Rogue States

by Noam Chomsky

  There is a great deal to say about these topics, but with regard to the human rights aspect, the facts seem reasonably clear and in conformity with the expectations of the founders of the Bretton Woods system.

  The Political Order and Human Rights

  The third pillar of post-World War II world order, standing alongside the Bretton Woods international economic system and the UD, is the UN Charter. Its fundamental principle is that the threat or use of force is barred, with two exceptions: when specifically authorized by the Security Council, or in self-defense against armed attack until the Security Council acts (according to Article 51). There is no enforcement mechanism apart from the great powers, decisively the US. But Washington flatly rejects the principles of the Charter, both in practice and official doctrine, as already discussed.

  The framework of world order has long ceased to exist, even in words, as the rhetoric has become too inconvenient to sustain. The approved principle is the rule of force. The sophisticated understand that an appeal to legal obligations and moral principle is legitimate as a weapon against selected enemies, or “to gild our positions with an ethos derived from very general moral principles,” in Dean Acheson’s words. But nothing more than that. The level of support for this stand among educated sectors should not be taken lightly. The human rights implications require no comment.

  In brief, of the three pillars of the post-World War II international order, two—the Bretton Woods system and the Charter—have largely collapsed. And the third, the UD, remains to a large extent “a letter to Santa Claus,” as the leaders of the relativist crusade contend.

  Rights for Whom?

  As widely noted, a major innovation of the UD was the extension of rights to all persons, meaning persons of flesh and blood. The real world is crucially different. In the US, the term “person” is officially defined “to include any individual, branch, partnership, associated group, association, estate, trust, corporation or other organization (whether or not organized under the laws of any State), or any government entity.”21 That concept of “person” would have shocked James Madison, Adam Smith, or others with intellectual roots in the Enlightenment and classical liberalism. But it prevails, giving a cast to the UD that is far from the intent of those who formulated and defend it.

  Through radical judicial activism, the rights of persons have been granted to “collectivist legal entities,” as some legal historians call them; and more narrowly, to their boards of directors, “a new ‘absolutism’” bestowed by the courts.22 These newly created immortal persons, protected from scrutiny by the grant of personal rights, administer domestic and international markets through their internal operations, “strategic alliances” with alleged competitors, and other linkages. They demand and receive critical support from the powerful states over which they cast the “shadow” called “politics,” to borrow John Dewey’s aphorism, giving no little substance to the fears of James Madison 200 years ago that private powers might demolish the experiment in democratic government by becoming “at once its tools and its tyrants.” While insisting on powerful states to serve as their tools, they naturally seek to restrict the public arena for others, the main tenet of “neoliberalism.” The basic thesis was expressed well by David Rockefeller, commenting on the trend towards “lessen[ing] the role of government.” This is “something business people tend to be in favor of,” he remarked, “but the other side of that coin is that somebody has to take government’s place, and business seems to me to be a logical entity to do it. I think that too many businesspeople simply haven’t faced up to that, or they have said, ‘It’s somebody else’s responsibility; it’s not mine.’ “23

  Crucially, it is not the responsibility of the public. The great flaw of government is that it is to some degree accountable to the public, and offers some avenues for public participation. That defect is overcome when responsibility is transferred to the hands of immortal entities of enormous power, granted the rights of persons and able to plan and decide in insulation from the annoying public.

  Current policy initiatives seek to extend the rights of “collectivist legal persons” far beyond those of persons of flesh and blood. These are central features of such trade treaties as NAFTA and the Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MAI), the latter temporarily derailed by public pressure, but sure to be reconstituted in some less visible form.24 These agreements grant corporate tyrannies the rights of “national treatment” not enjoyed by persons in the traditional sense. General Motors can demand “national treatment” in Mexico, but Mexicans of flesh and blood will know better than to demand “national treatment” north of the border. Corporations can also (effectively) sue national states for “expropriation”-interpreted as failure to meet their demands for free access to resources and markets.

  Even without such a formal grant of extraordinary rights in radical violation of classical liberal principles, something similar follows from the role of these collectivist entities as “tools and tyrants” of government and masters of doctrinal systems. One illustration is Article 17 of the UD, which states that “no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.” In the real world, the “persons” whose rights are most prominently secured are the collectivist entities, under a doctrine, formulated in the same years as the UD, which affirms the right to “adequate, effective, and prompt compensation” for expropriated property at “fair market value,” as determined by those in a position to enforce their will. The formula, attributed to Roosevelt’s secretary of state, Cordell Hull, has been termed the “international minimum standard of civilization” in respected treatises of international law.25

  Criteria for application of the formula may appear inconsistent on the surface, but not when real-world factors are taken into account. The formula is the basis for US economic warfare against Cuba for 40 years, justified by the charge that Cuba has not met this “minimum standard of civilization.” The formula does not, however, apply to US investors and the US government, who took the properties at the turn of the century when Cuba was under US military occupation. Nor does it apply to the US government and private powers who stole Spanish and British possessions in Cuba and the Philippines at the same time—for example, the Spanish-owned Manila Railway Company. After the bloody conquest of the Philippines, the US threw out the Spanish concession because it “had been inspired by Spanish imperialistic motives”—unlike the US possessions that Cuba nationalized when it was at last taken over by Cubans in 1959.

