Reviews for The political economy of human rights

The average rating for The political economy of human rights based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-12-06 00:00:00 Andrew Lindow Statement of purpose for this two-volume project: “It has a dual focus: on facts and on beliefs” (ix). The basic fact is that the United States has organized under its sponsorship and protection a neo-colonial system of client states ruled mainly by terror and serving the interests of a small local and foreign business and military elite. The fundamental belief, or ideological pretense, is that the United States is dedicated to furthering the cause of democracy and human rights throughout the world. (id.). That is all in fact basic and fundamental. Along with Manufacturing Consent, this set should be considered part of the core Chomsky writings. The main concern is how the US has “globalized the ‘banana republic’” (1), a “plague of neofascism.” This has proceeded through “interventions explicitly designed to preserve non-freedom from the threat of freedom […] and to displace democratic with totalitarian regimes” (3). Even though the US is the worst distributor of products in the global market for unlawful killing (inclusive of “the peasants of Indochina served as experimental animals for an evolving military technology” (3)), the majority of kenomatic development occurred under the US clientage system, a group of “subfascist” regimes, characterized by “most of the vicious characteristics of fascism [but] lacked the mass base that a Hitler or Mussolini could muster” (30). That is, the US client system, as an imposition by an imperialist, lacks “the degree of legitimacy of a genuine fascist regime” (id.), which regime normally is a rightwing populist movement indigenous to the state of its eruption. The principal axis of argumentation here is the analysis of the presentation of this subfascist system by the US imperial-oriented for-profit consciousness production industry, i.e., what Althusser might reference as the journalism ISA, and amply described otherwise by Bagdikian’s Media Monopoly, McChesney’s Rich Media, Poor Democracy, the writings of Michael Parenti, Project Censored, and so on. So, regarding subfascist crimes, the US media ISA has numerous strategies: distraction with emphasis on positive things, insistence that the US is a bystander, sleight of mind to refocus on alleged communist crimes, &c. (11 ff.). Very much a reply to Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in the chapter “The Pentagon-CIA Archipelago” (41-83), with the principal comment: Even liberal commentators rarely focus on the systematic character of the US support for right wing terror regimes and the simple economic logic of the ‘Washington connection.’ This evasion may even be said to define the limits of permissible liberalism in the mass media—one may denounce torture in Chile and ‘death squads’ in Brazil, but (1) it is unacceptable to explain them as a result of official US policy and preference and as plausibly linked to US economic interests; and (2) it would be highly advisable even when merely denouncing subfascist terror to show ‘balance’ by denouncing Soviet and left terror in equally vigorous terms. […] Needless to say, a similar balance is not required in establishment and extreme right commentators. One rarely finds any criticism of Gulag Archipelago for balance as a picture of Soviet society and its evolution, let alone for its neglect of unpleasant aspects of the Free World. (78-79) Nice listings of CIA technique (assassination, mercenary conspiracy, political bribery, propaganda, ersatz protests, corruption of organizations, and so on (50 ff.). The objective is a “favorable investment climate” (53 et seq.), of course: “Democratic threats to the interests of foreign investors, such as a Philippines Supreme Court ruling prior to the 1972 coup prohibiting foreigners from owning land, or a Brazilian dispute over a mineral concession to Hanna Mining Company, or agrarian reform in Guatemala, or nationalization of oil in Iran, are expeditiously resolved in favor of the foreigner by dictators” (53). It must be made plain: “terror is not a fortuitous spinoff but has a functional relationship to investment climate” (54). The US can’t accomplish all of this on its own, which is why subfascist local clients are required; the process is “denationalization,” a process whereby the US might “virtually disregard the sovereignty of this large and theoretically independent country. The catch, of course, is that Brazil was not an independent country—US penetration was already enormous by the 1960s and US leaders acted as it they had a veto over Brazilian economic and foreign policy” (52); the leaders were denationalized insofar as they had “strong ties and dependency relations” (id.). The gallows humor moment here is that “a curious aspect of this massive subversion operation in a country such as Brazil is that it is not regarded as subversion. If the Cubans are found to provide weapons to insurgents in Venezuela such a discovery is given great publicity as evidence of Cuban perfidy” whereas “the subversion of Brazil by the United States in the years leading up to the coup of 1964 […] is the natural right of power—where domination is so taken for granted that the hegemonic power intervenes by inevitable and unquestioned authority” (52-53). Anyway, lotsa detail on these points. In this subfascist system, “the majority of the population is a means, not an end” (59). We should expect these processes to accelerate now, given the local result in recent US elections, the cruel conversion of labor forces in the so-called third world into mere agambenian instruments, zoe whose bodies are subject to the usage of capital, wherein violation of the categorical imperative is the default condition of possibility for the system. This system “flows