By Noam Chomsky
In his penetrating study “Ideal Illusions: How the U.S.
Government Co-Opted Human Rights,” international affairs scholar James
Peck observes, “In the history of human rights, the worst atrocities are
always committed by somebody else, never us” – whoever “us” is.
Almost any moment in history yields innumerable illustrations. Let’s keep to the past few weeks.
On
May 10, the Summer Olympics were inaugurated at the Greek birthplace of
the ancient games. A few days before, virtually unnoticed, the
government of Vietnam addressed a letter to the International Olympic
Committee expressing the “profound concerns of the Government and people
of Viet Nam about the decision of IOC to accept the Dow Chemical
Company as a global partner sponsoring the Olympic Movement.”
Dow
provided the chemicals that Washington used from 1961 onward to destroy
crops and forests in South Vietnam, drenching the country with Agent
Orange.
These poisons contain dioxin, one of the most
lethal carcinogens known, affecting millions of Vietnamese and many U.S.
soldiers. To this day in Vietnam, aborted fetuses and deformed infants
are very likely the effects of these crimes – though, in light of
Washington’s refusal to investigate, we have only the studies of
Vietnamese scientists and independent analysts.
Joining
the Vietnamese appeal against Dow are the government of India, the
Indian Olympic Association, and the survivors of the horrendous 1984
Bhopal gas leak, one of history’s worst industrial disasters, which
killed thousands and injured more than half a million.
Union
Carbide, the corporation responsible for the disaster, was taken over
by Dow, for whom the matter is of no slight concern. In February,
Wikileaks revealed that Dow hired the U.S. private investigative agency
Stratfor to monitor activists seeking compensation for the victims and
prosecution of those responsible.
Another major crime with very serious persisting effects is the Marine assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah in November 2004.
Women
and children were permitted to escape if they could. After several
weeks of bombing, the attack opened with a carefully planned war crime:
invasion of the Fallujah General Hospital, where patients and staff were
ordered to the floor, their hands tied. Soon the bonds were loosened;
the compound was secure.
The official justification was
that the hospital was reporting civilian casualties, and therefore was
considered a propaganda weapon.
Much of the city was
left in “smoking ruins,” the press reported while the Marines sought out
insurgents in their “warrens.” The invaders barred entry to the Red
Crescent relief organization. Absent an official inquiry, the scale of
the crimes is unknown.
If the Fallujah events are
reminiscent of the events that took place in the Bosnian enclave of
Srebrenica, now again in the news with the genocide trial of Bosnian
Serb military commander Ratko Mladic, there’s a good reason. An honest
comparison would be instructive, but there’s no fear of that: One is an
atrocity, the other not, by definition.
As in Vietnam, independent investigators are reporting long-term effects of the Fallujah assault.
Medical
researchers have found dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer
and leukemia, even higher than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Uranium levels in
hair and soil samples are far beyond comparable cases.
One
of the rare investigators from the invading countries is Dr. Kypros
Nicolaides, director of the fetal-medicine research center at London’s
King’s College Hospital. “I’m sure the Americans used weapons that
caused these deformities,” Nicolaides says.
The
lingering effects of a vastly greater nonatrocity were reported last
month by U.S. law professor James Anaya, the U.N. rapporteur on the
rights of indigenous peoples.
Anaya dared to tread on
forbidden territory by investigating the shocking conditions among the
remnants of the Native American population in the U.S. – “poverty, poor
health conditions, lack of attainment of formal education (and) social
ills at rates that far exceed those of other segments of the American
population,” Anaya reported. No member of Congress was willing to meet
him. Press coverage was minimal.
Dissidents have been much in the news after the dramatic rescue of the blind Chinese civil-rights activist Chen Guangcheng.
“The
international commotion,” Samuel Moyn wrote in The New York Times last
month, “aroused memories of earlier dissidents like Andrei D. Sakharov
and Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, the Eastern bloc heroes of another age
who first made ‘international human rights’ a rallying cry for activists
across the globe and a high-profile item on Western governments’
agendas.”
Moyn is the author of “The Last Utopia: Human
Rights in History,” released in 2010. In The New York Times Book
Review, Belinda Cooper questioned Moyn’s tracing the contemporary
prominence of these ideals to “(President Jimmy) Carter’s abortive steps
to inject human rights into foreign policy and the 1975 Helsinki
accords with the Soviet Union,” focusing on abuses in the Soviet sphere.
She finds Moyn’s thesis unpersuasive because “an alternative history to
his own is far too easy to construct.”
True enough:
The obvious alternative is the one that James Peck provides, which the
mainstream can hardly consider, though the relevant facts are strikingly
clear and known at least to scholarship.
Thus in the
“Cambridge History of the Cold War,” John Coatsworth recalls that from
1960 to “the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political
prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political
dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union
and its East European satellites.” But being nonatrocities, these
crimes, substantially traceable to U.S. intervention, didn’t inspire a
human-rights crusade.
Also inspired by the Chen rescue,
New York Times columnist Bill Keller writes that “Dissidents are
heroic,” but they can be “irritants to American diplomats who have
important business to transact with countries that don’t share our
values.” Keller criticizes Washington for sometimes failing to live up
to our values with prompt action when others commit crimes.
There
is no shortage of heroic dissidents within the domains of U.S.
influence and power, but they are as invisible as the Latin American
victims. Looking almost at random around the world, we find Abdulhadi
al-Khawaja, co-founder of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, an
Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, now facing death in prison
from a long hunger strike.
And Father Mun Jeong-hyeon,
the elderly Korean priest who was severely injured while holding mass
as part of the protest against the construction of a U.S. naval base on
Jeju Island, named an Island of Peace, now occupied by security forces
for the first time since the 1948 massacres by the U.S.-imposed South
Korean government.
And Turkish scholar Ismail Besikci,
facing trial again for defending the rights of Kurds. He already has
spent much of his life in prison on the same charge, including the
1990s, when the Clinton administration was providing Turkey with huge
quantities of military aid – at a time when the Turkish military
perpetrated some of the period’s worst atrocities.
But these instances are all nonexistent, on standard principles, along with others too numerous to mention.
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