by Noam Chomsky
I will limit attention here to a single case: the world’s most powerful state, which also has the most stable and long-standing democratic institutions and unparalleled advantages in every sphere, including the economy and security concerns. Its global influence has been unmatched during the half century when the UD has been in force (in theory). It has long been as good a model as one can find of a sociopolitical order in which basic rights are upheld. And it is commonly lauded, at home and abroad, as the leader in the struggle for human rights, democracy, freedom, and justice. There remains a range of disagreement over policy: at one extreme, “Wilsonian idealists” urge continued dedication to the traditional mission of upholding human rights and freedom worldwide, while “realists” counter that the United States may lack the means to conduct these crusades of “global meliorism” and should not neglect its own interests in the service of others. By “granting idealism a near exclusive hold on our foreign policy,” we go too far, high government officials warn, with the agreement of many scholars and policy analysts.1 Within this range lies the path to a better world.
To discover the true meaning of principles that are proclaimed, it is of course necessary to go beyond rhetorical flourishes and public pronouncements, and to investigate actual practice. Examples must be chosen carefully to give a fair picture. One useful approach is to take the examples chosen as the “strongest case” and see how well they withstand scrutiny. Another is to investigate the record where influence is greatest and interference least, so that we see the operative principles in their purest form. If we want to determine what the Kremlin meant by human rights and democracy, we pay little heed to Pravda’s denunciations of racism in the United States or state terror in its client regimes, even less to protestation of noble motives. Far more instructive is the state of affairs in the “people’s democracies” of Eastern Europe. The point is elementary, and applies generally. For the US, the Western hemisphere is the obvious testing ground, particularly the Central America–Caribbean region, where Washington has faced few external challenges for almost a century. It is of some interest that the exercise is rarely undertaken and, when it is, castigated as extremist or worse.
Before examining the operative meaning of the UD, it might be useful to recall some observations of George Orwell’s. In his preface to Animal Farm, Orwell turned his attention to societies that are relatively free from state controls, unlike the totalitarian monster he was satirizing. “The sinister fact about literary censorship in England,” he wrote, “is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without any need for any official ban.” He did not explore the reasons in any depth, merely noting the control of the press by “wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics,” reinforced by the “general tacit agreement,” instilled by a good education, “that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact.” As a result, “Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness.”
As if to illustrate his words, the preface remained unpublished for 30 years.2
In the case under discussion here, the “prevailing orthodoxy” is well summarized by the distinguished Oxford-Yale historian Michael Howard: “For 200 years the United States has preserved almost unsullied the original ideals of the Enlightenment . . . , and, above all, the universality of these values,” though it “does not enjoy the place in the world that it should have earned through its achievements, its generosity, and its goodwill since World War II.”3 The record is unsullied by the treatment of “that hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty” (in the words of John Quincy Adams)4; by the fate of the slaves who provided cheap cotton to allow the industrial revolution to take off—not exactly through market forces; by the terrible atrocities the US was once again conducting in its “backyard” as the praises were being delivered; or by the fate of Filipinos, Haitians, Vietnamese, and a few others who might have somewhat different perceptions.
The favored illustration of “generosity and goodwill” is the Marshall Plan. That merits examination on the “strongest case” principle. The inquiry again quickly yields facts “that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention.” For example, the fact that “as the Marshall Plan went into full gear the amount of American dollars being pumped into France and the Netherlands was approximately equaled by the funds being siphoned from their treasuries to finance their expeditionary forces in Southeast Asia,” to carry out terrible crimes.5 And that under US influence Europe was reconstructed in a particular mode, not quite that sought by the anti-fascist resistance, though fascist and Nazi collaborators were generally satisfied.
Nor would it do to mention that the generosity was largely bestowed by US taxpayers upon the corporate sector, which was duly appreciative, recognizing years later that the Marshall Plan “set the stage for large amounts of private US direct investment in Europe,”6 establishing the basis for the modern transnational corporations, which “prospered and expanded on overseas orders, . . . fueled initially by the dollars of the Marshall Plan” and protected from “negative developments” by “the umbrella of American power.”7 Furthermore, “Marshall Plan aid was also crucial in offsetting capital flight from Europe to the United States,” political economist Eric Helleiner alleges, a matter of which “American policymakers were in fact keenly aware,” preferring that “wealthy Europeans” send their money to New York banks because “cooperative capital controls had proven unacceptable to the American banking community.” “The enormity of Marshall Plan aid thus did not so much reflect the resources required to rebuild Europe, . . . but rather the volume of funds that were needed to offset the ‘mass movements of nervous flight capital’” predicted by leading economists, a flow that apparently “exceeded” the Marshall Plan aid provided by US taxpayers—effectively, to “wealthy Europeans” and New York banks.8
The “prevailing orthodoxy” has sometimes been subjected to explicit test, on the obvious terrain. Lars Schoultz, the leading academic specialist on human rights in Latin America, found that US aid “has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens, . . . to the hemisphere’s relatively egregious violators of fundamental human rights.” That includes military aid, is independent of need, and runs through the Carter period.9 More wide-ranging studies by economist Edward Herman found a similar correlation worldwide, also suggesting a plausible reason: aid is correlated with improvement in the investment climate, often achieved by murdering priests and union leaders, massacring peasants trying to organize, blowing up the independent press, and so on. The result is a secondary correlation between aid and egregious violation of human rights. It is not that US leaders prefer torture; rather, it has little weight in comparison with more important values. These studies precede the Reagan years, when the questions are not worth posing.10
By “general tacit agreement,” such matters too are “kept dark,” with memories purged of “inconvenient facts.”
