3

Questions to Human Rights Defenders

The ideas criticized in this book are often implicit, but have recently been more explicitly expressed by groups defining themselves as liberals, democrats, and progressives. A perfect illustration of these ideas is to be found in a 2005 book, entitled A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq, a collective work by a number of writers who argue in favor of the war in Iraq on the basis of human rights.1 The authors consider that the United States had not only the right but the duty to use its superior military force to intervene and liberate the Iraqi people from the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. Neither the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq nor the fact that such an intervention flouts international law troubles them in the least, convinced as they are that human rights are a value far more fundamental than respect for international law. Many of them situate themselves in the center or on the left of the political spectrum, and part of their argument consists in denouncing the rest of the left for hesitating to come out firmly on the side of humanitarian war. They associate such hesitations with the left’s insufficient hostility toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War, as well as with the failure of Western countries to have waged a preventive war against Hitler.

The same arguments are to be found in a statement titled “The Euston Manifesto,” issued in the spring of 2006 by a group of British Laborites and signed by a number of Americans, including Marc Cooper of The Nation and Michael Walzer of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), co-editor of Dissent. Their “statement of principles” provides several potential arguments for war: human rights for all, opposing anti-Americanism, a new internationalism. Characteristically, the “errors of the past” are cited to discredit rejection of wars waged by democratic countries, and the lies that led up to the invasion of Iraq are dismissed as no longer relevant.

The founding supporters of this statement took different views on the military intervention in Iraq, both for and against We recognize that it was possible reasonably to disagree about the justification for the intervention, the manner in which it was carried through, the planning (or lack of it) for the aftermath, and the prospects for the successful implementation of democratic change. We are, however, united in our view about the reactionary, semi-fascist and murderous character of the Ba’athist regime in Iraq, and we recognize its overthrow as a liberation of the Iraqi people. We are also united in the view that since the day on which this occurred, the proper concern of genuine liberals and members of the Left should have been the battle to put in place in Iraq a democratic political order and to rebuild the country’s infrastructure, to create after decades of the most brutal oppression a life for Iraqis which those living in democratic countries take for granted—rather than picking through the rubble of the arguments over intervention.2

In short, errors of the distant past (support for the alleged “motherland of socialism”) must be the source of endless shame and disgrace, whereas quite recent errors—or rather, lies—are not worth mentioning. This forgetfulness conveniently obscures the origins of the war in a policy designed to overthrow the Iraqi regime, not for the welfare of the Iraqi people, but for what a particular group of neoconservative policymakers, calling themselves the Project for a New American Century, described as “our vital interests.”

The Origins of the Invasion of Iraq: Excerpt from a Letter Sent to President Clinton

The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy. We urge you to articulate this aim, and to turn your Administration’s attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam’s regime from power. This will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts. Although we are fully aware of the dangers and difficulties in implementing this policy, we believe the dangers of failing to do so are far greater We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf. In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council.3

In France, where few people took the WMD threat seriously, the main argument in favor of the war in Iraq—voiced notably by Bernard Kouchner—was humanitarian intervention. And by now, what conceivable argument other than the defense of human rights and democracy could possibly justify that war, as well as the ongoing occupation and bloodshed? Once it is recognized that the invasion was illegal and the pretexts false, why not simply demand that the Americans get out? And yet no Western government and practically no political movement has drawn that conclusion. Why? Because, we are told, it is now necessary to “stabilize” Iraq, to “construct democracy” there, etc. As a result, even if it is true that many organizations and intellectuals who defend human rights were initially opposed to the war, they have found themselves more or less obliged to support the ongoing war of occupation until the situation is “stabilized.”

