Whose Rights?
BY STEPHEN GOWANS | Simulposted at What’s Left
In a truly well-organized world, this mugshot would be no joke. Karl Rove and his masters and associates are indeed political criminals of the worst kind.
It is widely believed in the Western world that respect for civil and political liberties is more highly advanced in the United States and among countries of the Anglo-American orbit than it is anywhere else. The idea is so deeply ingrained that even egregious abuses of human rights by the US government (most recently in connection with the “war on terror”) are insufficient to discredit the fiction among US citizens that their government is the world’s principal human rights champion. While the US government has been criticized by such human rights organizations as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, the criticisms have been made in the context of concern that the US is squandering its human rights moral authority – criticism that serves to reinforce the dogma, not challenge it.
Juxtaposed against the view that the United States is the world’s most highly committed human rights defender is the view that its official enemies are human rights monstrosities. This was especially true of the Soviet Union and is true today of Cuba and north Korea –countries seen to define the opposite pole of the human rights continuum. Indeed, Western wars of aggression are often cast as human rights missions – campaigns to deliver civil and political liberties – free speech, freedom of religion and multi-party democracy – to the supposedly gagged, subjugated and politically enslaved people of certain Third World countries the US declares to be its enemies.
But while Western discourse on human rights emphasizes civil and political liberties, it ignores economic rights altogether – the right to a job, to participate in enterprise management, to free health care, to free education at all levels, and freedom from foreign economic domination – rights developed to a significant degree in the communist countries, and to an admirable degree in some economically nationalist Third World countries (Iraq, for example, before human development and social welfare were undermined by war, sanctions and finally abolished by the US occupation authority.)
Significantly, economic rights conflict with the profit-making activities of Western capital. The right to a job conflicts with the right of capital to hire and fire labor. The right to decent pay conflicts with the right of owners to minimize wages and salaries to maximize profits. The right to free health care conflicts with the rights of insurance companies to make a profit and of doctors to sell their services to the highest bidder. Because economic rights conflict with profit-making rights, they are not recognized as legitimate rights in the Western capitalist world. Here, profit is alpha and omega; all else is subordinate. Instead, civil and political liberties, which only have substantive meaning to those who have the money power to own the media, fund think tanks and foundations, pay lobbyists and finance the campaigns of sympathetic politicians in order to be heard and dominate the political arena, are elevated to special status. The Soviet Union, east Germany, Cuba and north Korea, which championed economic rights and pushed the rights of the many to fore, are given no credit, yet, for most of us, it is the rights they championed that have substantive meaning. Freedom of the press means little to those who don’t own one, and much less to those struggling to get enough to eat.
Rights have a class character. Freedom of expression to persuade others has little meaning if you haven’t the resources to own and control the mass media. Freedom to run for elected office has little meaning if you haven’t the money power to buy high profile advertising, hire pollsters, campaign strategists and PR firms to persuade voters. Because they often have no substantive meaning to anyone except the wealthy investors, bankers and hereditary capitalist families who have the money power to turn them to their advantage, political and civil liberties have been allowed to flourish in parts of the Western world that have not been challenged by significant labor and socialist movements. But when political openness has allowed these movements to threaten the status quo, civil freedoms and electoral democracy have been abridged or cancelled altogether (as in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany; in Chile in 1973; and in countless other countries, usually with the blessing, if not the assistance, of the US government.)
Despite civil and political liberties being skewed in favour of those who have economic power, commitment to civil and political liberties is never absolute. The notion of warranted restraint – that liberties can be abridged or even denied under certain conditions (freedom of expression does not give me the right to yell fire in a crowded theatre) – says that formal human rights are conditional. The conditions are often presented as the need to strike a balance between liberty and security, but what civil and political liberties have always been conditional on is the degree of threat they pose to whatever class dominates the society. Security, it’s true, is relevant – but whose security?
