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Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-opted Human Rights
From a noted historian and foreign-policy analyst, a groundbreaking critique of the troubling symbiosis between Washington and the human rights movement The United States has long been hailed as a powerful force for global human rights. Now, drawing on thousands of documents from the CIA, the National Security Council, the Pentagon, and development agencies, James Peck shows in blunt detail how Washington has shaped human rights into a potent ideological weapon for purposes having little to do with rights—and everything to do with furthering America's global reach. Using the words of Washington's leaders when they are speaking among themselves, Peck tracks the rise of human rights from its dismissal in the cold war years as "fuzzy minded" to its calculated adoption, after the Vietnam War, as a rationale for American foreign engagement. He considers such milestones as the fight for Soviet dissidents, Tiananmen Square, and today's war on terror, exposing in the process how the human rights movement has too often failed to challenge Washington's strategies. A gripping and elegant work of analysis, Ideal Illusions argues that the movement must break free from Washington if it is to develop a truly uncompromising critique of power in all its forms.
384 pages, Hardcover
First published March 15, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 17, 2020
"I'm here only for the good I can do."
So said the corrupt Ottoman official in Elia Kazan's film, "America, America." James Peck shows the patronizing mentality of the master class remains unchanged through all the permutations of the 20th century. I can recall when "human rights" was considered the catchphrase of leftist and libertarian cranks, to be brushed aside by knowing pragmatists dealing with the Real World. Peck outlines how international human rights ideals, and the civil rights movement at home, became ideological tools in the global arsenal of the Cold War; and continue as "weapons of mass justification" in spreading US hegemony to new frontiers.
But it seems Peck has taken a rather narrow, postwar/cold war view of the subject. Nothing was substantially different about this rhetoric from its imperial predecessors. Subduing the Boxers in China, ending the African slave trade, freeing Cuba from Spain, bringing Christian enlightenment and "good government" to lost heathens everywhere - all of this was justified in the broadest religious and humanitarian terms of Western idealism for their generation. And there was always the divide between "good imperialism" and "bad imperialism" - exemplied by the contest between the Atlantic Powers and fascism, continued with scarcely a blink in the internal and external cold war with the "communist empire." Men in the US Government like the Dulles Brothers encompassed the entire era with no sense of contradiction.
Peck also glosses over the differences between Carter and Reagan in their human rights promotion. Reagan was a late convert to the idea, most notably by avoiding the rescue of Ferdinand Marcos in the "Peoples' Power" Yellow Revolution of the Philippines - much against the Gipper's first reaction. Even so there was little pretense of even-handedness: the likes of Patricia Derian would never be found in Reagan's administration. His first cabinet consisted entirely of hardliners who preferred military confrontation, for whom Carter's human rights rhetoric was pure sissiness. The growth of the human rights industry made it an unavoidable asset even to die-hard reactionaries.
As another reviewer suggests, the focus on individual human rights, at the expense of social rights, is a legacy of the eighteenth century's "bourgeois revolutions." The middle class individual citizen was the highest expression of human evolution; freeing him from all external constraints (and social responsibilities) in asserting his ego identity the endgame of "good government." Peck demonstrates how this became a rationalization for the rich and powerful, where - as in so much else - one has all the human rights one can afford. Instructive also is how rights rhetoric is continuously employed as a justification for mass bombing, as in the former Yugoslavia, for ending "genocide"; in Afghanistan, in the name of "womens' rights"; or for gutting social safety nets as part of one's "freedom to choose."
It's also ironic how the "communist empire" lost its side of the cold war by abandoning its earlier social missionary sense, settling into the corruptions of power, and finally capitulating to the competition. Thus modern triumphalist pundits pontificate on the "inevitable collapse" of a "failed system." Yet there seemed nothing inevitable about said collapse to the cold war crafters of ideas. Their rivals instead seemed marching from success to victory across the nations and mens' minds. It was the West, so they worried, that was intellectually flabby, uninspiring, being left behind.
Peck also writes that enlightened criticism of past mistakes only reinforces the continued employment of the same methods with the same results. Empires never "learn the lessons" of their Vietnams: they can't admit the fundamental conflict of interest between power and justice without political suicide. Empires which finally do - like Britain or Gorby's USSR - are in "decay", exiting the stage of history. As long as the US can dress aggression and greed in Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes of doing good, of "humanitarian intervention," admitting that it has yet to live up to its ideals, the illusions of empire are in place; and the empire itself safe from them.
