cj#282> Article: Human Rights & The NWO

1995-10-22

Richard Moore



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                     Human Rights and The New World Order

                      Copyright 1995 by Richard K. Moore
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                                October 6, 1995


The phrase "New World Order" (NWO) is used widely these days, without an
agreed general definition of what it means.  As in "Common Sense and The
New World Order" (New Dawn, September-October, 1995), this author uses the
term to refer to the increasing centralization of global power under the
control of transnational corporations and their proxies: primarily the
international financial community and a variety of commissions, treaty
mechanisms, and multilateral military arrangements.

By this definition, the NWO is an observable phenomenon, already firmly
entrenched and growing visibly more powerful each day.  No conspiracy
theories are needed to describe its nature or to observe its consequences.
The daily news (despite its bias and selectivity) provides most of the
information needed.  In addition, many excellent analyses have been
published which deal with this subject.  This article contains only a few
references, but the following pieces provide background material for those
who would like further substantiation of the points made here:

        The Nation, June 14, 1993, Charles Lewis & Margaret Ebrahim:
                "The Big Buy"
        The Nation, September 6/13, 1993, Patrick Bryant:
                "NAFTA and Human Rights"
        The Nation, December 6, 1993, Jeremy Brecher:
                "After NAFTA: Global Village or Global Pillage?"
        In These Times, February 21, March 6, 1994, Noam Chomsky:
                "Time Bombs"
        The Nation, March 28, 1994, Paco Ignacio Taibo II:
                "The Phoenix Rises"
        The Nation, October 10, 1994, Ralph Nader:
                "Get Off the GATT Track"
        The Nation, December 19, 1994, Richard J. Barnet:
                "Corporate States"
        The Nation, December 19, 1994, Jeremy Brecher & Tim Costello:
                "Beating the Multinationals"
        The Nation, February 6, 1995, Bill Weinberg:
                "Chiapas A Year Later"
        The Nation, March 6, 1995, Ken Silverstein & Alexander Cockburn:
                "Mexico & The Banks"
        The Nation, April 17, 1995, Allan Nairn:
                "C.I.A. Death Squad"
        The Nation, June 5, 1995, Gore Vidal & Allan Nairn:
                "Guatemala '46/'95"

A recap of the NWO will help set the stage for a discussion of its effects
on human rights.

The NWO's _ideological_ and _economic_ agendas are globalized laissez-faire
capitalism, hiding under the rhetoric of "free trade" and "increased
competitiveness".  Not to be confused with free enterprise, entrepreneurial
capitalism, or classical free market economics, _laissez-faire_ turns over
control of domestic and international economies to an elite clique of
multinational corporations.  Free trade and fair competition are the last
thing this clique wants -- predatory monopoly capitalism (such as was
prevalent with the 19th century Robber Barons: Rockefeller, Carnegie,
Krupp, et al) -- is their modus operandi.  The so-called "free trade"
treaties are not about trade, but about opening up the world's economies,
resources, and labor pools to unregulated exploitation by the
multinationals.

The NWO's _political_ agenda is the erosion of national sovereignty and
democracy, with power being transferred by various treaties (such as GATT,
NAFTA, and Maastricht) to various commissions and organizations.  These
entities exhibit few or no democratic characteristics, but are designed to
represent the interests of the NWO corporate elite.  See William Greider's
"Who Will Tell the People?" (Simon & Schuster) for a brilliant
investigation into the systematic corporate undermining of the American
democratic process, the growing detachment of corporate loyalties from
their traditional national home bases, and the shift of power to
technocratic commissions beyond the jurisdiction of any democratic process.

The NWO's _social agenda_ can be summarized as "no more entitlements," or
expressed more poignantly, "Let them eat cake."  This agenda is being
implemented with alarming rapidity worldwide.  In Britain and the U.S., for
example, we see the dismantlement of social programs and regulatory
agencies, privatization (at give-away prices) of service infrastructures to
large corporations, increasing unemployment and impoverishment as a result,
and an emphasis on more prisons and law enforcement to deal with the
problems created by this (anti-)social agenda.  In the Third World, we see
even more draconian social disruption, impoverishment, and heavy-handed
suppression, dictated by the International Monetary Fund's inhumane
"guidelines", and facilitated by assistance to Third-World police forces by
the U.S., Britain, Israel, and other First World regimes.