In the list that follows, you’ll see what appears to be an exposition of the hypocrisy of Western governments that criticize Third World governments for human rights breaches, while engaging in the same, or worse, practices at home or in territories they control. And while the list is indeed an exposition of the hypocrisy of Western governments, it is important to note two things. In all of these cases, the human rights breach in question protects the interests of some ruling class, whether in the West or in the Third World from a threat posed by an antagonistic class or nation. Or to put it another way, no right is absolute. Enforcing the rights of a dominant class or nation means negating the rights of an opposing class or nation. For example, the freedom of expression rights of Iraqis to persuade others to join the resistance movement to end the occupation of their country, or the political freedom of the Ba’ath party to run candidates in elections to restore the status quo ante, have been denied by the US government to secure the right of US capital to economically reorganize Iraq. That a ruling class of any class society, whether feudal, capitalist or socialist, will limit the civil and political liberties of its enemies, where those liberties become a threat to the dominant economic class, can be posited as an inexorable law.
Most Leftists in the Anglo-American world, however, are committed to a different view, not one that recognizes rights as class-defined and as relative rather than absolute, but one that is ultimately moralistic and tied to dogma congenial to the economic elite of Western societies. In this view, the problem is not the human rights rhetoric of Western governments, but the failure of those governments to live up to it; the goal of Leftist forces is not the promotion of the rights of oppressed class and peoples over (and hence the denial of) those of oppressing classes and nations, but the expansion of civil and political liberties for all. It is, for this reason, that the soft Left has often had difficulty identifying with socialist and national liberation forces which operate in a real world of right against right, where conflict among classes and nations is inevitable, and where the elevation of the rights of one class or nation inevitably means the negation of the rights of another class or nation.
Moralist positions on human rights are not only beside the point; they’re nonsensical, inasmuch as they assume rights are absolute and that antagonisms between the rights of oppressor classes and nations and the classes and nations they oppress can be mediated. In the real world, it is not possible to build a socialist society if the capitalist class is allowed the freedom to organize to restore its power. It is not possible for a government of national liberation to achieve its country’s independence if it grants political and civil liberties to all, including agents of the oppressor nation who seek to restore that nation’s formerly privileged position. It is inconceivable that a revolutionary socialist government would tolerate a multi-party democracy that allows pro-capitalist parties to operate openly, just as it is inconceivable that the post-war east or west German governments would have allowed the Nazi party to run candidates, or that the revolutionary US government would have allowed pro-British monarchist parties to stand for election, or that the US occupation authority in Iraq would have allowed the Ba’ath Party and Saddam Hussein to contest elections.
The battlefield of human rights isn’t one in which the object of Left forces should be the securing of absolute rights for all (for there is no such thing as liberty and democracy for all) but the securing of the rights of oppressed classes and nations at the expense of those of their enemies. The right of the sheep to be free from predation comes at the expense of the wolf’s right to eat the sheep. The question is never whether you’re for human rights or not. The question is always whose rights are you for?
Public Advocacy Rights
While much is often made of China blocking access to websites, little is ever said about south Korea’s blocking access to more than 30 pro-DPRK websites. (1) US ideologues sometimes argue that respect for civil and political liberties is inextricably linked to capitalism, and conversely, that socialist regimes are repressive by nature. We might expect China, then, to be repressive in this way, but not south Korea. The truth of the matter is that the ruling class of any class society is repressive toward its class enemies, and only opens space for the exercise of political freedoms where and when its class enemies are weak and pose little threat. Capitalism, socialism or the peculiar form of socialism practiced by the Chinese Communist Party have nothing to do with it. That class societies are antagonistically divided, does.
Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez is criticized for refusing to renew the license of RCTV, a private television station that colluded in the short-lived April 2002 coup, but the closing of news media by the US or governments under its control are barely acknowledged. For example, the TV station Al Zawra was banned in Iraq for broadcasts said to “promote attacks against the Americans and the Shiite militias.” (2) Iraqi government forces raided and shut down the station’s offices when a newscaster wore black mourning clothes following the execution of the country’s legitimate president, Saddam Hussein. (3) While Chavez is criticized by US ideologues as being repressive, anti-democratic and dictatorial, he is none of these things. On the contrary, Chavez can be criticized for not being repressive. The country’s dominant economic interests have plenty of room to organize their return to political power. Chavez’s socialism for the 21st century – nothing more than Western social democracy circa 1965 built on oil wealth – will almost certainly fail to come off for allowing the opposition (to use a hockey term) to stick around in the game too long. That’s not to say that Chavez has a lot of options and that he can make history just as he pleases. Circumstances limit his room for manoeuvre, but even so, that doesn’t gainsay the regularity of reformist and social democratic movements being swept away by resurgent Rightist forces that have been given time to recuperate their strength. Fascism, it has been said, is punishment meted out to those who fail to go far enough because they naively believe capitalism can, in time, be peacefully transformed into socialism from within while the Right stands by passively and allows it to happen.