Such reasoning is the culmination of an ideological process that began thirty years ago. At the end of the war in Vietnam, and following Nixon’s disgrace, the prestige of the United States had sunk to a new low. President Carter, whose political innocence was in sharp contrast to the open cynicism of the Kissinger-Nixon tandem, was able to present human rights as “the soul of American foreign policy.”⁴ This was a somewhat innovative approach, since up till then the principal objective proclaimed by the United States was to build strong states with staunchly anticommunist governments in the Third World, with scant regard for human rights. It was that “nation-building” policy that had led the United States to support or install various governments in South Vietnam, with disastrous results. Moralizing rhetoric combined with perfectly cynical practice (notably in Afghanistan) was amazingly successful. In Europe, especially in France, where revolutionary illusions were fading, the intelligentsia took charge of a major reversal, from the systematic criticism of power, associated with Sartre and Foucault, to its systematic defense—especially the power of the United States—symbolized by the emergence of the “new philosophers” as media stars. Defense of human rights became the theme and principal argument of the new political offensive against both the socialist bloc and Third World countries emerging from colonialism.

Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. Its effect was to draw the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day the Soviets officially crossed the border I wrote to President Carter roughly the following: “We now have the opportunity to give the USSR its own Vietnam War”5

The basic idea of this school of thought is simple enough: since democracy and human rights are much more respected in the West than elsewhere, it is our right and even our duty to do whatever we can to see to it that these rights are extended to the rest of humanity. Moreover, that obligation takes priority, since human rights come first; they are even the precondition for development.

The main thing wrong with the “tough” version, the one calling for military intervention, stems from the ambiguity of the “we” in statements such as “We should intervene in order to … ” The “we” does not usually refer to a particular group to which the person making such recommendations belongs, as would have been the case, for example, with the volunteers who joined the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, but to armed forces powerful enough to intervene effectively, in particular those of the United States. During the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo, a certain number of Western intellectuals fancied themselves following in the Spanish footsteps of Malraux, Orwell, and Hemingway. But, unlike their predecessors, they largely remained safely at home or ensconced in the same hotel, rather than entering the fray, while the International Brigades and the Spanish Republican Army were replaced by the U.S. Air Force. Now, nothing in United States policy indicates the slightest sincere concern for human rights and democracy. Assigning it the prime task of defending these values is strange indeed. Moreover, to call on an army to wage a war for human rights implies a naive vision of what armies are and do, as well as a magical belief in the myth of short, clean, “surgical” wars. The example of Iraq shows that it is possible to know when a war starts but not when it will end, and it is totally Utopian to expect an army that is under constant attack from guerrilla forces not to have recourse to torture in order to obtain information. The French used it massively in Algeria. The Americans used it in Vietnam and again in Iraq. Yet both the French and American torturers were citizens of “democratic countries, respectful of human rights”—yes, but when they were at home, and in periods of relative social peace.

—The conversation was magnificent, that man at death’s door hid nothing from us of his historic role. Richard and I expressed our immense admiration.6

It is indeed a fairly remarkable indirect effect of the human rights ideology that torture in Iraq is almost universally denounced, but not the occupation. Yet torture is the result of occupation. This came to be understood in the case of the French war in Algiers, when revelations of torture by the French military stimulated calls to end the conflict. An army that finds itself the target for resistance fighters who are like fish in the sea is inexorably led to try to gain information by force. If one calls for military intervention, one is calling for war and occupation, and in that case, in effect calling for torture.

Well-meaning people can claim that torture doesn’t work, but unfortunately, that is far from true. Torture unquestionably enabled the French to dismantle the Front for National Liberation in Algiers, even if it did not make it possible to maintain French control of Algeria. Nor should we forget that many insurrections end up being crushed—for example, all those in Latin America after the Cuban revolution—and that torture often played a major role in their defeat.

In Washington, alarmists liken Iraq to Vietnam, while some in the administration may more optimistically be thinking of El Salvador.⁷ But no serious person can see bright prospects for human rights.

The Monoply of Violence

In the war against the militias, every door American troops crash through, every civilian bystander shot—there will be many—will make matters worse, for a while. Nevertheless, the first task of the occupation remains the first task of government to establish a monopoly on violence.