  The formula also does not apply to the founding of the United States, which benefited from expropriation of British possessions and those of loyalists, who were probably as numerous as the rebels in the civil war with outside intervention known now as the American Revolution. New York State alone gained close to $4 million by taking loyalist property, a considerable sum in those days. In contrast, the formula does apply to Nicaragua. The US compelled Nicaragua to withdraw the claims for reparations awarded by the World Court, and, after Nicaragua capitulated on all fronts, the Senate voted 94 to 4 to ban any aid until Nicaragua meets the international minimum standard of civilization: returning or giving what Washington determines to be adequate compensation for properties of US citizens seized when Somoza fell, assets of participants in the crimes of the tyrant who had long been a US favorite, including wealthy Nicaraguan exiles who are retroactively US citizens.

  Laws and other instruments are “spider webs,” a popular 17th-century poet wrote: “Lesser flies are quickly ta’en / While the great break out again.”26 Some things change, others persist.

  The Right to Information

  The immortal collectivist persons are easily able to dominate information and doctrinal systems. Their wealth and power allow them to set the framework within which the political system functions, but these controls have become still more direct under recent Supreme Court rulings defining money as a form of speech. The 1998 election is an illustration. About 95 percent of winning candidates outspent their competitors. Business
contributions exceeded those of labor by 12 to 1; individual contributions are sharply skewed.27 By such means, a tiny fraction of the population effectively selects candidates. These developments are surely not unrelated to the increasing cynicism about government and unwillingness even to vote. It should be noted that these consequences are fostered and welcomed by the immortal persons, their media, and their other agents, who have dedicated enormous efforts to instill the belief that the government is an enemy to be hated and feared, not a potential instrument of popular sovereignty.

  The realization of the UD depends crucially on the rights articulated in Articles 19 and 21: to “receive and impart information and ideas through any media” and to take part in “genuine elections” that ensure that “the will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government.” The importance of restricting the rights of free speech and democratic participation has been well understood by the powerful. There is a rich history, but the problems gained heightened significance in this century as “the masses promised to become king,” a dangerous tendency that could be reversed, it was argued, by new methods of propaganda that enable the “intelligent minorities . . . to mold the mind of the masses, . . . regimenting the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers.” I happen to be quoting a founder of the modern public relations industry, the respected New Deal liberal Edward Bernays, but the perception is standard, and clearly articulated by leading progressive public intellectuals and academics, along with business leaders.28

  For such reasons, the media and educational systems are a constant terrain of struggle. It has long been recognized that state power is not the only form of interference with the fundamental right to “receive and impart information and ideas,” and in the industrial democracies, it is far from the most important one—matters discussed by John Dewey and George Orwell, to mention two notable examples. In 1946, the prestigious Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press warned that “private agencies controlling the great mass media” constitute a fundamental threat to freedom of the press with their ability to impose “an environment of vested beliefs” and “bias as a commercial enterprise” under the influence of advertisers and owners. The European Commission of Human Rights has recognized “excessive concentration of the press” as an infringement of the rights guaranteed by Article 19, calling on states to prevent these abuses, a position recently endorsed by Human Rights Watch.29

  For the same reasons, the business world has sought to ensure that private agencies will control the media and thus be able to restrict thought to “vested beliefs.” They seek further to “nullify the customs of ages” by creating “new conceptions of individual attainment and community desire,” business leaders explain, “civilizing” people to perceive their needs in terms of consumption of goods rather than quality of life and work, and to abandon any thought of a “share in the decisions which often profoundly modify their way of life,” as called for by Vatican extremists. Control of media by a few megacorporations is a contribution to this end. Concentration has accelerated, thanks in part to recent deregulation that also eliminates even residual protection of public interest. In the latest edition of his standard review of the topic, Ben Bagdikian reports a decline in controlling firms from 50 in 1984 to 10 today—huge empires such as Disney and General Electric, though the spectrum has broadened with Rupert Murdoch’s entry.30