Cuba is often taken to task for jailing dissident journalists. However, the Cuban case rarely gets a hearing. The journalists were arrested for what they wrote, yes* (though that is often denied), but more importantly for taking money from the US government to further the project of overthrowing socialism and restoring US hegemony over Cuba. The job of the US is to provide funding and support to the journalists to allow them to amplify their anti-socialist, pro-capitalist views. The job of the dissident journalists is to persuade others. The job of the Cuban government is to protect Cuba’s socialism and political independence. While the jailing of the Cuban journalists is fairly widely known, what is barely known is that the US jails journalists in Iraq and holds them without charge. The US arrested at least three Reuters journalists in Iraq and held them without charge for eight months. (4) The US feared the journalists were materially aiding the resistance, and therefore were acting to thwart US goals related to re-organizing Iraq economically to the benefit of US corporations. The Cuban government feared Cuban journalists, materially aided by a hostile foreign power, were acting to undermine the socialist economic organization of Cuba and its political independence. In both cases, the battlefield pitted right against right.
On June 10, 2003, the US occupation authority in Iraq proclaimed Order #14, prohibiting “media activity” which “incites violence against Coalition Forces” or the occupation authority or “advocates the return to power of the Iraqi Ba’ath party, or makes statements that purport to be on behalf of the Iraqi Ba’ath party.” In late 2005, an Iraqi court disqualified 90 candidates because they had ties to the Ba’ath Party. (5) The US pushed sectarian and ethnic-based parties to the fore, part of a project of re-organizing Iraq along sectarian and ethnic lines (the usual conquering nation ploy of divide and rule.) US forces routinely close newspapers that express views that get in the way of pacifying opposition. The offices of al-Arabiya were shut down as was the al-Hawza newspaper, published by the Shi’a cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. (6) The US government clearly regards the Ba’ath party as a threat to its designs on Iraq. Likewise, the Chinese government regards the Falun Gong movement as a threat to its particular view of socialism. In both cases, the repression is carried out to limit opposition to the dominant authority in the country.
A British Muslim who led a crowd in chants of “Bomb, bomb Denmark, bomb, bomb USA’ in protest over the publication by a Danish newspaper of cartoons mocking the prophet Muhammad was found guilty of incitement to murder. (7) Two Canadian newspaper columnists who called upon the United States to launch a nuclear strike on Iran were neither charged by Canadian authorities nor found guilty of any crime. Any demand that they be charged with incitement to murder would be dismissed as frivolous, and an attack on freedom of speech.
Twenty countries prohibit Holocaust denial, including Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland and Israel. (8) Holocaust denial laws often appear together with laws prohibiting Nazi or neo-Nazi parties. The intent is to designate certain political views as being beyond the pale and inimical to the smooth functioning of a country’s social order. These prohibitions are regarded, in large measure and even among Leftist forces that define the aim of socialism as enlarging democracy and civil and political liberties for all, as being legitimate and as warranted restraints on rights of free speech and political association. Conversely, laws enacted in revolutionary societies which ban political parties that call for the restoration of class oppression or oppression by former colonial or foreign powers, or prohibit the advocacy of such restoration, are regarded in the West, including by large parts of the Left, as illegitimate, despotic and authoritarian. Clearly, they are despotic and authoritarian, in the same manner Holocaust denial laws are despotic and authoritarian, but they are not illegitimate from the point of view of the formerly oppressed class or nation.
