Noam Chomsky
Lies of Our Times
Written June 18, 1993
Letter from Lexington June 18, 1993
Dear LOOT,
"At Vienna Talks, U.S. Insists Rights Must be Universal." So reads the
headline for Elaine Sciolino's frontpage story on the forthright
U.S. stand at the Vienna conference on Human Rights, where "the United
States warned today that it would oppose any attempt to use
religious and cultural traditions to weaken the concept of universal
human rights" (NYT, June 15, 1993). The U.S. 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," Sciolino reports, while 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 [of
Human Rights]" (Mary Curtius, Boston Globe, June 15).
The Declaration, endorsed with no dissent by the UN General Assembly
on Dec. 10, 1948, is generally recognized as customary
international law, by U.S. courts in particular; the judgment in Filartiga
v. Pena (1980) referred to "customary international law, as
evidenced and defined by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights"
(Joseph Wronka, Human Rights and Social Policy in the 21st
Century, University Press of America, 1992).
At last, Washington is taking a stand that we can be proud of. For once
we can appreciate the chorus of self-acclaim that routinely
follows the pronouncements of U.S. officials, and the bitter condemnation
of the "dirty dozen," as U.S. diplomats refer to those who
reject "elements of the Universal Declaration" that do not suit them
(Curtius). Of the bad guys who hold "that human rights should be
interpreted differently in regions with non-Western cultures," only
one took the floor, Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas
(Sciolino).
The chorus of acclamation, however, gave little indication of the contents
of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, apart from
those Articles that the U.S. proclaimed sacred. Perhaps it is worth
a further look on the principle, also grandly proclaimed in a Times
headline, that "The Truth is Great, and Shall Prevail" -- referring
to Soviet depravity, now at last exposed (NYT Book Review, March
21, 1993).
Article 14 states that "Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy
in other countries asylum from persecution"; Haitians, for example,
now locked into their prison of terror and torture by a U.S. blockade.
As the Vienna conference ended, 87 Haitians crowded aboard a
sailboat were intercepted 25 miles off Haiti's coast and returned to
the terror, on grounds that they are fleeing poverty, not political
persecution -- as determined by ESP (Reuters, "Haiti peasant group
backs UN sanctions," Boston Globe, June 18, p. 68). Sciolino
notes 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." More pertinently, the case illustrates Washington's
reverence for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Article 25 states that "Everyone has the right to a standard of living
adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family,
including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social
services, and the right to security in the event of
unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack
of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control." It is
superfluous to ask how the world's richest country, with unparalleled
advantages, enforces this basic principle of the Declaration we
revere.
For those familiar with Article 25, the celebration of our virtue might
have been disrupted slightly by an item headlined "Tufts study
finds 12 million children in US go hungry" (Judy Rakowsky, Boston Globe,
June 16, p. 80, Food section). The study, conducted
"Even before the economic doldrums of the past two years dragged more
people into poverty," defined hunger "as not having enough
money to buy adequately nutritious food to nourish the body and maintain
growth and development in children." This leads to
"impaired physical and mental growth, a lasting handicap," according
to study director Larry Brown of the Tufts Center on Hunger,
Poverty and Nutrition, "which found a total of 30 million Americans
are hungry" (pre-recession). "The nations with which we compete
-- Germany and Japan -- are knocking our socks off by protecting their
people," Brown added: "We have to end hunger for our
nation's economy."
That a child's right to food has to be marketed in such terms speaks
volumes about the values of the dominant culture, and about the
sanctity of the Universal Declaration outside the ranks of the "dirty
dozen."
Another item might also have marred the celebration. A June 15 Times
headline reads: "43,412 Stricken Cubans, and Not a Single
Answer." Buried within, we detect a possible answer. Reporting the
decision of the Cuban government to distribute vitamins to the
entire population so as "to increase resistance to the disease," correspondent
Howard French comments on the "plummeting living
standards in what had only recently been one of Latin America's healthiest
and most affluent countries. Especially hard hit is the Cuban
diet, [which] is limited by strict rationing" as a result of "the collapse
of the Soviet bloc and a three-decade American embargo,"
recently extended by George Bush under pressure from candidate Clinton,
then laying the groundwork for his "Administration, which
has defined human rights as a focus of foreign policy" (Sciolino).
In such ways we uphold Article 25.
To be sure, this is done in pursuit of our fervor for democracy, demonstrated
by our treatment of Cuba until it fell out of our hands in
1959, to select an example at random. A commissar unwilling to fall
back on this standard absurdity might, however, concede the
Cuban exception to our dedication to human rights, accounting for it
on the grounds explained by University of Chicago Iran scholar
Marvin Zonis and banker Karim Pakravan, writing on Iran (Boston Globe,
June 5): "Yet no country in the world, with the arguable
exceptions of Cuba and Vietnam, has inflicted such powerful hurts on
the United States as Iran," whose conservative parliamentary
regime was overthrown in a successful CIA coup in 1953, installing
a regime of torturers and killers that endured for a quarter of a
century. Zonis and Pakravan forgot to mention Nicaragua, which also
maliciously assaulted us, inflicting "psychological injuries."