—George Will⁸

Another thing basically wrong with the tough version of human rights ideology is the failure to recognize that just because a society is democratic in its internal political life does not in any way imply that it will have a generous attitude toward the rest of the world. To take an extreme contemporary example, Israel is without any doubt the most democratic country in its region in regard to its own population, or at any rate the Jewish part of that population. But the least one can say is that the state of Israel cannot be relied on to protect the rights of the Palestinians in the occupied territories, or those of the Lebanese. And the same could be said for the populations of the colonial empires. Their European masters were already “democracies respectful of human rights,” who used the “defense of human rights” to legitimize their colonial enterprise. British liberal imperialists discovered in the late nineteenth century that presenting foreign interventions as moral crusades was particularly effective in whipping up popular support in a parliamentary democracy with a press eager to denounce foreign villainy. King Leopold II of Belgium justified his conquest of the Congo by the fight against Arab slave dealers. His own treatment of the native Congolese scarcely stands as a monument to human rights.

The fact that the United States is a democratic country with a free press doesn’t change much, or in any case less than is claimed, for the victims of U.S. sanctions and bombings. Indeed, the “free” press is remarkably uniform when it comes to foreign policy, and being free makes it a more efficient propaganda tool. Citizens of countries where the press is censored by the government tend to catch on and end up not believing anything it says. The U.S. press finally got around to criticizing the war in Vietnam, but only after many years and countless dead and, above all, only after the 1968 Vietnamese Tet offensive convinced American elites that the war was costing too much, both in military losses and domestic disorder. But no similar protest could be heard in regard to the genocidal embargo imposed on the Iraqi people in the 1990s.9 And as for the 2003 war, all the official lies were diligently echoed by the mainstream media. Once again, it was only when a strong Iraqi resistance made itself felt that U.S. media showed signs of having second thoughts.

In November 2004, the prestigious British medical review The Lancet published the results of a study of excess mortality caused by the invasion of Iraq. Dr Les Roberts, who led the study, concluded: “Making conservative assumptions we think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more, have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most of the violent deaths.”10 One of the conservative postulates of the study was not to take into consideration data concerning Fallujah. The study was ignored or discredited in the United States and to a lesser extent in Britain. Media did not hesitate to echo a comment made by a Human Rights Watch military expert, Marc E. Garlasco, to the effect that the figures seemed exaggerated, even though Garlasco admitted that he had not read the Lancet study when he made that comment

Dr Roberts has used the same methods to study the conflict in Eastern Congo, arriving at an estimate of 1,700,000 deaths, a figure that failed to arouse skepticism among Western media or politicians. On the contrary, both Tony Blair and Colin Powell cited its conclusions. As Dr Roberts remarked, “It is odd that the logic of epidemiology embraced by the press every day regarding new drugs or health risks somehow changes when the mechanism of death is their armed forces.”¹¹

The basic objection to the idea of using the U.S. Army for humanitarian purposes can be summed up in a few words: the purpose of an army, in the best of cases, is to defend its own country, or else to attack others. Neither of these aims, even if the first can be considered legitimate, is altruistic. Everything about an army, its equipment, its training, and above all its mindset (esprit de corps and patriotism), are designed to serve those aims. So why hope that an army can be used for supposedly altruistic purposes?

Still, the partisans of humanitarian intervention stress that the purpose of “modern” armies is no longer simply to defend their own country but to help others and save oppressed populations. This implies waging a war without too many casualties on the side of the “liberator.” Otherwise, the soldiers’ families will ask what their children are dying for. This is what happened during the summer of 2005, when the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, Cindy Sheehan, camped outside the Crawford, Texas, ranch where Bush was spending his vacation. She wanted to ask him face-to-face the question “What is the noble cause my son died for?”12 For the partisans of the war who attacked her action, she had a simple response: “The army is recruiting and lacks personnel. Why don’t you join up?” Now that the army recruits women as well as men, and recalls reservists over the age of forty, it is not so easy to evade such a question. It can be addressed to all the partisans of humanitarian wars once these wars are not short and sweet.

