1. Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-opted Human Rights - James Peck (link)
"We divide the world in two. Those countries who choose democracy, we help. In those countries which do not choose, we create conditions where they will choose it."
-Morton Halperin, US State Department, 1994
"More can be won by illusion than coercion"
-Harold Lasswell, 1927
"Does freedom of the press extend to a paper's right to support armed, externally controlled forces (the Contras) attempting to overthrow an elected government? Human rights reports rarely delved into such questions.
In 1975, the Senate's Church Report on Cia operations against the Allende government in Chile had pointed to the funds that flowed to El Mercurio so that the paper could spread CIA-planted rumors and propaganda, showing how the CIA made Allende's censorship of the paper a centerpiece in a highly orchestrated campaign to accuse him of suppressing "freedom of the press." Did human rights groups assume such standard operation procedures of ideological intervention were myths? Irrelevant? Unworthy of investigation? They simply took no position."
-The Author
I started the new year off with an absurdly appropriate subject to dig into given *gestures around* literally everything going on right now. Based on a painstaking documentation of decades worth of American overtures towards "human rights," Peck's main accomplishment in this book is using this history to construct a fascinating synthesis. Per Peck's analysis, there are broadly speaking two existing conceptions of human rights: one that is focused on narrow, individualistic liberties, and another that speaks to more systemic and economic rights driven by material conditions. The apparent fecklessness of Western human rights organizations is repeatedly shown to be symptom of adopting a laser-like focus on the former current, largely at the behest of American hegemony. At the same time, the American government and its ilk are explicitly aware of this second current, and in fact use the concepts associated with this current in their analysis of how to keep such an ideology at bay. This contradiction between knowledge and action is made most explicit in an analysis (from none other than the CIA) of how a growing liberal bourgeois class will serve as a natural counterweight to the very possibility of insurgency:
"Yet Washington's managers were not too worried. They judged that "the widening income and regional disputes" would not be "incompatible with a growing middle class and increasing overall wealth," a situation not inimical to American power. If their guardedly argued economic predictions held true, CIA-funded task forces foresaw a planet of 2 billion somewhat-well-off people—enough to sustain the globalization process—living amid 4.7 billion others."
And yet, Peck's narrative reveals yet another level of contradiction that gives his work an additional richness. Despite the ruling class possessing a general knowledge of the ideology of their opposition, they have been bound by the shackles of their own ideology to never be able to properly synthesize their own shortcomings. Peck begins to hint at this in the introduction with this anecdote:
"Kennan, for example, puzzled over the contradiction between the Soviets' realism and their fanaticism. "I must say I admire" the Communist leaders, he said in his lectures to the National War College in 1947, "for the realism with which they look to the essential features of power and do not allow themselves to be carried away by the more petty sorts of human vanity." And yet, inexplicably, the Kremlin held fast to an ideological prism, distorting reality to suit its own needs (the class struggle, capitalism's decline, the certainty of revolution and of the economic development of Communist society). How could these men be at once so objective and yet so ideological? This was "the key question to understanding the whole system," Kennan concluded, "and I am frank to say I don't know what the answer is." Greater self-awareness might have suggested a place to start."
This is a wonderful example of how ideology (especially that of capitalism) often takes the form of unstated assumptions about how the world works; both in Kennan's inability to comprehend the Other, and in Peck's assertion that Soviet ideology was necessarily distorted. Peck subsequently demonstrates how the West's dominant conception of "freedom" is a critical part of this blinkeredness. Per the aforementioned narrow conception of "human rights," this ideal is seen less as a general humanistic freedom and more as a "freedom of capital" which "stood apart from and often against such other core values as equality, community, solidarity, and redistributive forms of justice." How a pursuit of such freedom sustains and reinforces itself is perhaps best understood through the West's usage and deployment of media. The commodification of images such an approach produces serves to "simplify and dramatize reality, disrupting the context of politics by focusing on an instantaneous present, and encouraging emotional reactions to events rather than reflective consideration of them." Within the context of the book, the treatment of human rights violations as individual events devoid of context ironically makes them easier to dismiss and to forget. And so yet again, as this blog has noted before and will continue to note ad infinitum, we can understand the American conception of freedom as fundamentally the freedom to forget. After all, when knowledge is commodified it takes on a cost; one for which few are willing or able to pay the price.
2. The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut (link)
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