The _propaganda_ branch of the NWO is the global mass media, with ownership
increasingly concentrated in a small number of corporate conglomerates.
These news, entertainment and propaganda vendors provide a highly biased
and selective interpretation of world events, aligned with the interests
and agendas of the NWO.  Again see Chomsky ("Manufacturing Consent") or
Michael Parenti ("Make Believe Media") for a treatment of how this
propaganda machine operates, and to what ends.  Or pay attention to your
everyday news sources, and think about what's being left out of the stories
you're being told.
        Example: when Croatia launched its invasion of Krajina, forcing the
greatest migration of refugees in Europe since World War II, where were the
pictures and interviews with the refugees?  Where was the condemnation of
Croatia's overrunning of areas which were homelands of Serbs for centuries?
Where was the concern with shelling of fleeing refugees, and with the
rampages of drunken, revenge-hungry, fascist-minded Croation troops?
Instead the cameras were focused on the plight of Muslims being forced out
by the influx of the Serbian refugees.  Meanwhile Peter Galbraith (U.S.
ambassador to Croatia), put forward the NWO's spin for these events on BBC
(August 9), rejecting British and Serbian charges that Croatia was guilty
of ethnic cleansing.  Galbraith: "...ethnic cleansing is a practice
supported by Belgrade and carried out by Bosnian and Croatian Serbs
forcefully expelling local inhabitants and using terror tactics."  Why
doesn't a full scale military invasion by Croatia count as "terror
tactics"?  Galbraith went on: "...the Croatian military success could prove
to be a positive step in resolving the conflict through negotiations."  How
Orwellian can you get?  -- "War is Peace", classic Newsspeak.
        Don't misunderstand: I'm not saying the Serbs should be portrayed
as innocent victims, but the media treatment of the Krajina invasion was
beyond merely "biased news" -- it was blatantly slanted propaganda,
intentionally distracting attention from the major news of the day.  This
one-sided demonization of one of the parties in a civil war serves to
justify the establishment of the NWO's military agenda.

That NWO _military_ agenda, as demonstrated in Iraq, Ethiopia and now
Bosnia, is the creation of a multinational strike force, ostensibly under
"international" control, but in fact controlled primarily by the United
States, its client states, and closest allies.  The U.S. plays a central
role in the NWO, but the NWO is not merely a disguise for traditional
American imperialism.  Being firmly under the thumb of corporations, the
U.S. Government serves as a useful agent for NWO interests, and being the
only super power, U.S. military muscle forms the invincible nucleus of the
NWO's enforcement branch.  But enforcement is not limited to traditional
U.S. national interests, it extends to the more general interests of the
global corporate elite.  American taxpayers, being both misinformed and
uninformed by the media, largely foot the bill for the NWO's global
military operations -- at least thus far.  Look for increased funding and
participation, especially by Germany, under the auspices of NATO and fueled
by the understandable citizen outrage generated by the media's one-sided
demonization of Serbs, Iraqis, and whoever else stands in the way of NWO
objectives.

Human rights, the subject of this article, are affected adversely by every
one of these NWO agendas, as the above considerations already begin to
reveal.  There are four primary reasons why the NWO is -- and must be -- at
its very core, anti-human rights.

First, the NWO is inherently _socially amoral_ -- its only imperatives are
the expansion of corporate power, the accumulation of wealth, and the
establishment of a global political system that facilitates those
objectives.  This single-minded (yet far-reaching) agenda includes no
concern for human rights or welfare, and will naturally and without qualms
tend to roll over any person, culture, or institution that stands in its
way.  You might be tempted to say this aspect of the NWO is _neutral_ to
human rights, but consider this parallel situation: if a murderer shows no
concern for the life of his/her victims, he or she is considered to be a
sociopath and is generally viewed with even more horror than one who kills
out of hatred or passion.  I submit the NWO's social amorality should be
judged similarly as being dangerously sociopathic and anti-human rights.
This amorality is an enabling factor: it unleashes the NWO to pursue its
agendas irresponsibly, without any internally-imposed restraints.