What shows that the problem raised above is at least implicitly recognized by the war apologists is that they employ a double discourse. For the intellectuals and the elite, it is all about the right to intervene, humanitarian interventions, etc. For the rest of the population, it is all about the “war against terror,” weapons of mass destruction—that is, about threats and dangers from which we must defend ourselves. The majority of the population have enough good sense to understand that if the idea is to accomplish altruistic deeds there are a whole lot of things to do besides waging war. On the other hand, they may be ready to make sacrifices for self-defense. Unfortunately, they often lack the means of obtaining information other than from television. Intellectuals, on the other hand, have the means to be better informed and are often aware that the threats brandished by governments are exaggerated. Thus they are the ones who invent and interiorize the ideology of humanitarian war as a legitimization mechanism. Marx spoke of religion as the opium of the people; the French liberal philosopher Raymond Aron ironically called Marxism “the opium of the intellectuals.” Whether or not that was the case in his day, one can say that today that opium has become the ideology of humanitarian intervention.

Shortly after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, the African-American singer Kanye West stated during a live broadcast devoted to raising funds for the victims:”! hate the way they portray us in the media. You see a black family, it says, They’re looting. ‘You see a white family, it says, ‘They’re looking for food. ‘And, you know, it’s been five days [waiting for federal help] because most of the people are black … George Bush doesn’t care about black people!”

What is even more revealing is the reaction of the television network, NBC, to these remarks: ‘Tonight’s telecast was a live television event wrought with emotion. Kanye West departed from the scripted comments that were prepared for him, and his opinions in no way represent the views of the networks.” West’s comments were edited out of the West Coast broadcast Now, what was it we criticized Soviet media for?13

The Question of Transition and Development

Just imagine a mafia godfather who, as he grows old, decides to defend law and order and starts attacking his lesser colleagues in crime, preaching brotherly love and the sanctity of human life-all this while holding on to his ill-gotten gains and the income they provide. Who would fail to denounce such flagrant hypocrisy? And yet, strangely enough, scarcely anyone seems to see the parallel with the West’s self-anointed role as defender of human rights, although the similarities are considerable.

Let’s start by asking ourselves what the historical process was by which we managed to reach the present high level of civilization in which we take such pride. Certainly it was not only democracy, the free market, or respect for human rights that got us here. We cannot even claim to owe our success solely to Christian charity or to the philosophers of the Enlightenment. Wars, colonialism, child labor, autocracy, and pillage are also very much part of the roots of our present civilization. It cannot reasonably be denied that the actions of Bismarck, Queen Victoria, both Napoleons, Leopold II, and Theodore Roosevelt, not to mention the conquistadores and the slave traders, also contributed to our development. What is certain is that their behavior was far from being altogether compatible with human rights.

Of course, it will be said that human rights are a universal value and that nothing—no special economic or cultural circumstances—can justify violating them. But here’s the rub. To start with, our mafioso would not be wrong, in the abstract, to defend respect for the law and brotherly love. But he would be hypocritical. The same reproach can be addressed to the Western discourse on human rights and for exactly the same reasons. Once it is acknowledged that human rights only became respectable in our countries (at least in regard to our domestic affairs) after a long historical process, and in particular after a long cultural, social, and economic development, we must ask ourselves how countries that find themselves at another level of socioeconomic development can attain the one we enjoy; and above all how they can do so while adhering to the human rights standards that our own societies did not respect in the least when we were at the stage of development where they are now.

The first and most important of these factors is obviously colonialism. What was the impact of colonialism either on the development of the West or on the underdevelopment of non-European societies? This is a matter of considerable dispute, and there seems to be no recognized way to measure this impact with any precision. But that is just the problem: nobody really knows what enables a society to develop economically. In particular, what is the role of cultural factors? For example, how can one measure the impact on our development of the racist sense of superiority that flourished in the colonial era, and which gave Europeans their overriding self-confidence? Is it more or less important than the Protestant spirit emphasized by Max Weber? These questions are not so easy to answer, and raising them only gives a hint of the multitude of difficulties involved.

