In an alarming shift, the reduced, fragile discourse of "human rights" is replacing the magnificent concept of justice. The difference is that notions of equality have been pried loose and eased out of the equation. It's a process of attrition. Almost unconsciously, we begin to think of justice for the rich and powerful, and human rights for the poor. Justice for the corporate world, human rights for its victims. Justice for the Indian upper castes, human rights for Dalits and Adivasis (if that). Justice for white Australians, human rights for Aboriginals and immigrants.It is becoming clearer that violating human rights is an inherent and necessary part of implementing a coercive and unjust political and economic structure on the world. Without wholesale violation of human rights, the neo-liberal project would remain in the dreamy realm of policy. But increasingly human rights violations are being portrayed as the unfortunate, almost accidental, fallout of an otherwise acceptable political and economic system. This is why in areas of heightened conflict - in Kashmir and in Iraq for example - human rights professionals are regarded with suspicion.
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It's easy to blame the poor for being poor. It's easy to believe that the world is being caught up in an escalating spiral of terrorism and war. That's what allows the American President to say "You're either with us or with the terrorists". But we know that that is a spurious choice. It is mendacious to make moral distinction between the unspeakable brutality of terrorism and the indiscriminate carnage of war and occupation. Both kinds of violence are unacceptable. We cannot support one and condemn the other. The real tragedy is that most people in the world are trapped between the horror of a putative peace and the terror of war. Those are the two sheer cliffs we're hemmed in by. The question is: How do we climb out of this crevasse?
For those who are materially well-off, but morally uncomfortable, the first question you must ask yourself is do you really want to climb out of it? How far are you prepared to go? Has the crevasse become too comfortable?
If you really want to climb out, there's good news and bad news...
Arundhati Roy — November 3, 2004 | Peace and the new corporate liberation theology
Why does it seem to take someone with literary gifts to see what journalism misses?
Tom Matrullo | Let us prey
Note: Reread The algebra of infinite justice (The Guardian September 29, 2001).
Since my return from Iraq, I have continued to watch the horror unfold on television. It's different seeing the violence decontextualized from the battlefield, now playing out in discrete video clips that run between ads for Chevys and the Olive Garden. Videos of militants staging beheadings against dungeon-like backdrops, with the perpetrators wearing masks and the victims in colorful jumpsuits, seem almost like grotesque TV shows.
One of the great ironies of the Bush administration, obsessed as it is with Christian values and the attendant crusade to punish what it deems obscene and lewd in the media (from Janet Jackson's breast to Howard Stern's speech), is that it has given us a war in which the airing of snuff films on national TV has become routine. The conflict in Iraq, as seen through news coverage, has begun to resemble the macabre underground 1980s video series Faces of Death. Throw in the images produced by the U.S. Army at Abu Ghraib, and the administration has put itself in the running to successfully compete with the BDSM side of the porn industry.
Evan Wright | Dead-Check in Falluja [via InformationClearingHouse]
But this week, in defending embattled NBC television reporter Kevin Sites — the man behind the now-famous video from Fallujah showing a U.S. Marine shooting an injured insurgent — abuse is coming Mortenson's way in waves. "Yeah," he told me, "I’m getting my butt kicked around here a bit. I try not to take it personally."
Sites, still in Iraq with the Marines, is getting it even worse, from conservative commentators here at home to the troops (his former buddies) over there. "Sites wrote me first thing this morning," Mortenson informed me. "He seemed pretty down."
Darrin Mortenson | Shoot the Messenger [via InformationClearingHouse]
The importance of public opinion was stated quite frankly by Robert Kaplan, a leading neo-conservative, in the Atlantic Monthly last year. The most important battleground of America's new "combination warfare," he wrote, is the media:
"Indeed the best information strategy is to avoid attention-getting confrontations in the first place and to keep the public's attention as divided as possible. We can dominate the world only quietly, so to speak. The moment the public focuses on a single crisis like the one in Iraq… it becomes a rallying point around which lonely and alienated people in a global mass society can define themselves through an uplifting group identity, be it European, Muslim, anti-war intellectual, or whatever."Therefore, public opinion — if strategically focused — can end this war. To understand this requires a different analysis than the usual one that assumes that there will be an "exit strategy" after Iraq is "stabilized." The war will end either when the U.S. military "wins" or it will not end at all.
Tom Hayden | How to End the Iraq War
