The rough transcript of a Truthdig interview with James Peck. During the interview Peck addresses a matter I've noticed is being indulged in more blatantly than I think of as usual. The matter is hypocrisy or "the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own country's behavior does not conform". It is raised, in the interview, with respect Clinton's latest lecturing of the Chinese over the issue of human rights violations.
Peter Scheer: This is Peter Scheer with Josh Scheer. We are speaking with James Peck, who is the author of “Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-opted Human Rights.” Welcome..” Welcome.
James Peck: Welcome, I’m glad to be here.
Josh Scheer: So, human rights—how does the government do it? … I’ve read the introduction; you talk about the Cold War and, you know, setting up dictatorships. And then when did the, as you put it, ideological weapons … that our national security infrastructure used to bring human rights as a motivator for war?
James Peck: Human rights, I think, really began to emerge in the public in the United States in the 1970s. Sort of the late ’60s, early ’70s … in the public; it came with Soviet dissidence; it came up with Allende and things like that, in the Congress. But the national security people were faced with the enormous implications of the defeats in Vietnam, the discrediting of anti-communism, and all the resistance that had occurred in the Vietnam struggles. And I think what really happened, if I could put it sort of in a, really sort of a nutshell, is this: The human rights movement really was grabbed upon by the Carter administration, and ever since, in order to cut off—in order to create sort of a new idealism, on the one hand; but also to bifurcate what had been some of the deepest demands within the peace movement. The human rights movement, in a way, really broke from some of the fundamental concerns that dominated the peace movement.
For example, the human rights movement has developed various things about laws of war; but they’re not against war. They are about—they’re not against occupying other countries; they’re concerned with the laws of occupation. They’re not concerned with the size of military spending, or the pre-eminence of American power. And those kinds of concerns, which had been so central to the issues of Vietnam, were ones that the human rights movement—when it really began to be taken into the national security world—were broken away from. And you see it, as well, in the civil rights movement, because in the last years of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life, he had begun to speak very eloquently about the need to link a peace movement with civil rights, and if you broke the two apart, you would end up with neither, because the civil rights movement, in the end, was going to have to deal with issues of inequality and restructuring of American society. And that also, in a way, is what the fundamentals of human rights have broken from. So what the national security managers basically needed was a new idealism. What they needed was an idealism that said, look: Vietnam was a mistake; if we’d lived up to our ideals, we probably wouldn’t have done it; we’re a different kind of country than that. And that can be sort of the foundation for a new way of re-idealizing American power and asserting a new kind of globalism.
Peter Scheer: I want to—can we jump into China real quick, because you’re also the author of “Washington’s China,” and a China expert yourself. And speaking of human rights, this week Hillary Clinton came out in an interview in the Atlantic and said some nasty things about China’s human rights record, which we’re used to hearing from Washington since 1949. And as we pointed out on Truthdig, it’s awfully hypocritical, considering that the United States is now executing people abroad; it has an island gulag; we have more of our population in prison than any country in the world …
Josh Scheer: Now? [Laughs]
Peter Scheer:… including China …
Josh Scheer: James’ book is filled with the history of examples of setting up dictatorships, torture …
Peter Scheer: Right, but I’m saying, in pursuit of these wars, we have used the human rights argument. But does it have any credibility at this stage?
James Peck: I think it has a great deal of credibility in the United States, unfortunately. I think its credibility overseas is basically diminished, and is pretty much gone. I mean, I think if we look at what’s happened in the Middle East, I would say one of the overwhelming demands in the Middle East is freedom from us. And it’s not that they don’t want radical transformation and change. But when I talk in the book about two currents of human rights, I show, in part, about how America keeps invoking things about freedom of speech and things like that. But—and those things are very important—but the other issues of radical transformation of wealth and power, of collective mobilization, of a way of reducing American military presence in the Middle East—these issues are now all back on the agenda. And in that context, the traditional human rights language is coming to an end, I think.
Josh Scheer: And you talk in the book about Amnesty International, and talking about—in particular about China, the Chinese revolution being an atrocity, or one huge atrocity; the Iranian revolution being, you know, an atrocity, among others; and then defending some acts of violence as necessary. How do human rights groups like Amnesty International, which I believe you put at 1961, right, as being founded …
James Peck: Yeah.
Josh Scheer: … how do they work with the government? I mean, are they kind of—are they important … or are they doing the government’s work? Are they kind of feeding this war machine?