So said the corrupt Ottoman official in Elia Kazan's film, "America, America." James Peck shows the patronizing mentality of the master class remains unchanged through all the permutations of the 20th century. I can recall when "human rights" was considered the catchphrase of leftist and libertarian cranks, to be brushed aside by knowing pragmatists dealing with the Real World. Peck outlines how international human rights ideals, and the civil rights movement at home, became ideological tools in the global arsenal of the Cold War; and continue as "weapons of mass justification" in spreading US hegemony to new frontiers.
But it seems Peck has taken a rather narrow, postwar/cold war view of the subject. Nothing was substantially different about this rhetoric from its imperial predecessors. Subduing the Boxers in China, ending the African slave trade, freeing Cuba from Spain, bringing Christian enlightenment and "good government" to lost heathens everywhere - all of this was justified in the broadest religious and humanitarian terms of Western idealism for their generation. And there was always the divide between "good imperialism" and "bad imperialism" - exemplied by the contest between the Atlantic Powers and fascism, continued with scarcely a blink in the internal and external cold war with the "communist empire." Men in the US Government like the Dulles Brothers encompassed the entire era with no sense of contradiction.
Peck also glosses over the differences between Carter and Reagan in their human rights promotion. Reagan was a late convert to the idea, most notably by avoiding the rescue of Ferdinand Marcos in the "Peoples' Power" Yellow Revolution of the Philippines - much against the Gipper's first reaction. Even so there was little pretense of even-handedness: the likes of Patricia Derian would never be found in Reagan's administration. His first cabinet consisted entirely of hardliners who preferred military confrontation, for whom Carter's human rights rhetoric was pure sissiness. The growth of the human rights industry made it an unavoidable asset even to die-hard reactionaries.
As another reviewer suggests, the focus on individual human rights, at the expense of social rights, is a legacy of the eighteenth century's "bourgeois revolutions." The middle class individual citizen was the highest expression of human evolution; freeing him from all external constraints (and social responsibilities) in asserting his ego identity the endgame of "good government." Peck demonstrates how this became a rationalization for the rich and powerful, where - as in so much else - one has all the human rights one can afford. Instructive also is how rights rhetoric is continuously employed as a justification for mass bombing, as in the former Yugoslavia, for ending "genocide"; in Afghanistan, in the name of "womens' rights"; or for gutting social safety nets as part of one's "freedom to choose."
It's also ironic how the "communist empire" lost its side of the cold war by abandoning its earlier social missionary sense, settling into the corruptions of power, and finally capitulating to the competition. Thus modern triumphalist pundits pontificate on the "inevitable collapse" of a "failed system." Yet there seemed nothing inevitable about said collapse to the cold war crafters of ideas. Their rivals instead seemed marching from success to victory across the nations and mens' minds. It was the West, so they worried, that was intellectually flabby, uninspiring, being left behind.
Peck also writes that enlightened criticism of past mistakes only reinforces the continued employment of the same methods with the same results. Empires never "learn the lessons" of their Vietnams: they can't admit the fundamental conflict of interest between power and justice without political suicide. Empires which finally do - like Britain or Gorby's USSR - are in "decay", exiting the stage of history. As long as the US can dress aggression and greed in Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes of doing good, of "humanitarian intervention," admitting that it has yet to live up to its ideals, the illusions of empire are in place; and the empire itself safe from them.
February 21, 2014
Phương Tây có một cụm từ để nói về nhân quyền rất hay ho đấy là: Nghành công nghiệp nhân quyền (human rights industry).
Giống như những nghành công nghiệp khác, nghành công nghiệp nhân quyền cũng sẽ có ưu tiên phát triển sản phẩm, định hướng tiêu dùng. Các ông lớn đã biến nghành công nghiệp nhân quyền thành nghành công nghiệp mũi nhọn đi chinh phục thế giới như thế nào? Ví như họ cắt bỏ quyền lao động/các tổ chức công đoàn, gạt quyền bình đẳng kinh tế ra khỏi nghành sản xuất của mình thế nào thì không phải ai cũng biết, bởi mọi người sinh ra vốn có quyền bình đẳng, chỉ là luôn luôn có một số ít người bình đẳng hơn những người còn lại ak ak.
Ngoài chuyện về kích động nhân dân, ủng hộ chiến tranh, nghành công nghiệp nhân quyền còn gì nữa đọc sách là biết. Các ông lớn trong nghành công nghiệp nhân quyền như tổ chức ân xá quốc tế, human rights watch hay ACLU... đang làm giàu cho những ai, đem lợi ích đi phân phối ở đâu, bị những thế lực nào tác động, bị những ai chi phối có lẽ cuốn sách sẽ giải đáp khá đầy đủ.