“Universal” Human Rights
The natural starting point for an inquiry into Washington’s defense of “the universality of [Enlightenment] values” is the UD. It is accepted generally as a human rights standard. US courts have, furthermore, based judicial decisions on “customary international law, as evidenced and defined by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”11
The UD became the focus of great attention in June 1993 at the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna. A lead headline in the New York Times read: “At Vienna Talks, US Insists Rights Must be Universal.” Washington warned “that it would oppose any attempt to use religious and cultural traditions to weaken the concept of universal human rights,” Elaine Sciolino reported. The US delegation was headed by Secretary of State Warren Christopher, “who promoted human rights as Deputy Secretary of State in the Carter administration.” A “key purpose” of his speech, “viewed as the Clinton
administration’s first major policy statement on human rights,” was “to defend the universality of human rights,” rejecting the claims of those who plead “cultural relativism.” Christopher said that “the worst violators are the world’s aggressors and those who encourage the spread of arms,” stressing that “the universality of human rights set[s] a single standard of acceptable behavior around the world, a standard Washington would apply to all countries.” In his own words, “The United States will never join those who would undermine the Universal Declaration” and will defend its universality against those who hold “that human rights should be interpreted differently in regions with non-Western cultures,” notably the “dirty dozen” who reject elements of the UD that do not suit them.12
Washington’s decisiveness prevailed. Western countries “were relieved that their worst fears were not realized—a retreat from the basic tenets of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” The “Challenge of Relativity” was beaten back, and the conference declared that “The universal nature of these rights and freedoms is beyond question.”13
A few questions remained unasked. Thus, if “the worst violators are the world’s aggressors and those who encourage the spread of arms,” what are we to conclude about the world’s leading arms merchant, then boasting well over half the sales of arms to the Third World, mostly to brutal dictatorships—policies accelerated under Christopher’s tenure at the State Department with vigorous efforts to enhance the publicly subsidized sales, opposed by 96 percent of the population but strongly supported by high-tech industry?14 Or its colleagues Britain and France, who had distinguished themselves by supplying Indonesian and Rwandan mass murderers, among others?15
The subsidies are not only for “merchants of death.” Reveling in the new prospects for arms sales with NATO expansion, a spokesman for the US Aerospace Industries Association observes that the new markets ($10 billion for fighter jets alone, he estimates) include electronics, communications systems, etc., amounting to “real money” for advanced industry generally. The exports are promoted by the US government with grants, discount loans, and other devices to facilitate the transfer of public funds to private profit in the US while diverting the “transition economies” of the former Soviet empire to increased military spending rather than the social spending that is favored by their populations (the US Information Agency reports). The situation is quite the same elsewhere.16
And if aggressors are “the worst violators” of human rights, what of the country that stands accused before the International Court of Justice for the “unlawful use of force” in its terrorist war against Nicaragua,17 contemptuously vetoing a Security Council resolution calling on all states to observe international law and rejecting repeated General Assembly pleas to the same effect?18 Do these stern judgments hold of the country that opened the post-Cold War era by invading Panama, where, four years later, the client government’s Human Rights Commission declared that the right to self-determination and sovereignty was still being violated by the “state of occupation by a foreign army,” condemning its continuing human rights abuses?19 I omit more dramatic examples, such as the US attack against South Vietnam from 1961-62, when the Kennedy administration moved from support for a Latin American-style terror state to outright aggression, facts that it still “wouldn’t do” to admit into history.20
Further questions are raised by Washington’s (unreported) reservations concerning the Declaration of the Vienna Conference. The US was disturbed that the Declaration “implied that any foreign occupation is a human rights violation.”21 That principle the US rejects, just as, alone with its Israeli client, the US rejects the right of peoples “forcibly deprived of [self-determination, freedom, and independence] . . . , particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes and foreign occupation or other forms of colonial domination,. . . to struggle to [gain these rights] and to seek and receive support [in accordance with the Charter and other principles of international law]”—facts that also remain unreported, though they might help clarify the sense in which human rights are advocated.22
Also unexamined was just how Christopher had “promoted human rights [under] the Carter administration.” One case was in 1978, when the spokesman for the “dirty dozen” at Vienna, Indonesia, was running out of arms in its attack against East Timor, then approaching genocidal levels, so that the Carter administration had to rush even more military supplies to its bloodthirsty friend.23 Another arose a year later, when the Carter administration sought desperately to keep Somoza’s National Guard in power after it had slaughtered some 40,000 civilians, finally evacuating commanders in planes disguised with Red Cross markings (a war crime) to Honduras, where they were reconstituted as a terrorist force under the direction of Argentine neo-Nazis. The record elsewhere in the region was arguably even worse.24
Such matters too fall among the facts “that it ‘wouldn’t do’ to mention.”
