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The lady doth protest too much

Amnesty International dropped a bombshell a few weeks ago when it published a report accusing the United States of widespread domestic human rights abuses (www.amnesty-usa.org). This was greeted with amazement, disbelief, and outrage; it created much cognitive dissonance because the US continues to play the role of global watchdog on human rights issues, hounding all and sundry. However, America's record is quite mixed in this area. Physician, heal thyself?

The Amnesty campaign, its very first focusing on the US in the 37 years of its existence, focuses on several areas: arms shipments overseas, asylum, the death penalty, police brutality, juvenile justice, prison issues and women's issues. Amnesty has kicked off a year-long campaign to bring media attention to alleged abuses in these areas.

On the US domestic front, I have criticised Amnesty because they never seemed to pay attention to abuses I have observed over time: ranging from the incineration of the group MOVE in Philadelphia a dozen years ago to the annihilation of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas to the Rodney King incident in Los Angeles to the horror-stories of sexual abuse in women's prisons. I am glad the spotlight is finally turning on the US.

Now I confess I am glad that Americans do use the human rights issue as a stick to beat various noxious regimes with. Unfortunately, there is a tendency to use it as an economic cudgel, and to tar all offenders with the same brush. For instance, I have to plead that there are extenuating circumstances in, say, Jammu and Kashmir: this is not in the same heinous league as, say, Chinese genocide in Tibet.

I do wish the Americans would therefore step off their high horse about Jammu and Kashmir. For, there, the Indian State faces a grave threat to its very existence; and the human rights of terrorists and mercenaries are not greater than the rights of their victims. After all, those who have been killed in Jammu and Kashmir have been disproportionately civilian, unarmed non-combatants; while the loud allegations about violations are usually regarding State violence against terrorists.

Remarkably, individual Americans are among the most compassionate and caring people I know; for instance, if it weren't for people like Richard Gere, Tibet would be completely forgotten by the world. Any number of Americans, another famous example being Ernest Hemingway during the Spanish Civil War, have fought on the side of the good guys. Nevertheless, this individual compassion does not seem to translate into government policy.

In particular, in international affairs, the US has been known to be friendly with and to support some of the worst human-rights violators in the world: the Chinese, sundry Latin American and Asian and African dictators, and so on. I suspect this arises out of the cynical calculation that a totalitarian dictatorship is much easier to do business with -- after all, any opponents can easily be shot. This apparently has a very salutary effect on would-be dissidents.

Latin America used to have more than its fair share of these monsters, and those that come to mind include General Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay, General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and the generals who have conducted 30 years of brutal, genocidal, low-intensity conflict in Guatemala. In particular, the Chilean experience has been poignant; it has also been immortalised by the works of such writers as Isabelle Allende and Ariel Dorfman.

I was in the US at the time of the arrest in London of Augusto Pinochet, on charges of complicity in the murder of Spanish nationals, including diplomats, in Chile. I listened with great interest to a call-in talk show on Public Radio, featuring Ariel Dorfman, currently a professor at Duke University. I remember reading Dorfman's The Last Song of Manuel Sendero some time ago -- a remarkable magical-realist tale of how children refuse to be born because of the situation in Chile.

What happened in Chile is as follows -- a socialist government under Salvador Allende came to power through democratic means. Allende went on a nationalising spree, bringing much of the country's economy under state control. It is alleged that, alarmed at this, US multinationals appealed to the US government; whereupon the CIA engineered a coup in Chile that caused Allende's assassination and resulted in the brutal Pinochet regime.

The CIA's involvement has never been proven; but I have no difficulty in believing they in fact were party to all this. This reminds me of the forceful State of Siege by Costa-Gavras -- the innocuous US 'agricultural attache' (played with stunning understatement by Yves Montand) kidnapped by Tupamaro urban guerrillas in Uruguay turns out, in fact, to be the adviser to the armed forces in the arts of torture and murder.

The facts in Chile are that Allende was murdered and that Pinochet made a 180-degree turn: he opened up the Chilean economy to MNCs. He also ran roughshod over the opposition, jailing and murdering hundreds and thousands of his opponents. Many just 'disappeared' -- presumed tortured and killed; in a particularly macabre act, sometimes the orphaned children of these people were 'donated' to government supporters.

Pinochet's bitter legacy continues to traumatise Chile; but it must be admitted that his economic policies appear to have made Chile the star of Latin America today. This brings up that wretched question: is a totalitarian regime that makes the majority of people better off therefore a good thing? Utilitarians might argue that it is. But a just society has to be, of necessity, worried about how the most disadvantaged person is affected by its policies.

This is where I begin to wonder if indeed the US is a just society. The history of the nation is suffused with acts of appalling cruelty against those who are different from the dominant mainstream population: that is, white, middle class people. Consider the systematic extermination of the Native American (read Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee ), the horrifying system of slavery (see the recent Beloved and Amistad and the PBS special Africans in America ), and the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during WWII.

This sort of thing exists even today, in perhaps more benign form; but the fact of the matter is that America has little tolerance for those who depart from the accepted norms of their society. Which is indeed odd, considering the general perception of the US as tolerant of, and indeed friendly to, dissent and differences.

And it is indeed true that there are many groups, for example extreme libertarians, who reject the authority of the US government, refuse to pay taxes and fortify themselves in remote mountains, especially in Idaho, Montana and so forth. There are also fundamentalist Christians who worry about the putative end of the world in the 2000th year of their calendar and who have similarly barricaded themselves in remote communes.

Oddly enough, reports Salon magazine (www.salonmagazine.com), there are even computer types who, worried about the Y2K effect and its impact on society (they believe the banking system will fall apart, planes will fall out the air, the distribution system will fail, and marauding bands of city dwellers will invade the countryside seeking food) have set up armed encampments with stockpiles to see them through years of chaos while presumably Western civilisation as we know it comes to a grinding halt.

My tendency is to consider all of these people somewhat eccentric; one of the things I have always found risible about them is their paranoia that there are certain shadowy organisations attached to the US government that have virtually unlimited powers to do whatever they wish to do, citizens' rights be damned.

But is this altogether implausible? I wonder. It is well known, for example, that the income tax people, the Internal Revenue Service, have extraordinary powers: many gangsters have been brought to book by using tax law provisions against them. Further, it is believed that unlike in normal courts of law, where the accused is presumed innocent until proven otherwise beyond reasonable doubt, the IRS can and does presume taxpayers guilty until proven otherwise.

Then there is the BATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Rather innocent sounding, but it was they who led the siege of the Branch Davidians in Waco. And the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Authority, who have broad powers to interdict the flow of illegal drugs, which powers they do seem to take very seriously even if not very effectively in terms of stanching the flow.

This is not to mention, of course, the FBI and the CIA and the NSA. In the recent Bruce Willis thriller, Mercury Rising, the NSA are the bad guys, especially in the murderous persona of Alec Baldwin. In Deep Impact, some other federal agency plays the villain -- I never quite figured out which. InX Files, the FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, tries to keep the lid on things the government would rather keep to itself. Doubtless there are other agencies that are so secret their very existence is not public knowledge.

Hollywood is nothing if not savvy about the pulse of public opinion, and so this sudden surfeit of conspiracy theory films makes me wonder -- is there some sense of fin-de-siecle angst, or is there indeed something to all these paranoid-delusional fears?

In any case, despite continued American posturing that would make the impartial observer conclude that they are the undisputed world champions at caring about human rights, I do believe "milady doth protest too much". It would behove Americans -- especially members of the current US administration -- to revisit their own failings before lecturing others as they are wont to.

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