James Peck: You know, Amnesty … Amnesty is somewhat different than, say, Human Rights Watch, which of course is an American organization; Amnesty was a British. And indeed, when the national security managers were first talking about the issue of human rights, and bringing it into American foreign policy, there weren’t major American human rights groups yet; there was only the British, and they were uneasy about the fact that the only organization … was British. Amnesty has been much more leery of association with the American government than, say, Human Rights Watch, which has a great many people on it who are former national security people. So the linkage is much greater.
On the China issue, I would say the human rights vision basically is the further away you get from the Chinese revolution, the better. And in that way, though there are many egregious problems of human rights in China, it doesn’t give you a lot of insight into what’s happening in the protest movements in China, unless they happen to conform to the language we’re used to. And China, I think, actually is going to surprise a lot of people in terms of the wealth and diversity of its protest movement. But if you’re looking at it through the eyes of the dissidents who’ve been significantly—and they’re courageous, often, people—but if you look at it through the eyes of the dissidents who are known in the West, you probably won’t get what’s really happening in China.
Josh Scheer: It’s funny, because … the different eras, before we started doing human rights—I know Bob would have a fit if we didn’t mention it—but in Iran, and the Iranian revolution … they talk about … a lot of these groups …
Peter Scheer: Were assassinated …
Josh Scheer: … [by] Mossadegh … in 1945. So that was before we started selling human rights, and now we’ve got this problem in Iran, where people do not like their administration; they do have human rights …
Peter Scheer: Well, no, but I mean the irony—you know, in Afghanistan, we were talking about human rights when we were trying to fight the Russians in a proxy war that ended up installing this horribly anti-human-rights regime. And now in the name of human rights against that regime, we are air—you know, firing missiles into wedding parties. So it seems like a big mess all around.
James Peck: One of the things—it’s interesting that you put it that way, because one of the things the U.S. government, oddly enough, can live with is hypocrisy. [Laughter] And I think people underestimate why this is true, so let me give you a very specific example. The laws of war—which the human rights community radically and rapidly developed during the 1980s, during the violent struggles in Central America and the effort to suppress the Sandinistas—were actually strongly advocated by the national security managers, like Jeane Kirkpatrick and Elliott Abrams. And one of the things people don’t seem to realize is why so many of the hawks, up to Wolfowitz today, keep pushing for human rights. Well, what they understood in the ’80s was not that the people they were working with weren’t murderous thugs, but they needed to do what they had not been able to do in Vietnam, which is to discredit the struggles against the Americans. And they’ve not been able to do that against the National Liberation Front and the Vietnamese. They tried to label them as terrorists—essentially if you go back and read these documents, there are reams of documents trying to label them as terrorists. But the label didn’t stick.
And so what happened in the ’80s is that the human rights community, on the one hand, started to document the extraordinary atrocities in El Salvador and Guatemala and the death squads. But at the same time they wrote reports about some of the violations—which were true—of some of the resistance movements in El Salvador, and Guatemala, and Honduras. And what the U.S. government did was to say, you see? Everybody … nobody’s really on a good cause here, everybody’s doing these atrocious acts. And it sort of tarnished the whole notion of, well, what is social justice? How do you deal with oppression? And when you’re reading reports about guerrilla groups killing certain people, and you stop there, you lose the mobilizing ability to try and think through, well, what movements do have a certain justice on their side, and which ones are thuggish, and which ones should not be supported? So there’s a case where by spreading the darkness all around, you—in a way, it’s endlessly hypocritical, but it’s also effective.
Peter Scheer: We’re speaking with James Peck, the author of “Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-opted Human Rights.” Let me ask you, you’ve been framing a lot of these—this is sort of like a manipulative strategy by people who are really interested in war for, maybe, other reasons to help sell war. Are there people—Tony Blairs, people like that—who are really committed to this idea and maybe misguided? Are there people who truly believe this is, perhaps … I don’t know, Hillary Clinton, Samantha Powers, people like this, who are truly committed to the idea of human rights, or …?
James Peck: I think the real core issue is, there are—and I wouldn’t include Tony Blair and Hillary Clinton in this—but I think there are indeed people who are deeply committed to human rights. But the problem is, as I try to—as I do, as I try to point out about the various currents of human rights, is usually what we mean by human rights does not involve the issues of inequality, or war, or occupation, or how you restructure resources, or how you gain control over corporations. These are all the kind of issues that would have interested a Gandhi, or a Martin Luther King, or we could go through a long list of people. And it’s the bifurcation of those two things, so that they almost stand against each other, that makes the advocacy of human rights so narrow and limited to a very individualized, and often a very individualistic thing. And there are good things there, you know; civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights—all of those are terribly important. But if you set up human rights so it leaves out these other issues, and you look at the struggles of people who are dealing with those issues, and you don’t really figure out a way to insist that they be brought in to as much of the mainstream as the first current of what we’re very used to, of what we normally think of as human rights—then basically you’ve structured the issue against people who are really, profoundly trying to change—and are in the desperate straits they are—who are trying to change their world.