Giống như những nghành công nghiệp khác, nghành công nghiệp nhân quyền cũng sẽ có ưu tiên phát triển sản phẩm, định hướng tiêu dùng. Các ông lớn đã biến nghành công nghiệp nhân quyền thành nghành công nghiệp mũi nhọn đi chinh phục thế giới như thế nào? Ví như họ cắt bỏ quyền lao động/các tổ chức công đoàn, gạt quyền bình đẳng kinh tế ra khỏi nghành sản xuất của mình thế nào thì không phải ai cũng biết, bởi mọi người sinh ra vốn có quyền bình đẳng, chỉ là luôn luôn có một số ít người bình đẳng hơn những người còn lại ak ak.
Ngoài chuyện về kích động nhân dân, ủng hộ chiến tranh, nghành công nghiệp nhân quyền còn gì nữa đọc sách là biết. Các ông lớn trong nghành công nghiệp nhân quyền như tổ chức ân xá quốc tế, human rights watch hay ACLU... đang làm giàu cho những ai, đem lợi ích đi phân phối ở đâu, bị những thế lực nào tác động, bị những ai chi phối có lẽ cuốn sách sẽ giải đáp khá đầy đủ.
June 9, 2012
I loved the various perspectives from which the author approached the idea of human rights and they ways in which the American government manipulates politics around them (or them around politics). It was easy to read and follow, with great examples, both contemporary and historical, to demonstrate his points.
September 12, 2020
Amazingly sourced and bravely detailed. I only wish some parts were more in depth, and maybe spent more time laying out the thesis of the evolution of human rights intervention but maybe that’s just the material being convoluted to begin with. Overall, extremely important read and so many good sources to dive into (CIA/NSC docs etc).
July 5, 2021
Such a good book. Dissects the Western/US monopoly on what is classified as rights, who is entitled to them, and how/why those answers are designed to/aligned with American hegemony.
Some select insights from a book full of them:
"From the earliest years of the Cold War, Washington predicated its war of ideas on a set of deep divisions: between freedom and equality, reform and revolution, self-interest and collective interests, the free market and state planning, and pluralistic democracy and mass mobilization. American human rights leaders largely, if unknowingly, built on this divide. They usually felt more at ease associating human rights with civil rights and political freedoms, the individual, the market, and pluralistic openness, while seeing the perils in revolution and concentrations of state power. They preferred not to dwell on what might compel populations, as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights warned, “to rebellion against tyranny and oppression”; nor did they acknowledge that it often takes militant mass movements, both violent and nonviolent, to pressure states and powerful interests into acquiescing to programs promoting greater social justice. They considered the struggle for human rights largely apart from peace movements and efforts toward disarmament and the banning of nuclear weaponry, and they took no stand on issues of war and aggression. They mostly viewed resistance movements through the prism of individual rights rather than considering the role of resistance and mass mobilizations in the creation and nourishment of rights."
"For most human rights leaders today, the long travails of decolonialization and revolution and the search for alternatives to market driven economic development represent little more than the backwaters of old Cold War battles that were hardly about rights at all. One looks almost in vain for accounts that show how Western power long subordinated the development of the Southern Hemisphere to its own needs and desires, how challenges in the non-Western world propelled the development of human rights laws and ideas, and how mass mobilizations broke the Gordian knot of colonialism and liberalism. Nor do human rights textbooks devote many pages to the great mass movements—not even the civil rights movement in the United States or the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa.5 The major studies of human rights law spend their time instead debating how to enforce UN pronouncements and covenants. The language of law dominates the discussion. But law is the language of institutions, courts, and politicians. The teachings of Mohandas Gandhi and King and the language of impassioned justice are notably absent."
"In effect, modernization took visionary globalism’s proclivity toward reform, orderly process, and the rule of law—its hostility to revolution and populist nationalism—and fashioned these traits into a new fighting faith against mass mobilizations. Then it added an enticing array of additional ideological arguments. Being modern implied, for example, that self interest was the most direct path to collective good; that development required full integration into an America-centered global order, rather than local control over resources and developmental patterns; that “closed societies” fueled the flames of nationalism that economically open societies assuaged."
I found this passage prescient in light of today's mass atomization, the loss of any notion of collective change or possibility, and the obsessive use of pop psychology as justification to seemingly individual antisocial behaviors/solipsism.