The high-minded rhetoric at and about the Vienna conference was not besmirched by inquiry into the observance of the UD by its leading defenders.25 These matters were, however, raised in Vienna in a Public Hearing organized by NGOs. The contributions by activists, scholars, lawyers, and others from many countries reviewed “alarming evidence of massive human rights violations in every part of the world as a result of the policies of the international financial institutions,” the “Washington Consensus” among the leaders of the free world. This “neoliberal” consensus disguises what might be called “really existing free market doctrine”: market discipline is of great benefit to the weak and defenseless, though the rich and powerful must shelter under the wings of the nanny state. They must also be allowed to persist in “the sustained assault on [free trade] principle” that is deplored in a scholarly review of the post-1970 (“neoliberal”) period by GATT secretariat economist Patrick Low (now director of economic research for the World Trade Organization), who estimates the restrictive effects of Reaganite measures at about three times those of other leading industrial countries, as they “presided over the greatest swing toward protectionism since the 1930s,” shifting the US from “being the world’s champion of multilateral free trade to one of its leading challengers,” the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations commented in a review of the decade.26
It should be added that such analyses omit the major forms of market interference for the benefit of the rich: the transfer of public funds to advanced industry that underlies virtually every dynamic sector of the US economy, often under the guise of “defense.” These measures were escalated again by the Reaganites, who were second to none in extolling the glories of the free market—for the poor at home and abroad. The general practices were pioneered by the British in the 18th century and have been a dominant feature of economic history ever since, and are a good part of the reason for the contemporary gap between the First and the Third World (growing for many years along with the growing gap between rich and poor sectors of the population worldwide).27
The Public Hearing at Vienna received no mention in mainstream US journals, to my knowledge, but citizens of the free world could learn about the human rights concerns of the vast majority of the world’s people from its report, published in an edition of 2,000 copies in Nepal.28
Civil and Political Rights
The provisions of the UD are not well known in the United States, but some are familiar. The most famous is Article 13 (2), which states that “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own.” This principle was invoked with much passion every year on Human Rights Day, December 10, with demonstrations and indignant condemnations of the Soviet Union for its refusal to allow Jews to leave. To be exact, the words just quoted were invoked, but not the phrase that follows: “and to return to his country.” The significance of the omitted words was spelled out on December 11, 1948, the day after the UD was ratified, when the General Assembly unanimously passed Resolution 194, which affirms the right of Palestinians to return to their homes or receive
compensation if they choose not to return, and has been reaffirmed regularly since. But there was a “general tacit agreement” that it “wouldn’t do” to mention the omitted words, let alone the glaringly obvious fact that those exhorting the Soviet tyrants to observe Article 13, to much acclaim, were its most dedicated opponents.
It is only fair to add that the cynicism has finally been overcome. At the December 1993 UN session, the Clinton administration changed US official policy, joining Israel in opposing UN 194, which was reaffirmed by a vote of 127 to 2. As is the norm, there was no report or comment. But at least the inconsistency is behind us: the first half of Article 13 (2) has lost its relevance, and Washington now officially rejects its second half.29
Let us move on to Article 14, which declares that “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution”—Haitians, for example, including the 87 new victims captured by Clinton’s blockade and returned to their charnel house, with scant notice, as the Vienna conference opened.30 The official reason was that they were fleeing poverty, not the rampant terror of the military junta, as they claimed. The basis for this insight was not explained.
In her report on the Vienna conference a few days earlier, Sciolino had noted that “some human rights organizations have sharply criticized the administration for failing to fulfill Mr. Clinton’s campaign promises on human rights,” the “most dramatic case” being “Washington’s decision to forcibly return Haitian boat people seeking political asylum.” Looking at the matter differently, the events illustrate Washington’s largely rhetorical commitment to “the universality of human rights,” except as a weapon used selectively against others.