naturally from control by denationalized elites in a system of suspended law and arbitrary privilege” (66)—which is to situate the US subfascist clientage system within the agambenian state of exception, a kenomatic state wherein the absence of law in the client is the arche of the law in the US. The argument thereafter develops three principal mechanisms that constitute the biopolitical management of the subfascist system: “benign terror” (85 ff.), “constructive terror” (205 ff.), and “bloodbaths” (299 ff.). In “atrocities management” (97), the first step is that the imperialist insists on a zone of indistinction between “civil rights workers and bomb-throwers” (93) in order to throw legitimate protest in with unauthorized violence. The manager thereafter institutes “permanent counterrevolution” such that “the indiscriminate violence puts into operation a feedback process of ‘communist creation’ that affords the intervention legitimacy in the eyes of imperial power” (99), the creation, i.e., of a state of exception that runs parallel to and thereby supersedes the rule of constitutional order. Examples of benign terror (about which “attitudes in the United States have been characterized mainly by sheer indifference” (105)) include East Pakistan in 1971 (105 ff.) (which has been estimated variously to have involved anywhere from 300,000 to 3,000,000 civilians massacred); Burundi in 1972 (250,000 massacred) (106 ff.); Native Americans in Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil (millions dead?) (109 ff.); East Timor in 1975 (100,000 killed?) (129 ff.)—much detail on this last. Instances of 'constructive terror,' by contrast, “contribute substantially to a favorable investment climate” (205), and typically involve systematic torture, arbitrary imprisonment, death squads, permanent counterrevolution, and so on. Examples studied herein are: Indonesia 1965 (205 ff.), with its 500,000+ leftists killed; Thailand after WWII (218 ff.), which became a US “landlocked aircraft carrier” (223); the Philippines (230 ff.), wherein the “democratic façade was suspended under Marcos in 1972”; the Dominican Republic (242 ff.) in the 1960s; Argentina (264 ff.); Uruguay (270 ff.); Guatemala (274 ff.); Nicaragua (283 ff.); El Salvador (296 ff.), and so on. The last section, on “bloodbaths,” concerns Vietnam, which, under the Vietnamization doctrine, “became the ultimate satellite—the pure negative, built on anti-communism, violence, and external sustenance” (328). The first sort of bloodbath is “constructive,” by the French colonialist or the Diem regime, supportive of favorable investment climate (300 ff.). The US direct assault is the “primary bloodbath” in this narrative, no doubt (304); “The number of civilian casualties inflicted on South Vietnam is unknown, but is very likely underestimated by the Senate Subcommittee on Refugees at 400,000 dead, 900,000 wounded and 6.4 million turned into refugees” (312). The “mythical bloodbath” concludes the volume, i.e., massacres long predicted by the rightwing to result from a communist victory in Vietnam, or allegations of leftwing crimes during the US invasion. The analysis disputes the rightwing narrative that Hanoi killed millions of persons during land reform in the 1950s (341 ff.); it’s an effective presentation. The Hue massacre is likewise brushed against the grain (345 ff.), with success. Much of the import here is the attempt by the US to use exaggerated or fabricated atrocities to recover its imperial authority after the failure of the unlawful armed attack against three sovereign states. Volume II will resume this thread. Good stuff overall, though now nearly 40 years out of current, which does not vitiate its political critique. As preparatory for analysis of Volume II, we conclude by noting the insistence upon the atrocities in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge, which are acknowledged (20 ff.) as the constant pretense that the horrors of Cambodia are being ignored except for the few courageous voices that seek to pierce the silence, or that some great conflict was raging about the question of whether or not there have been atrocities in Cambodia. […] By September 1977, condemnation of Cambodian atrocities, covering the full political spectrum with the exception of some Maoist groups, had reached a level and scale that has rarely been matched. (20) Recommended, no doubt.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-05-21 00:00:00 Duane Cummings Chomsky and Herman are at the absolute top of their game here, witty, sardonic, and ruthless. They paint a chilling picture of the postwar world, with America protecting her national interests by exporting "sub-fascism" ("sub" because classic fascism at least had some kind of popular support) to inept, sadistic dictators and then looking away as these petty Hitlers repress and occasionally exterminate their people. The authors' examples are shamefully obscure; many have not even heard of Indonesia's invasion of East Timor in '75, but here they spend 200 pages on the issue. It serves as a much needed corrective, as does the entire book. One of the most revealing parts was the section on the 20th Century genocide of the Ache indians in Paraguay and the terrifying, disgusting fundamentalist missionaries aiding and abetting in the extermination. We meet Jack Stolz of the New Tribes Mission who buys and sells the Ache as slaves and makes good money doing it. We hear descriptions of Death Camps that are compared to those run by the Nazis, and is it left wing activists saying this? No, its highly respected anthropologists who had only been in Paraguay to study the Ache when they discovered they were the target of a genocide. Before "The Washington Connection," I had never even heard of the Ache indians. That alone is reason enough to recommend this monumental work. I can't wait to read the second volume.