Second, the NWO, like all flavors of capitalism, is insatiably
_expansionist_ -- like a cancer, it must grow to survive.  Corporate
managers are taught explicitly: "If you stand still, you die."  Capital
must continually seek new realms for investments and create new markets for
its products.  The resulting development-oriented initiatives (such as land
commercialization and oil/mineral exploitation) inevitably run up against
competing uses for those same resources, as we see in Chiapas, Honduras,
Ethiopia, Brazil, etc.  The people (along with their rights) who stand in
the path of the NWO must be killed or swept aside to make room for the
never-ending growth.  The murder and forced dislocation of people and
cultures, and the dismemberment of their economic infrastructures, strikes
directly at the very heart of human rights.
        Classic examples of this were the British Enclosure Acts (sixteenth
century) and the western expansion of the United States (primarily
nineteenth century).  The land-use patterns of the Native Americans (and
earlier, the British peasantry) were inconsistent with maximal capitalist
exploitation of those same lands.  The people therefore "had to go", and
(in the American case) were demonized by the media, massacred by the army,
and pushed into concentration camps ("reservations") -- despite their
historic claim to the lands, their God-given right to life and livelihood,
and the numerous treaties concluded with them, only to be ignored.  In the
British case, the peasants were pushed into urban centers to form a cheap
industrial workforce.  Both of these development patterns continue to
operate identically today throughout the world, fueled by multinational
investments and pressure applied to Third-World governments by
international financial interests.

Third, the NWO is inherently _anti-democracy_ -- this is a classic case of
conflicting class interests, the two classes in this case being _people_
and _corporations_.  A government beholden to people is democratic, while a
government beholden to corporations is essentially fascist.  It is no
accident that those nations most directly controlled by corporations -- the
smaller Third World countries -- are frequently ruled by overtly fascist
military dictatorships.  People, if they have the power, naturally have a
tendency to promote their own self-interest, which includes things like
social welfare legislation, minimum wages, imposition of taxes on corporate
profits, health and safety regulation of industry, collective bargaining,
etc.  For this reason, the NWO and its corporate constituency stridently
oppose effective democratic governance.  In some cases this means
supporting overtly non-democratic forms of government, in other cases this
means subverting so-called "Democracies" through bribery, election funding,
intensive lobbying, media propaganda, control of political parties,
supportive media coverage for favored citizen pressure groups, etc.  This
anti-democratic activism attacks human rights both directly and indirectly:
it directly undermines the human right to control one's own government, and
it indirectly undermines other rights, since corporate-dominated,
undemocratic governments tend to undermine human rights generally.

Fourth, the NWO naturally _opposes national sovereignty_ and _promotes
unaccountable internationalism_ -- this is where the NWO stands out in
comparison to earlier manifestations of capitalist power.  Whereas,
capitalists  have traditionally supported strong national sovereignty in
their home-base countries, the NWO stands apart from "parochial" national
interests and actively promotes a technocratic, super-national,
investment-friendly World Order.  This attacks human rights by undermining
the meaning and value of citizenship and by depriving people of life and
livelihood through NWO-sponsored armed conflicts.  It further attacks human
rights indirectly by its strangulation of national budgets so that nations
do not have the means to to pursue beneficial economic development.

Beyond these inherent characteristics -- which guarantee that an unchecked
NWO must always be on a collision course with human rights  -- we can look
at the actual record.  We can examine specific programs, actions, and
behaviors of the NWO, and observe the appalling consequences for human
rights.  These are even worse, it turns out, than what one might expect
from a straightforward unfolding of the NWO agendas.  The NWO's inherent
sociopathic amorality seems to somehow encourage an almost demonic
mentality in its operatives, leading to capricious torture, brutality, and
murder on a colossal scale.  In the case of Native Americans, to return to
that foreshadowing precedent, the army didn't just massacre the natives, it
massacred them with relish -- burning babies before the eyes of parents,
raping women, cutting trophy-parts from corpses, etc.  There is enough
racism, sadism, and intolerance buried in the human psyche that when
political permission is given for it to be unleashed, it seems, alas, to
run amok.

In the 1950s Nelson Rockefeller undertook an official good-will tour of
Latin America.  Almost everywhere he went he was greeted by angry crowds
and shouts of "Yankee go home".  It was made abundantly clear that the
roles played by the U.S. and multinational corporations was deeply resented
by the people of the region, and that  Rockefeller was seen as a symbol of
those roles.  When Rockefeller returned home, he formed one of his many
influential "study commissions" to evaluate the response he had
encountered.  Rather than concluding that the U.S. should respond to the
complaints of the Latin Americans, and adopt more acceptable policies, the
conclusion was instead that the U.S. should undertake a massive program of
training and arming the police forces of the region.  As per the  standard
NWO pattern, if there's a conflict between people and the investment
interests of the multinationals, it's the people who must give way.  In
this case, stronger police forces were seen as the way to accomplish this
objective.

