% FROM THE NOAM CHOMSKY ARCHIVE
% http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu:/usr/tp0x/chomsky.html
% ftp://ftp.cs.cmu.edu/user/cap/chomsky/
% Filename:    articles/chomsky.loot.human-rights
% Title:       Letter from Lexington (column)
% Author:      Noam Chomsky
% Appeared-in: Lies Of Our Times, issue unknown (July 1993?)
% Source:      Jeremy Allaire 
% Keywords:    human rights, Haiti, Universal Declaration
% Synopsis:    US government selectively upholds UN Universal Declaration
% See-also:    

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