The journalist William Thomas Stead recounts that his close friend Cecil Rhodes told him in 1895, in regard to his imperialist ideas: ”I was in the East End of London (a working-class quarter) yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for ‘bread! bread!’ and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism…. My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.”14

To come back to the present, the right to leave one’s country to flee persecution (guaranteed by Article 14 of the U.N. Declaration) is applied in an extraordinarily selective manner by the United States. For example, out of more than 24,000 Haitians intercepted by Coast Guard forces on their way to U.S. shores between 1981 and 1990, only eleven were granted the right of asylum, compared to 75,000 Cubans in the same situation. For Cubans, asylum is automatic.¹⁵ It takes a heavy dose of preconceived ideas to consider that all the former were “economic” and all the latter “political” refugees. Or consider Article 13 of the Declaration, which ensures the right to leave one’s own country. During the final stages of the Cold War, the United States was unflinching in its demand that Soviet Jews be allowed to leave their country, mainly to emigrate to Israel (an emigration that ran into Soviet objections concerning the cost to the state of having educated the candidates for emigration). But the same Article 13 also guarantees the right of return to your country of origin. The day after ratification of the Declaration, the United Nations adopted Resolution 194, which gave Palestinians driven from their territories the right to return home (or else to receive compensation). Everyone knows perfectly well that this return will never take place without a profound shake-up in the world relationship of forces. On the other hand, the Israeli settlers who were obliged to leave the Gaza strip colonies they had illegally occupied received an average of a quarter of a million dollars per family in compensation.¹⁶

Harvard Law Professor Offers a Solution to Terrorism

Israel should announce an immediate unilateral cessation in retaliation against terrorist attacks. This moratorium would be in effect for a short period, say four or five days, to give the Palestinian leadership an opportunity to respond to the new policy. It would also make it clear to the world that Israel is taking an important step in ending what has become a cycle of violence. Following the end of the moratorium, Israel would institute the following new policy if Palestinian terrorism were to resume. It will announce precisely what it will do in response to the next act of terrorism. For example, it could announce the first act of terrorism following the moratorium will result in the destruction of a small village which has been used as a base for terrorist operations. The residents would be given 24 hours to leave, and then troops will come in and bulldoze all of the buildings. The response will be automatic. The order will have been given in advance of the terrorist attacks and there will be no discretion. The point is to make the automatic destruction of the village the fault of the Palestinian terrorists who had advance warnings of the specific consequences of their action. The soldiers would simply be acting as the means for carrying out a previously announced policy of retaliation against a designated target

—Alan M. Dershowitz17

In the last analysis, the cruelest truth in regard to the grand Western declaration about the “free circulation of persons” is illustrated by an anecdote. On a visit to the United States in the 1970s, the Chinese leader Deng Xiao Ping, in response to President Carter’s demand that China allow its people to leave, is said to have replied: “Certainly—and how many million Chinese do you want?”

Another factor of contrast between the developed and developing countries is the construction of powerful and stable states. Even the United States, today the champion of freeing the economy from state interference, built its economic strength thanks to a huge amount of government support: protection of budding industries, favors to railroads and other infrastructure, control of the currency, and public education.18 And the so-called defense budget of the United States, which amounts today to roughly half of the entire world’s military expenditures, that is, more than the rest of the world put together, is at least in part a form of military Keynesianism that allows massive subsidies of high-technology industries.¹⁹

Micheal Ignatieff on Nation-Building

Let’s remember just what any free nation can do, provided its resources and international law permit. It can, for instance, develop weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons. They can opt out of non-proliferation agreements, especially if an imperial occupation authority forced them to sign. And a free country can develop any other sort of weapon you can think of; for example, advanced antitank and antiaircraft missiles. It can buy and sell such weapons, to our enemies, just as we buy and sell them to the enemies of other countries. It can raise large armed forces. It can develop electronic warfare capabilities. It can form alliances. Maybe a free democratic Iraq would ally itself with Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, a newly radicalized Turkey, perhaps China as well. The rights of these free nations would certainly include launching spy satellites which orbited over the U.S., and acquiring long-range nuclear missiles. So a free country, a really free country, can not only cease to service our lust for raw materials. It can also get together with other countries, with the express objective of challenging our supremacy.