"In the 1950s, Albert Camus sought to appeal to the best in his time by writing The Rebel. The title in the 1990s could have been The Victim. No word better captures the spirit of the age in the United States. Human rights had become the very “language of the victim and the dispossessed,”35 commented one historian. “It harvests the hopes of the victims,”36 added another. The issue of financial compensation for crime victims had briefly emerged in American courts in the 1960s and early 1970s but quickly faded. More and more, victims’ rights came to mean the opportunity to speak out in court, a privilege compatible both with the goals of hard-line prosecutors and judges seeking more stringent punishments and those of progressives seeking to protect people in need.37 Both sides singled out the individual who has been wronged: the rape victim, the pedestrian hit by a drunk driver, the old couple robbed of their life savings, the bystander shot during a holdup. Who could be anti-victim?
The imagery was of harm individualized, atrocity narrated through the biographies of the innocent, accompanied by demands for remedies, empathy, a helping hand. As Canadian Michael Ignatieff astutely observed, this attitude was “a weary world away from the internationalism of the 1960s,” when political causes could be supported or opposed on the basis of struggles over different ways to develop societies. Now there were “no good causes left—only victims of bad causes.”38 The sentiment “I’m at one with the victims,” another writer noted, conceals a humanitarian antipolitics—“ a pure defense of the innocent and the powerless against power, a pure defense of the individual amidst immense and potentially cruel or despotic machineries of culture, state, war, ethnic conflict, tribalism, patriarchy, and other mobilizations or instantiations of collective power against individuals.”39 Political movements and mass struggles had all become tainted. Supporting victims, by contrast, was beyond causes, beyond politics.
The humanitarian spirit calls for us to be our brother’s keeper; failing to come to the aid of those in need makes us complicit in their harm. One may not be directly responsible for what is happening in the world; America may not be responsible for much of the ugliness and chaos in the world. The real complicity, from the humanitarian perspective, lies in not responding. This perspective reinforced the efforts of human rights groups to move away from an exclusive focus on state action (torture, disappearance, political imprisonment) to include, as one report put it, “the culpability of state inaction in the face of known abuses by private actors.”40
But what of situations that call on us to aid the “victims” by rebelling, as Camus once wrote, against what we have become? That the new humanitarian interventionism called for no transformative changes in the United States was an ideological gift to Washington. It demanded great changes of others, but of us only that we become the well-intentioned humanitarians we really were all along. It made Americans look everywhere except—fundamentally—at ourselves.
...
The decentralized world of NGOs made it all the more necessary to promote a common lexicon ideologically suited to Washington’s objectives. Victims became “rights holders,” humanitarians their advocates. Developmental strategies and humanitarianism were to be “people centered,” “empowering.” Out was impartial, needs-based emergency relief that respected state sovereignty; in were both aid predicated on clear legal, political, and moral judgments against abusers and rights-based development"
Some select insights from a book full of them:
"From the earliest years of the Cold War, Washington predicated its war of ideas on a set of deep divisions: between freedom and equality, reform and revolution, self-interest and collective interests, the free market and state planning, and pluralistic democracy and mass mobilization. American human rights leaders largely, if unknowingly, built on this divide. They usually felt more at ease associating human rights with civil rights and political freedoms, the individual, the market, and pluralistic openness, while seeing the perils in revolution and concentrations of state power. They preferred not to dwell on what might compel populations, as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights warned, “to rebellion against tyranny and oppression”; nor did they acknowledge that it often takes militant mass movements, both violent and nonviolent, to pressure states and powerful interests into acquiescing to programs promoting greater social justice. They considered the struggle for human rights largely apart from peace movements and efforts toward disarmament and the banning of nuclear weaponry, and they took no stand on issues of war and aggression. They mostly viewed resistance movements through the prism of individual rights rather than considering the role of resistance and mass mobilizations in the creation and nourishment of rights."
"For most human rights leaders today, the long travails of decolonialization and revolution and the search for alternatives to market driven economic development represent little more than the backwaters of old Cold War battles that were hardly about rights at all. One looks almost in vain for accounts that show how Western power long subordinated the development of the Southern Hemisphere to its own needs and desires, how challenges in the non-Western world propelled the development of human rights laws and ideas, and how mass mobilizations broke the Gordian knot of colonialism and liberalism. Nor do human rights textbooks devote many pages to the great mass movements—not even the civil rights movement in the United States or the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa.5 The major studies of human rights law spend their time instead debating how to enforce UN pronouncements and covenants. The language of law dominates the discussion. But law is the language of institutions, courts, and politicians. The teachings of Mohandas Gandhi and King and the language of impassioned justice are notably absent."
