesday, the second day, it hit a newspaper: Pratt's Oilgram, a professional journal of the oil industry, which reported it. On Wednesday, the next day, there were about ten lines somewhere in the Wall Street Journal totally obscure and meaningless, and it started to get into the small newspapers, like Dayton Ohio and things like that where the editors really aren't all that sophisticated and they don't quite understand what has to be suppressed. It has yet to make it to the New York Times and the Washington Post after months. Now, that was obviously the biggest story of the week, when the troops were landing. Biggest story of the week, big headline, any free press would have had a story saying: there never was an embargo, there never were sanctions, we're landing troops for some other reason. We'll wait a long time for that one.
By then the popular organisations had been pretty well decimated. The threat of democracy was removed. The US forces landed with a great fanfare.10 The killers and torturers were sent off to lives of luxury, courtesy of the American taxpayer - I guess their "slim, attractive wives" are fine. But Jimmy Carter doesn't seem to be getting his Nobel Prize11 - probably pretty upset about that. There was great self-adulation all over the place about how we were bringing democracy and freedom back to Haiti. However, there was much less attention - as far as I can determine flat zero attention - to the only important fact, namely that the United States had provided President Aristide with a very specific economic plan, which is public, you can read it if you can find it. The economic plan - here is the crucial passage of it, it says: "the renovated state must focus on an economic strategy centered on the energy and initiative of Civil Society, especially the private sector, both national and foreign". That means the core of Haitian civil society is US investors and the super rich coup supporters. That is Haitian civil society. They have to get the benefits of any foreign aid that is coming in, not the peasants in the hills and the people living in the miserable slums, who made the mistake of trying to enter the public arena.
Well, Haiti is back on track,10 following the principles of Washington and its defeated candidate, Mark Bazin, and it is well on its way to becoming an economic miracle in the usual sense once again.
All of this has been suppressed with pretty impressive discipline, here too as far as I am aware, in favour of a different story, namely the story that Anthony Lake gave, which I quoted before, which is uniform in the press and the intellectual culture. That makes sense on certain assumptions. It makes sense on the assumption that was perhaps expressed most lucidly by one of my favourite sources of quotes. I think he is there for my benefit in fact, the guy who holds the chair of Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard, Samuel Huntington. He wrote recently that the United States must maintain its "international primacy" for the benefit of the world, because alone in history its "national identity is defined by a set of universal economic and political values, namely liberty, democracy, markets and equality". Now notice that that is a definition, so the science of government teaches. Since it is true by definition, there is no need to look at annoying facts.4 You don't do experiments to find if two plus two equals four, everybody understands that. So you don't have to look at the facts of history past and present, you don't have to look at what was happening in Haiti. And since the US by definition stands for equality, you don't have to look at the fact that as he wrote, the US had reached by far the highest levels of inequality in any industrial society, in fact the highest level since 1929, right before the stock market crash, when the level of inequality was artificially inflated by the stock market bubble which soon broke. That is where it is now, higher than the rest of the century, by far the highest level in the world, twice that of England. The top one per cent of the population has 40% of the wealth, twice England. All that increased in the '80s. Take, say, New York, the richest city in the world. Inequality is higher than in Guatemala, and going up. But that doesn't matter because by definition, we are committed to equality like all other good things, so you don't have to look at those facts.
Meanwhile there are soaring profits, double digit growth for the Fortune 500, for the last four years. Half the population suffered an absolute decline in wealth, right through the glorious 1980s. Real wages have been declining steadily since 1980, continuing right through the Clinton recovery. There are consequences, like Oklahoma City.
I'll come back to that. Take another striking example in "our little region over here" as Secretary of War, Henry Stimpson described the Western Hemisphere in 1945 while explaining that all regional Systems were to be dismantled apart from our own, which were to be extended. Half of US Military aid to the hemisphere now goes to Colombia, increasing under Clinton; the training program for Colombian officers is also the largest in the hemisphere. Colombia is regularly hailed for its "democratic structures", which, "notwithstanding inevitable flaws, are among the most solid on the continent", and model of "well-established political stability" (John Martz in Current History), a refrain that is constant in the press. Among the "inevitable flaws" are the murder of more than 2000 activists of the one Independent party by the security forces and their paramilitary associates since its founding in the mid-80s, including Presidential candidates, Mayors and others. But that is only a footnote to the most horrendous human rights record in the hemisphere, amply documented by international human rights monitors, the Church, and other independent sources, and virtually ignored in the media. Colombia's last President, César Gaviria, was a particular US favourite, rammed through as Secretary-General of the OAS in a power play that aroused much resentment. "He has been very forward-looking in building democratic institutions in a Country where it was sometimes dangerous to do so", the US representative of the OAS explained - not inquiring into the reasons for the 'dangers', however: for example, the fact that Gaviria presided over a significant escalation of the terror.
The terror continues right now, as we meet. The Bishop and priests of the Diocese of Apartadó in the northwest region have just issued a "Communiqué to Public Opinion" about "the moment of terror" in which the people are living, "caused by homicides and disappearances". "The paramilitary groups have mercilessly decimated entire towns," they charge, and "have in recent times deliberately focused their destructive efforts upon the settlements of the banana growing areas", while the authorities, "facing the tragedy of the people," "remain indifferent without opposing the advance of this macabre plan of death and destruction". Their charges are backed by the Major of Apartadó, who alleges that the paramilitary groups are "virtually running wild with an escalation of murders and horrible mutilations" while the tens of thousands of military and police watch in silence. As does the world, in particular, the country that provided the arms and training. The Communiqué to Public Opinion will reach a few people in the solidarity groups, but once again, will not find its way through the usual filters, for the usual reasons. It is the wrong story: the responsibility lies in the wrong hands, and the atrocities could readily be stopped if public opinion were altered. If the efforts to expose the use of half of US military aid cannot be entirety ignored, they can be dismissed with yawns and snide remarks about "old stories" and "routine America-bashing". The devices are manifold. and every well trained intellectual knows them.
The current upsurge of military-paramilitary atrocities, and their focus, seems to be a part of the land-grab efforts related to a multibillion dollar development project scheduled for the region. The paramilitaries are closely linked to the landowners, ranchers, and narcotraffickers, one of the most important of whom has recently been selected as supreme commander of the paramilitary units of the Magdalena Medio region, long known for the close co-operation of the military, drug lords, landowners, and paramilitary forces. The agents of this "macabre plan of death and destruction" are the usual ones, and so are the targets: grassroots civic and popular organisations and their leaders, peasants, indigenous people and the Black population. In fact anyone who gets in the way of the plans of the alliance of government drug markets, and "legitimate" economic powers. All of this continues a regular pattern, including the suppression of the facts. US aid has long been correlated with torture and other atrocities, another fad from which we can learn something about tonight's topic, if we choose.
In the case of Colombia, nobody pretends that it is the cold war. The pretext there is that it is the war against drugs, which is a total fraud. The military are in bed with the narcotraffickers, the cartels and the landlords. In fact, almost all the military aid goes to parts of the military that aren't even formally involved in the so-called drug war - nothing to do with it. The military aid is going to those parts of the military forces and indirectly the paramilitary forces that are involved in counter-insurgency: massacres of peasants, independent political figures, union leaders, religious activists, human rights activists, the usual business. It is a classic pattern, as is the impossibility of seeing what it implies about human rights and the new world opening before us. This is half of US military aid for the hemisphere right now.
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