These recommendations became U.S. policy, both openly and covertly, and
large amounts of military and "security" assistance were provided to many
Latin American countries.  There followed decades of police brutality,
torture, "disappearances", and death squads -- all frontal assaults on
human rights.  The U.S didn't officially endorse such practices, and
frequently condemned them in public speeches, but the arms, funding, and
training assistance continued to flow.  Only recently has it officially
been "revealed" that CIA agents participated directly in these brutal
activities, although the revelation was no surprise to attentive observers.

Other similar examples over the past several decades include the massacre
of millions of Chinese in Indonesia, slave labor in Brazil, countless civil
wars in Africa, toleration and support of the former racist government of
South African, and the acceleration of trade with a Chinese government that
operates slave labor camps and executes democracy advocates.

As a final example, consider the events unfolding at this moment in
Chiapas, Mexico.  One of the results of the Mexican Revolution (early this
century) was the dedication of Mayan homelands to their traditional use for
communal farming.  This showed respect for the human rights of the natives,
both individually and collectively, to retain their traditional way of life
and economic activity.  An essential policy in making this system work was
a proviso that the land must be held in common, and not divided up into
individual plots, which would inevitably be sold off to outside interests.
This system lasted up until very recently, when Chiapas became one of the
latest frontiers of NWO expansionism.

What happened is that NAFTA came along.  One of the central goals of NAFTA,
in support of U.S. agribusiness interests, was to open up Mexico as a
market for U.S. agriproducts, and to open up Mexico's farmlands for
exploitation by American agricultural operators.  President Clinton
succeeding in pressuring Mexico into abrogating the communal land policy as
a condition of adopting the NAFTA treaty.  NAFTA, a typical NWO-sponsored
initiative, spelled the doom of the indigenous way of life, and probably
death for many of the indigenous peoples.  Not only does the partitioning
of the land make the system vulnerable to dissolution, but the influx of
discounted, surplus, American agriproducts undercuts the traditional
markets served by the natives, forcing the natives to sell their land to
survive.

But that's not the end of the NWO's role in this drama.  The Chiapas
Indians rose to protect their human rights and to resist this onslaught
against them.   Together with sympathetic allies from the rest of Mexico,
they organized themselves under the banner "Zapatistas" and began active
resistance.  The Mexican government was somewhat hesitant in responding to
this situation.  It didn't want to spark more widespread resistance through
precipitous suppression, and it didn't want to suffer damage to its
international reputation.  But at the same time, it had no intention of
backing out of its NAFTA commitments.

So into the fray came Riordan Roett, advisor to Chase Manhattan Bank,
writing a memo which includes, ominously:

       "While Chiapas, in our opinion, does not pose a fundamental threat
        to Mexican political stability, it is perceived to be so by many
        in the investment community.  The government will need to eliminate
        the Zapatistas to demonstrate their effective control of the national
        territory and of security policy."

As reported by Ken Silverstein and Alexander Cockburn in Counterpunch,
February 1, 1995, "Major U.S. Bank Urges Zapatista Wipe-Out: 'A litmus test
for Mexico's stability'", this statement was incorporated by the bank into
its Jan. 13 1995 "Political Update on Mexico," and serves as a green light
to encourage military suppression of those who are fighting to retain their
way of life.  Here we see the whole pattern of NWO operations in microcosm.
We see the sociopathic amorality of this multinational bank in its
cold-blooded decision that "elimination" of a group of people is the
rational action to be taken when corporate investments are at risk.  We see
the undermining of Mexican sovereignty by NWO-sponsored treaties and
dictates from the NWO financial community.  And we see that human rights
carries no weight in the NWO balance sheet.

Ultimately the prime movers of the NWO -- both individual and corporate --
must bear responsibility for the excesses of their operatives and client
states, whether intended or not, especially when the practices continue
year after year.  In a case such that in Chiapas, the chain of
responsibility and intention turns out to be very short indeed.

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                Wexford, Ireland (USA citizen)
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