In other words, what is so unutterably silly about [Michael] Ignatieff’s proposal is the idea that genuine self-determination or “freedom” could ever be the objective of an imperial power Building a free nation, if possible, is dangerous: why not take on the much easier task of building an enslaved client state? Ignatieff claims that imperialism’s opposition to “modern nationalism” is a mistake. It is not. Imperial powers fight modern nationalism because it threatens them, and because it can and quite often is defeated. Vietnam was an exceptional case because it had strong Russian and important Chinese support. When that kind of support is lacking, the interest of all imperialisms—and even Ignatieff admits that imperial powers pursue their own interests—is to prevent rather than to foster nation-building. This is why, for better or more often for worse, imperialism has always attacked the real nation-builders, men like Abdel-Krim in Morocco, Joshua Nkomo, Castro, Lumumba, Gandhi, Bose, Ben Bella and other Algerian revolutionaries, Janio Quadros of Brazil, Nasser, Sukarno in Indonesia, Arbenz of Guatemala, Mossadegh and Khomeini of Iran, Mao and Zhou Enlai. All imperialisms must oppose the building of free nations as opposed to tame, subject “democracies” like our staunch allies, the Marshall Islands. So real nation-building, even where it is possible, is nothing America would ever want to sponsor.

—Michael Neumann20

There was nothing idyllic about the way the strong Western nation-states were built: foreign wars, extermination of indigenous populations, merciless persecution of centrifugal forces within—persecutions that often lasted for several centuries. If the Russians had done with the Chechens what the white Americans did with the Amerindians, there would be no conflict in Chechnya today (of course, I am not recommending such a way of dealing with the problem, but simply suggesting that Westerners show a bit more modesty when they speak of that conflict). If Yugoslavia or China had enjoyed a long period of modern economic development allowing them to reach a dominant position on the world scale, the situation of Kosovo or Tibet might well be similar to that of Brittany or Wales, or, at the worst, Corsica or the Basque country.

The flow of money is another factor. Our foreign aid budgets amount to a tiny fraction of our GNP. And even less if we subtract the share that goes to military cooperation or promotion of our own business interests. For many Third World countries, such aid is a drop in the bucket compared to the usurious interest payments, euphemistically called “debt service,” that keep them permanently strapped. Moreover, in many countries, for example Argentina or Indonesia, the debt was largely incurred by former dictatorial regimes that came to power with the support of the creditor powers, notably the United States, the debt being part of the support deal. It’s rather as if Mr. X demanded interest payments from Mr. Y for a debt contracted by Mr. Z, who is in fact an accomplice of Mr. X.

It is true that this factor has more to do with the poor countries’ possibility of respecting their obligations concerning economic and social rights rather than strictly political rights. But the two are related, as we shall discuss further on. How indeed is it possible to preserve the minimum stability required to establish political rights when a state is ruined, which leads to uprisings—often encouraged from outside? The Yugoslav tragedy illustrates this type of situation, even if, in that case, the economic aspect of the problem was almost completely ignored in favor of analyses stigmatizing “nationalism,” principally that of the Serbs, who happened to be the only national group without a sponsoring godfather among the Western powers—unlike the Croats, backed by Germany, or the Bosnian Muslims, whose cause was taken up by the United States.21