Poor little United States, beset by powerful enemies that afflict it
mercilessly. Surely the "powerful hurts" we suffer should exempt us
from the provisions of the Universal Declaration. What remedy do we
have, in our impotence and vulnerability, but to launch economic
warfare against those who "inflict such powerful hurts" upon us?
If there is, in human history, an episode that compares in vulgarity,
cowardice, and deceit to the highly successful enterprise of turning
our victims into our tormentors, I have not found it. The incessant
whining about our sad fate at the hands of our Vietnamese
oppressors, virtually exceptionless throughout the degrading POW farce,
is an episode that truly defies commentary -- particularly
when one recalls our own atrocious treatment of POWs in Vietnam, Korea,
and the Pacific War, to mention only the most extreme
cases of savagery.
Putting aside the terror and violence to which we have subjugated much
of the Third World, and the malicious economic warfare that is
a Washington specialty, a reporter lauding our dedication to the Universal
Declaration might notice UNICEF's estimate that half a
million children die every year as a direct result of the debt repayment
on which we insist so that commercial banks will be compensated
for their bad loans, with the additional help of the U.S. taxpayer;
it is understood that U.S. enterprises are to be protected by state
power from the ravages of the market, appropriate only for the weak.
The loans, granted to our favorite dictators and oligarchs so that they
could purchase U.S. luxury goods and export capital to the West,
are now the burden of the poor, who had nothing to do with them. Susan
George estimates that debt service alone amounted to a capital
flow of $418 billion from South to North from 1982-90, six times the
value of Marshall Plan aid in today's dollars. This includes the
countries of sub-Saharan Africa, where starvation and misery is rampant
in part thanks to the much-admired U.S. policy of
"constructive engagement," which helped South Africa to cause 1.5 million
killed and over $60 billion in damage in the neighboring
countries in that period while maintaining its illegal hold on Namibia.
To this figure we may add the eleven million children who die
each year from easily treatable diseases, a "silent genocide," WHO
director-general Hiroshi Nakajima observes, "a preventable tragedy
because the developed world has the resources and technology to end
common diseases worldwide" but lacks "the will to help the
developing countries" -- the latter a euphemism for the countries colonized
and controlled by the West.
When we denounce the crimes of Pol Pot, we rightly count the numbers
who died as a result of his brutal policies, not merely the
minority killed outright. Application of similar criteria to ourselves,
were this imaginable, would yield an awesome figure. Recall the
contents of Article 25, to which we are dedicated with such solemnity
-- as distinct from the "dirty dozen."
Article 23 declares that "Everyone has the right to work, to free choice
of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to
protection against unemployment," along with "equal pay for equal work"
and "just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself
and his family and existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented,
if necessary, by other means of social protection." Again,
we need not tarry on our devotion to this principle. Furthermore, "Everyone
has the right to form and to join trade unions for the
protection of his interests."
These rights are indeed granted in the United States in the sense that
no law explicitly denies them. Rather, social and political
arrangements, some legal, some rooted in vast discrepancies of private
power, prevent these rights from being exercised. Labor's
political victories in the mid-30s sent a chill through the business
community, which saw its dominance over social and political life
threatened as the U.S. was dragged into the modern world. A strong
counteroffensive, delayed briefly by the war, reversed these
gains. By the 1980s, the US was well off the international spectrum
once again, to the extent that the International Labor Organization,
which rarely has an unkind word for its paymasters, took up an AFL-CIO
complaint about the use of strikebreakers and recommended
that the U.S. act to conform to international standards. Apart from
South Africa, no other industrial country tolerates these methods to
ensure that the Universal Declaration will remain empty words.
Firing of strikers is only a minor element of the array of devices that
have been deployed to deny labor rights, a campaign in which the
mass media have played a shameful role. The effects are vividly seen
in North Carolina, which "boasts of having the lowest
unionization rate in the country," Toronto Star reporter Linda Diebel
observes in a study of "right-to-work laws" -- Newspeak for
"effectively impossible to organize laws" -- and other measures to
improve the investment climate (June 6, 1993). The issue is of great
concern to Canada, which is watching jobs flee to southern states of
the U.S. as wages are driven down by policies designed to convert
the rich countries themselves into two-tiered societies on the Third
World model, with islands of extreme wealth and privilege in a
growing sea of misery. The average manufacturing wage in North Carolina
is well below Canada's, Diebel reports, while "health and
safety provisions are barebones and are under continuous assault."