  Bagdikian also reviews the ever more blatant “manipulation of news to pursue the owners’ other financial goals,” along with those of advertisers, to ensure “the promotion of conservatism and corporate values,” crucially including “materialist consumption” in which “the negative aspects on others are considered completely irrelevant.” That process too has been accelerated by the merger/acquisition boom, which has “consolidated advertising dollars in the hands of a shrinking number of marketers,” the Wall Street Journal reports in a lead story, describing how “Advertisers Flex Muscles” to assure that editors “get the message” about permissible content—but without “trying to impinge on their editorial integrity,” the chief executive of a major ad agency assured the Journal.31

  Young children are a particular focus of the massive onslaught, which extends to regimenting the minds and attitudes of the rest. The controls are to be extended worldwide, and must include the new media created in large measure within the huge state sector of the industrial economy. As a developing country, the US took “far-reaching precautions . . . to insure that the telecommunications industry remained in US hands,” a recent academic study points out; but having achieved global dominance thanks to crucial state intervention, the industry now demands that all others open themselves to “free competition,” so that Article 19 will be effectively nullified worldwide.32

  The dedication to this principle was revealed with unusual clarity when UNESCO considered proposals to democratize the international media system to permit some access on the part of the vast majority of the world. The US government, and the media, bitterly condemned UNESCO with a most impressive flood of deceit and lies—uncorrectable, and reiterated without change after refutation, which was rarely permitted expression. “The stunning irony of this achievement,” an academic historian of US-UNESCO relations observes, “was that the United States, having proved that the free market in ideas did not exist, attacked UNESCO for planning to destroy it.” A detailed review of media and government deceit was published by a university press, but was also ignored. That history provides a revealing measure of the attitudes towards the basic principles of freedom and democracy.33

  Control of the Internet is currently the “hot issue.” Developed primarily in the state sector for almost 30 years and commercialized against the will of two-thirds of the population, the Internet and the Web are regarded by the business world as “the primary platform for the essential business activities of computing, communications, and commerce,” as “the world’s largest, deepest, fastest, and most secure marketplace,” not only for goods but also for “selling” ideas and attitudes. They are expected to provide enormous profits, as well as new means to carry forward the mission of civilizing attitudes and belief, if they can be brought under corporate control and commercial sponsorship—that is, if they can be taken from the public, the owner of the airwaves and cyberspace by law, and transferred to a handful of immortal and unaccountable collective “persons” with extraordinary global power. A primary goal, one trade journalist observes, is “to turn the once-eclectic Web into the ultimate 24-hour marketing machine.”34

  New software and technologies are being devised to direct this public creation to marketing, diversion, and other safe activities, undermining the “once-eclectic” character that has provided a way to escape doctrinal constraints and construct a public counterforce to concentrated power, sometimes to considerable effect. In Indonesia, a visiting Australian academic specialist writes, the Internet “proved a godsend” for communication and “mobilizing cultural and political activism,” with results that are as unwelcome to domestic elites as to the foreign beneficiaries and supporters of the threatened regime, unusual in its corruption and brutality. Another notable recent example is the success of grassroots and public interest organizations in deflecting the state-corporate attempt to institute the MAI in secrecy, an achievement that elicited near-panic, and even the fear that it may become “harder to do deals behind closed doors and submit them for rubber-stamping by parliaments,” as trade diplomats warned. Overcoming these hazards is a high priority for business leaders.35

  It is only to be expected that private power and its “tools and tyrants” should seek to ensure that others can do no more than “keep trying although they know that it is in vain.” But the Confucian judgment is surely too grim. The words are hard to utter after this terrible century, but there has been substantial improvement in many aspects of human life and consciousness, extending an earlier history of progress—agonizingly slow, often reversed, but nonetheless real. Particularly
in the societies that are more privileged and that have won a significant measure of freedom, many choices are available, including fundamental institutional change if that is the right way to proceed. We need not quietly accept the suffering and injustice that are all around us, and the prospects, which are not slight, of severe catastrophes if human society continues on its present course.

  10

  The United States and the “Challenge of Relativity”

  The adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UD) on December 10, 1948, constituted a step forward in the slow progress towards protection of human rights. The overarching principle of the UD is universality. Its provisions have equal standing. There are no moral grounds for self-serving “relativism,” which selects for convenience; still less for the particularly ugly form of relativism that converts the UD into a weapon to wield selectively against designated enemies.

  The 50th anniversary of the UD provides a welcome occasion for reflection on such matters, and for steps to advance the principles that have been endorsed, at least rhetorically, by the nations of the world. The chasm that separates words from actions requires no comment; the annual reports of the major human rights organizations provide more than ample testimony. And there is no shortage of impressive rhetoric. One would have to search far to find a place where leadership and intellectuals do not issue ringing endorsements of the principles and bitter condemnation of those who violate them—notably excluding themselves and their associates and clients.