If you really stop to think about all these aspects of the modern economic development of various countries, you cannot help but be struck by the quantity of suffering involved, and that the first countries to undertake that adventure have had the means to prevent those who came later from really following the same course. The first major industrialization, that of Britain, was linked to the conquest of a vast empire providing raw materials, markets, and space for its own population expansion. All the major European powers proceeded to carve out colonies as they industrialized, causing untold suffering to the conquered peoples.22 In the second great wave of industrialization, the United States, Germany, and Japan all practiced protectionism to build the strength of their industries. The United States had the further advantage of enormous territorial expansion, at the expense of the indigenous population, followed by a Monroe Doctrine “closed door” policy in Latin America and an “open door” policy elsewhere in the world, ensuring the United States the advantages of imperialism beyond its actual colonies (the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii). As for Germany and Japan, the drive to catch up with the Atlantic powers by gaining their own colonial empires was a major factor leading to the two world wars. The next great power to industrialize was the Soviet Union. There, it was the internal populations who bore the brunt, in the absence of tropical colonies to exploit. It was all the easier for Western intellectuals to stigmatize Soviet development in that they could compare the situation there with contemporary Britain and France, rather than with their colonies or with the conditions marking their own early industrialization.

When we see that the principal recommendation given by international organisms to Third World countries is to follow the Western example, we can only wonder what on earth they have in mind. Do they want India and Pakistan to solve the Kashmir problem the way France and Germany solved the problem of Alsace-Lorraine? The current development of China, far from being idyllic, is clearly a repetition on a much larger scale of the England of Dickens, with shameless exploitation of workers, child labor, and disruption of the peasantry. The situation is often denounced in the West, but what are they supposed to do? Colonize us?

In the last analysis, the defenders of the dominant discourse on human rights are faced with a dilemma that has no easy solution. On the one hand, they can claim that there is a path to development different from that of the West, one which would respect democracy and human rights. But even leaving aside the problem already mentioned of the exhaustion of resources, which makes it extremely problematic that our lifestyle can be extended to the whole of humanity, it would still be necessary to say a few words to explain just what that path is, and not simply make the assertion.

Israel is provided with weapons, helicopter gunships, bullets coated with depleted uranium, to wage war against people whose only way to retaliate is by committing suicide bombing,…

—Former Malaysian prime minister Mohamed Mahathir23

I should point out that the critique briefly touched on here goes much more to the heart of the matter than the relatively frequent reproach leveled against the United States for supporting rather systematically dictatorship while claiming to defend democracy. Here it is the way we got to the stage where we are now in regard to human rights which ought to be enough to prevent us from giving lessons to the rest of the world.

The Question of Priorities between Types of Rights

In addition to individual and political rights, the 1948 Universal Declaration includes economic and social rights, such as the right to health care, to education, and to social security.²⁴ Whatever one may think of these rights, they are as much a part of the Declaration and every bit as binding on the signatories as the other rights. Nevertheless, when Jeane Kirkpatrick was Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, she declared that these rights were “a letter to Santa Claus” without getting much of a rise out of anybody.²⁵ But how would our press and our intellectuals react if a Third World leader described individual and political rights as a “letter to Santa Claus”?

It shall be unlawful for a foreign national directly or through any other person to make any contribution of money or other thing of value, or to promise expressly or impliedly to make any such contribution, in connection with an election to any political office or in connection with any primary election,

Countries where the United States has intervened to finance particular parties or candidates:26

Or else one can admit that the introduction of “real existing” democracy into Cuba would inevitably lead to a capitalist transformation of the economy, complete with IMF requirements, which would end up abolishing free health care for everybody. And thus, a choice must necessarily be made, at least in poor countries, between free health care and a multiparty system. When one observes the evolution of the ex-socialist countries, one can see that the risk is by no means imaginary. But then, in the name of what principle should that choice be made? Are a certain number of political prisoners and a certain degree of censorship and repression worse than thousands of children dying for lack of care? And, perhaps more to the point, should this choice be made by people who for the most part enjoy the benefits of both health care and democratic freedoms (European intellectuals or the leaders of Reporters Without Borders)? What choice would be made by the two or three billion people living on one or two dollars per day? I don’t claim to have a satisfactory answer to these questions, but they are seldom asked, and it is easy to understand why.