Much like the Third World, North Carolina advertises "low taxes, lax
regulations, minimal worker compensation and cheap, productive
workers." In their anti-union passion, North Carolina business leaders
campaigned to prevent United Aircraft from setting up a repair
operation, because, as the Raleigh News & Observer reported, "the
arrival of thousands of unionized workers would damage North
Carolina's status as one of the nation's least unionized states and
possibly blunt the state's efforts to attract other companies looking for
low-cost labor." A union district manager observes that "It's very
difficult to go on strike in North Carolina. You'd be better off in
Eastern Europe. There is no protection for striking workers whatsoever."
So much for Article 23.
The U.S. and the West generally have forged a concept of human rights
that dismisses the social and economic provisions of the
Universal Declaration as mere rhetoric. Henry Shue observes that abstract
liberal theory, which assumes the subsistence problem to
have been met, excludes "no fewer" than 1 billion people -- actually
far more (Basic Rights, 1980, p. 183). The "dirty dozen" make a
different selection, and are justly condemned for denying the universality
of certain rights. Given the overwhelming dominance of the
West in every domain, including control over the norms of Political
Correctness, the Western concept of "what counts" prevails.
Representatives of Venezuela, not one of the "dirty dozen," observed
that "the proposals tabled by the countries of the South, such as
the right to development, the effects of the foreign debt, the war
on poverty, child protection and the defense of indigenous
communities, had provoked strong opposition from the North" (IPS, June
4, 1993), though they fall under the Universal Declaration.
The selective eye of the West picks out just those rights that benefit
the rich and powerful: Freedom of speech is of great value to those
who can use it to achieve their ends, confident that unwanted thought
will be marginalized and the mass of the population left
effectively voiceless. For similar reasons, the privileged insist upon
political rights. The social and economic rights of the Universal
Declaration are peripheral concerns for those whose wealth and privilege
guarantees them these amenities, and who profit from the
denial of the rights to others. Accordingly, the West adamantly rejects
the universality of the Universal Declaration. For the poor and
suffering, all of these rights are values to be treasured, but they
scarcely enter the debate, or commentary on it.
These crucially important facts are not completely suppressed. Thus
Sciolino notes that the Administration will "press for Senate
ratification of four treaties -- to eliminate racial discrimination
and discrimination against women, to protect the economic rights of the
poor and to codify basic human rights and duties." The comment tacitly
concedes that the U.S. does not observe the Universal
Declaration. Note that mere ratification of treaties, even if achieved,
would still fall short of the action required to ensure that "basic
human rights" are protected, in accord with the Universal Declaration.
Adequate press coverage would have gone further, noting the repeated
refusal of the United States to accept UN human rights
covenants. Thus the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and
Political Rights, among others, was submitted to Congress for
ratification with the express stipulation that it would be "non self-executing,"
that is, unenforceable in the U.S., so that ratification
"would have only symbolic and not legal significance" (Wronka). The
U.S. Senate made the same stipulation in considering the UN
Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading
Treatment or Punishment, "in part so as not to invalidate
the Supreme Court decision" that permits corporal punishment in schools
(Wronka).
Let's have a further look at Warren Christopher, the gallant defender
of the universality of human rights. Sciolino reports that he
condemned "the world's aggressors and those who encourage the spread
of arms." It is too much to ask an American intellectual to
consider how Washington ranks among "the world's aggressors" -- say,
in the period from the attack against South Vietnam over 30
years ago to Panama, in celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
But who is the world's leading arms merchant, by a huge margin?
How can one write these words, without cringing?
And how can a reporter blandly refer to Christopher's work "promoting
human rights" under the Carter Administration? Recall that
Haitians were then fleeing from the terror of Washington's friend Baby
Doc, hence unqualified for political asylum and barred from our
shores, deported, and harshly treated (if they did not die at sea).
Or recall 1978, when the spokesman for the "dirty dozen," Indonesia,
was running out of arms in its attack against East Timor, then approaching
truly genocidal levels -- so that the Carter Administration
had to rush new armaments to its bloodthirsty friend. Or 1979, when
the 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) and reconstituting them as a terrorist force
on the border under the direction of Argentine neo-Nazis. Or take
Iran, where the Administration sought to foist useless high-tech arms
on another favored torturer, assuring the Shah that there would be
"no linkage" between arms sales and human rights. Or Wilmington North
Carolina, where prison terms of 282 years were imposed on
Ben Chavis and other civil rights activists in a fraud that was an
international scandal, but the Administration declared itself unable to
utter a word.
Needless to say, we cannot dream of the day when someone in the media
might discover the studies by Edward Herman and Latin
American scholar Lars Schoultz that demonstrate the close correlation
between U.S. aid and torture, running right through the Carter
years, including military aid and independent of need, studies that
would be pointless to undertake as Jeane Kirkpatrick, George
Shultz, Elliott Abrams and the rest of that merry crew took the reins.
Is there no shame? None at all?
Sincerely,
Noam Chomsky