In this respect, Zimbabwe’s ZANU-PF government comes to mind. ZANU-PF was a leading force in the armed struggle of the Black majority to wrest political control from the White minority Rhodesian settler regime. While the Black majority achieved a kind of formal political independence, de facto independence has always been limited by the reality that the White minority remains economically dominant. The land seizures were a way of carrying forward the revolution to its logical conclusion in the absence of Harare having the wherewithal to buy out the White settlers and absentee British landowners. While the confiscation of land was, on the one hand, a denial of the previous owners’ rights to make a profit, it was, on the other, a reclamation of a right to land that had been stolen by colonial plunder — a war of right against right (with the soft Left in the West, sadly, though predictably, aligning itself in the war with the landowners.) Zimbabwe is not, however, a one-party state, and nor is it a country in which those with money power are prohibited from buying mass media or funding opposition political parties to oppose the government. For this, Zimbabwe too, along with Venezuela, can be criticized for failing to be repressive enough, and yet it is revolutionary and national liberation movements that fail to repress their enemies with sufficient zeal and that allow ample opportunity for their enemies to marshal a counter-strike, that are often the most vigorously reviled by the soft Left (and perhaps because part of the counterstrike is PR campaigns mounted in the West to discredit the regime in question – campaigns the soft Left has always shown a particular vulnerability to.) Whatever repressive measures ZANU-PF takes toward its opposition must be understood in the context of the history of the struggle for national liberation and of the alliance of the main opposition party, the MDC, with Britain and the White settlers.
Police States
The Soviet Union, east Germany, Cuba and north Korea are often thought of in the West as police states. To deny the reality that the USSR and east Germany were, and that Cuba and north Korea are, police states would be disingenuous. But at the same time, to deny the reality that the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and other Western countries are also police states would be equally disingenuous. It is only the power of anti-communist propaganda that allows the socialist east German Stasi to be invested with a unique menace while any recognition that an equally repressive police state apparatus existed in capitalist west Germany is entirely suppressed.
“Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the (US National Security Agency) monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people inside the United States without warrants.” (9) The New York Times held back this story for a year, after Washington asked that it not disclose the violation of its own laws to spy on its citizens.
Canada’s RCMP and intelligence services amassed files on 800,000 Canadians (Canada’s population is only 30 million) and secretly monitored thousands of organizations, including church and women’s groups. For over three decades, the Mounties spied on Tommy Douglas, esteemed by Canadians for his role in creating public health insurance, even when Douglas was leader of the social democratic New Democratic Party and a Member of Parliament. (10)
In Mexico, more than 700 people were assassinated by the state and many tortured, from the late 60s through the early 80s, as part of a secret campaign to eliminate militant leftists. Successive governments used “massacres, forced disappearances, systematic torture and genocide, in an attempt to destroy the part of society it considered its ideological enemy.” (11)
These examples, drawn from recent newspaper reports, only scratch the surface. You could write tomes and tomes on US police state activities (COINTELPRO being one of the more infamous programs to neutralize class enemies), and many have been written. But it’s not the reality that the US government conspicuously parades around the world as human rights champion, when it’s just as repressive, when circumstance demand, as any other state, that is important. Nor should the failure of Western governments to live up to their human rights rhetoric hold our attention. Human rights rhetoric is based on the idea that rights are absolute, not relative, and that different groups of people don’t have antagonist interests, based on their economic positions and role as either exploiter or exploited. And we certainly shouldn’t expect that states can be pressured to live up to their rhetoric, anymore than we should expect that lions can be pressured to give up meat for grazing on grass. Have they ever? All states are police states, and always will be, so long as antagonist classes exist. The antagonism is played out on many battlefields, human rights among them. In battles over human rights, we shouldn’t ask whether rights, as an absolute, are being denied, for rights are never absolute. We should ask whose rights are in conflict with who else’s, which rights are our own, and whether sheep can be faulted for denying wolves their flesh.
Stephen Gowans is a Senior Contributing Editor at Cyrano, who also maintains a quality personal blog at What’s Left.
1. Reuters, January 27, 2007.
2. New York Times, January 21, 2007.
3. New York Times, January 2, 2007.
4. New York Times, January 23, 2006.
5. New York Times, December 25, 2005.
6. Antonia Juhasz, “The Bush Agenda: Invading the World One Economy at a Time,” Regan Books, 2006, p. 205.
7. Los Angeles Times, January 6, 2007.
8. William Blum, Anti-Empire Report, November 19, 2006; New York Times, December 21, 2006.
9. New York Times, December 16, 2005.
10. Globe and Mail, December 18, 2006.
11. New York Times, November 23, 2007.
* Had they written in favour of Cuban socialism, they would never have been arrested, even if they were taking money from Washington. To say what they wrote had nothing to do with their jailing, then, is absurd, and has more to do with pandering to liberal prejudices than anything else.
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