By Nick Li

For those who haven’t read it, "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" by Canadian uber left-wing activist Naomi Klein is a must read for anyone interested in economics, human rights, or the world generally. One of the most interesting chapters of her book, "Entirely Unrelated," discusses the rise of the international human rights movement in the 1960s and its acute limitations. The basic premise of the book, which I will not get into here, is that the shock, confusion and dislocation caused by natural disasters (like Katrina), wars (Iraq or the Falklands), coups (Pinochet in Chile, Suharto in Indonesia, etc.) or economic crises (like the kind gripping Eastern Europe after the fall of communism and the whole developing world during the 1980s) have provided fertile grounds for the implementation of extreme right-wing economic policies by alert and opportunistic ideologues and powerful interests. In the chapter "Entirely Unrelated" Klein explores how the restricted domain of analysis of the international human rights movement in the 1960s (to this day) resulted that "an ideology was cleansed of its crimes." She points out that Milton Friedman, the main intellectual force behind the economic policy and personnel of the dictatorial regimes of Chile and Argentina, won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1976; a year later Amnesty International won the Nobel Peace Prize largely for its work exposing the human rights abuses in Chile and Argentina. She writes:

From afar, however, it seemed as if, with the two Nobel prizes, the most prestigious jury in the world had issued its verdict: the shock of the torture chamber was to be forceful condemned, but the economic shock treatments were to be applauded – and the two forms of shock were, as [Orlando] Letelier had written with dripping irony, "entirely unrelated."

Another strange contradiction of this period was that the Ford Foundation spent $30 million during the seventies and eighties devoted to human rights in Latin America, while the economists dominating these governments had their education and training largely funded by… the Ford Foundation. She writes:

After the left in those countries had been obliterated by regimes that Ford had helped shape, it was none other than Ford that funded a new generation of crusading lawyers dedicated to freeing the hundreds of thousands of political prisoners being held by those same regimes…Given its own highly compromised history, it is hardly surprising that when Ford dived into human rights, it defined the field as narrowly as possible. The foundation strongly favoured groups that framed their work as legalistic struggles for the "rule of law," "transparency" and "good governance." As one Ford Foundation officer put it, the organization’s attitude in Chile was, "How can we do this and not get involved in politics?"… The foundation’s decision to get involved in human rights but "not get involved in politics" created a context in which it was all but impossible to ask the question underlying the violence it was documenting: Why was it happening, in whose interests?

The story of the international human rights movement begins, as my colleague pointed out in a recent post with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. As Klein observers:

No sooner had the document been written than it became a partisan battering ram, used by both sides in the Cold War to accuse the other of being the next Hitler. In 1967, press reports revealed that the International Commission of Jurists, the pre-eminent human rights group focused on Soviet abuses, was not the impartial arbiter it claimed to be but was receiving secret funding from the CIA.

One of the results of this tendency to use human rights as a tool of partisan politics was the foundation of Amnesty International as a non-ideological, non-political champion of human rights around the world. Writes Klein:

It was in this loaded context that Amnesty International developed its doctrine of strict impartiality: its financing would come exclusively from members, and it would remain rigorously "independent of any government, political faction, ideology, economic interest or religious creed." To prove that it was not using human rights to advance a particular political agenda, each Amnesty chapter was instructed to simultaneously "adopt" three prisoners of conscience, one each "from communist, Western, and Third World countries." Amnesty’s position, emblematic of the human rights movement as a whole at that time, was that since human rights violations were a universal evil, wrong in and of themselves, it was not necessary to determine why abuses were taking place but to document them as meticulously and credibly as possible.

It is entirely understandable why we need groups like Amnesty. Human rights are still very much a political game, with accusations of human rights violations often serving as a precursor to warfare. The implementation of human rights still seems to be frequently subordinate to strategic and economic interests as well as "realism." Amnesty’s neutrality allows it to credibly criticize our own Western governments as well – unlike activists like Naomi Klein who are often (unfairly) accused of hating American first and ignoring crimes by other regimes, especially those of ideological sympathizers (like Cuba, Venezuela, etc.), Amnesty International comes across as impartial. Using the cold, legalistic language of international human rights discourse, referencing norms found in internationally ratified documents like the UN Declaration (that very few people will ever criticize), Amnesty comes across as even-handed. Of course, given the fact that Amnesty documents human rights abuses in all countries, some people in the West have attacked it for its "double standard" when it comes to the United States or Israel . But Amnesty International to this day proclaims principles of independence and impartiality on its website:

We have a number of safeguards in place to protect our autonomy. We are: * Independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion * Democratic and self-governing * Financially self-sufficient, thanks to the generous support of donations provided by individual members and supporters We do not support or oppose any government or political system and neither do we necessarily support or oppose the views of the victims/survivors or human rights defenders whose rights we seek to protect

While I think there is a role for a human rights watchdog that strives to be as non-political as possible, I think Naomi Klein is right to point out the deficiencies of this approach. When human rights violations are documented and condemned without any analysis of the raison-d’etre, we invariably end up with the impression that either (a)these are just random acts of violence, or (b)there are truly evil people in the world. This is problematic from both an intellectual and a practical point of view. From an intellectual point of view, focusing on human rights and their violation in a purely formal or legal sense abstracts from the political economy that governs the use of power and force in the first place. This greatly impoverishes our understanding of history and conflict. In some cases, this leads to the perception that human rights violations are carried out as part of a struggle for survival between mortal enemies – the national defense and security rationale for imprisoning, torturing, disappearing and executing enemies of the state. This justification of the use of force is usually only a veil, masking a deeper struggle for power and resources. The economic ideology underlying the massive repression carried out throughout Latin America and elsewhere has escaped condemnation precisely because it has convinced the world that the facts of human rights violations (such as the imprisonment or disappearance of union leaders and left-wing journalists) are distinct from the questions of why they occur and for whose benefit. Communism was never able to pull off such an intellectual coup – by now, most people have correctly made the connection between unpopular its unpopular economic policies (such as collective farming) and the repression required to implement them. For this we have the myopia of contemporary human rights discourse to blame. [Two interesting examples of this in recent times are the case of the Tiananmen square massacre, which Klein argues was widely perceived as an anti-democracy crackdown when it was as much an attempt to crush forces that opposed the economic policies of Deng Xiaoping and his successors, and the current situation in Burma, which has its roots more in the ridiculous economic incompetence of the kleptocracy than a desire to promote freedom of the press for its own sake.] From a more practical point of view, the reason for analyzing the causes of human rights abuses more deeply is that it greatly extends the sphere of culpability. It is not just the torturers, executioners and military men who are to blame, but the civilians who stand to benefit from the fear and control that is achieved. Being the beneficiary of repression is not enough in and of itself to merit criminal prosecution under international law, or even censure in the court of public opinion. But there are many cases where civilians, business leaders, and, yes, economists themselves are actively involved in the support and formulation of the very policies that provoke, or even require, systematic human rights abuses. I am not sure that international human rights lawyers are currently up to the task of prosecuting these people, when so many of the petty thugs with literal blood on their hands go unpunished. The international business interests that benefit every time a (seemingly random) group of thugs intimidate or kill a union leader have excellent legal resources, protection from their home (and often host) governments, and arms-length associations with the "muscle." Naming and shaming is probably the best we can do right now. Nevertheless, one longs for the day that a more thorough accounting of culpability recognizes the role of the "why" in human rights violations, especially as it relates to the implementation of unpopular policies by undemocratic regimes.