It goes without saying that our world is by no means an exact replica of that imaginary planet, despite strong resemblances. Indeed, on our planet one can hope that political rights will eventually make it possible to diminish economic inequalities (as has been accomplished to a certain extent with the development of trade unions and left parties in Europe). But that hope is quite contrary to putting forward political rights to the exclusion of all other considerations.

Before the emergence of the human rights ideology, such remarks were taken for granted by everyone, at least on the left, whatever the tendency, and even by a good part of the right. This is no longer such a sure thing today. Everyone used to agree that survival was the first priority, and that it required a certain social organization, sometimes involving coercion, and that in any case political rights could not really exist unless certain minimal economic conditions were fulfilled. In the words of Berthold Brecht, “First comes eating, then comes morality.”27 Yet even the Stalinist current of the traditional left did not reject individual and political rights on principle as a worthy goal, even though in practice they were postponed indefinitely. The only ideologies that were in real conflict with human rights, even in principle, and not simply as to what needed to be done to achieve them, were certain religious, aristocratic, or communitarian ideologies. The disagreement between Marxism and liberalism, in all their respective forms, had to do with means and priorities, not with desirable goals.

An incident illustrates the radical transformation of the left on the issue of human rights. On a visit to Tunisia, French president Chirac provoked an uproar by declaring that “the very first human rights are to eat, to be cared for, to receive an education and be housed,” and in that regard, Tunisia was “way ahead of many other countries,” adding that he did not doubt that “the liberal character, respectful of freedoms, was increasingly asserted” in Tunisia. I have no intention of defending that statement in regard to the particular case of Tunisia, but rather point out that the indignant reactions did not clearly distinguish between the particular case and the principle voiced concerning the “first of human rights.”28 Suppose someone says, “Brazil, contrary to Cuba, is a democracy.” This sort of statement is not usually considered an apology for the social situation in Brazil and no human rights organization would be shocked or indignant enough to stress that “civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights are indivisible” although, manifestly, economic and social rights are far from being satisfactory in Brazil. But a statement such as that of Chirac’s is taken ipso facto as an apology for the political situation in Tunisia and a defense of dictatorship. This difference in reactions reflects the whole difference in the way these two parts of the Declaration are treated. During that visit, even the French Communist Party expressed indignation at Chirac’s declaration, although it was merely a very moderate expression of what used to be that party’s ideology back in its heyday.²⁹

The Question of Relationship of Forces and Our Position in the World

Finally, let us look at the effects of the softest version of the human rights ideology, the one that asks us to write letters or sign petitions in protest against violations of those rights committed in Third World countries. I do not intend here to reject that form of action, which often has positive effects, but simply wish to shed light on certain of its underlying assumptions, which deserve reflection.

Let us consider the following scenario: some citizens of a poor African country undertake to protest en masse against, let us say, human rights violations in China. It is manifestly improbable that such a thing would ever happen and the reason is obvious: the citizens of all such countries know full well that Chinese leaders would pay no attention to such protests, for two reasons—one bad and the other less so. The bad reason is that a poor country obviously has no means of bringing pressure on China. A better reason, that the Chinese could cite, is that the citizens of that African country would do better to solve their own problems before minding other people’s business.

As to the second response that the Chinese could make to their imaginary African detractors, “solve your own problems first,” almost everyone in our Western countries is convinced that such a response could not be addressed to us. So long as it is limited to the issue of human rights and democracy, that conviction can be defended.30 But there are still all the problems already mentioned concerning our disproportionate consumption of natural resources, and thus our growing dependence on the very Third World countries whose practices we denounce, not to mention our contribution to global warming. Chinese leaders could very well say that instead of giving them lectures on human rights and democracy, we would do better to start to reform our mode of consumption so as to give the rest of the world a chance to share it, at least in part. And the answer that the defenders of Western interventionism could reasonably give them is far from obvious.