I came across a statistic recently that I thought was sort of graphic in this way. It was done by somebody at the World Bank—not one of my favorite institutions [Laughter]—but nonetheless, he was trying to point out how people actually lived on the planet. And the statistics exist: 65 to 70 percent of the planet lives less well off than the bottom 5 per cent of Americans. And if you’re trying to think about the kind of desperateness and need for radical transformation that’s necessary and that has long historical roots that go back—if we can—if those were really brought into human rights with the fervor and intensity that is often, say, used about an individual prisoner in another country, or—then I think we have a very, a more fluid and a far more dynamic conception of human rights.
Josh Scheer: And the question now is, should these countries be allowed to make their own history, even if their behavior upsets and sickens …
Peter Scheer: No, but I want to—I want to complicate that, Josh. Because you have countries, if you expand this issue, like you said, of human rights to religious freedom, you have a situation now where France has banned the veil, and Switzerland has banned minarets. I mean, you know, there are countries that we consider, you know …
Josh Scheer: Peter, can you explain to the—most of the KPFK audience—what a minaret is?
Peter Scheer: I think the very sophisticated KPFK audience knows that a minaret is the tower of a mosque.
Josh Scheer: OK, thank you.
Peter Scheer: But the point is that, you know, who is off-limits? Who do we not go to war with? This is insane.
James Peck: The issue of who we go to war with is … such a pivotal one, because the inclination has been so—I mean, Libya is an example …
Peter Scheer: Well, there President Obama laid out these reasons, why Libya, why not else, and obviously there’s reason to be skeptical of that. But can you talk about …
James Peck: Well, that gets us into, sort of, what I call back, once again, the hypocrisy issue, in terms of why it works. You’re asking a very valid and central … question of why the involvement in Libya, and not the involvement in Bahrain. And I think …
Josh Scheer: Or France.
James Peck:… or France. [Laughter] In one sense, it’s obvious. And what I try to get at is, why, if we get stuck at that level of discussion, we don’t get away from seeing certain systematic ways in which American power operates. For example, if we had to look at American power operating, but could hear no words to describe it—if we just had to watch the actions through some sort of silent screen—I think you’d see a great deal of consistency. But it’s the words that often play out. In other words, there are ways that American power can operate in certain places, and it appears to be promoting certain progressive changes temporarily. Then it doesn’t quite work that way, and it keeps working out somewhat differently. So if you can take away the words, you’d see more of the consistency. Put the words in, people say, ah, but it’s hypocritical. Well, it is hypocritical. But that doesn’t take us far enough into the fundamental issue. And it goes right back to when the human rights movement began, about Vietnam—was Vietnam a hypocritical exercise, or did it reflect something which people like Martin Luther King and others really did try to raise? That it was something very systemic about American power, as it has operated ever since 1949.
Peter Scheer: He said “the United States is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” and, sadly, that appears to still be true.
James Peck: Yes.
Josh Scheer: One last thing for me—I don’t know about Peter—but the question would be, how do we shut down the ideological weapons that Washington has, and should we watch these human rights groups even though they’re trying to do good things with kind of a—should we take them with a grain of salt, watch them with, you know, our good eye?
James Peck: Two things—I’d push them incredibly strongly on why they are so limited in their conception of human rights. Because—as long as they’re so limited, they cannot push a certain kind of critique of power. But the other one is, the only way that you, I think, in the end truly create empathy and compassion and understanding of the world you live in, is if you have struggled in your own society that, as King himself argued, collectively based, that are trying to meet the needs, empathetically and compassionately, of your own people. There’s a trajectory between that and the rest of the world. I think we’ve moved into the stage where we’re in a rather increasingly hardened attitude at home, that feeds and is fed in for a long time. But there is—there is something to be said—not that the U.S. is a model; it isn’t; not that the U.S. should show the world how to do things; it shouldn’t. But if its own people are involved in struggles to actually create and deal with certain needs, and do so compassionately, that will have an implication for how it sees the rest of the world in a more meaningful way.
Peter Scheer: James Peck is the author of “Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-opted Human Rights.” Thank you so much for joining us.
James Peck: Thank you. It was a delight to be here.
Josh Scheer: Have a great day.