"In effect, modernization took visionary globalism’s proclivity toward reform, orderly process, and the rule of law—its hostility to revolution and populist nationalism—and fashioned these traits into a new fighting faith against mass mobilizations. Then it added an enticing array of additional ideological arguments. Being modern implied, for example, that self interest was the most direct path to collective good; that development required full integration into an America-centered global order, rather than local control over resources and developmental patterns; that “closed societies” fueled the flames of nationalism that economically open societies assuaged."
I found this passage prescient in light of today's mass atomization, the loss of any notion of collective change or possibility, and the obsessive use of pop psychology as justification to seemingly individual antisocial behaviors/solipsism.
"In the 1950s, Albert Camus sought to appeal to the best in his time by writing The Rebel. The title in the 1990s could have been The Victim. No word better captures the spirit of the age in the United States. Human rights had become the very “language of the victim and the dispossessed,”35 commented one historian. “It harvests the hopes of the victims,”36 added another. The issue of financial compensation for crime victims had briefly emerged in American courts in the 1960s and early 1970s but quickly faded. More and more, victims’ rights came to mean the opportunity to speak out in court, a privilege compatible both with the goals of hard-line prosecutors and judges seeking more stringent punishments and those of progressives seeking to protect people in need.37 Both sides singled out the individual who has been wronged: the rape victim, the pedestrian hit by a drunk driver, the old couple robbed of their life savings, the bystander shot during a holdup. Who could be anti-victim?
The imagery was of harm individualized, atrocity narrated through the biographies of the innocent, accompanied by demands for remedies, empathy, a helping hand. As Canadian Michael Ignatieff astutely observed, this attitude was “a weary world away from the internationalism of the 1960s,” when political causes could be supported or opposed on the basis of struggles over different ways to develop societies. Now there were “no good causes left—only victims of bad causes.”38 The sentiment “I’m at one with the victims,” another writer noted, conceals a humanitarian antipolitics—“ a pure defense of the innocent and the powerless against power, a pure defense of the individual amidst immense and potentially cruel or despotic machineries of culture, state, war, ethnic conflict, tribalism, patriarchy, and other mobilizations or instantiations of collective power against individuals.”39 Political movements and mass struggles had all become tainted. Supporting victims, by contrast, was beyond causes, beyond politics.
The humanitarian spirit calls for us to be our brother’s keeper; failing to come to the aid of those in need makes us complicit in their harm. One may not be directly responsible for what is happening in the world; America may not be responsible for much of the ugliness and chaos in the world. The real complicity, from the humanitarian perspective, lies in not responding. This perspective reinforced the efforts of human rights groups to move away from an exclusive focus on state action (torture, disappearance, political imprisonment) to include, as one report put it, “the culpability of state inaction in the face of known abuses by private actors.”40
But what of situations that call on us to aid the “victims” by rebelling, as Camus once wrote, against what we have become? That the new humanitarian interventionism called for no transformative changes in the United States was an ideological gift to Washington. It demanded great changes of others, but of us only that we become the well-intentioned humanitarians we really were all along. It made Americans look everywhere except—fundamentally—at ourselves.
...
The decentralized world of NGOs made it all the more necessary to promote a common lexicon ideologically suited to Washington’s objectives. Victims became “rights holders,” humanitarians their advocates. Developmental strategies and humanitarianism were to be “people centered,” “empowering.” Out was impartial, needs-based emergency relief that respected state sovereignty; in were both aid predicated on clear legal, political, and moral judgments against abusers and rights-based development"
January 31, 2025
It is a must-read, an infuriating read, for anyone interested in the topic. Peck brings the receipts and lays things out clearly; you don't need to be an expert on international human rights issues. Highly recommended.
June 15, 2024
What exactly are human rights… well maybe we should first decide what is HUMAN. Will that be like the 1 drop rule and will the truth aka FACTs be kept from the USA because they cannot even manage the Current ‘Accepted’ 5 Races.
What will Saartjie Baartman be considered? Why have we not tested her DNA or have we?
What exactly does “Genetically Divergent from other Humans” mean….exactly!
What will Saartjie Baartman be considered? Why have we not tested her DNA or have we?
What exactly does “Genetically Divergent from other Humans” mean….exactly!
November 1, 2011
Long. Interesting. A lot of information. May buy when it comes out on paperback to re-read.
September 26, 2014
Amazing look at the foreign policy of the US and the failure of the human rights industry to adequately deal with "humanitarian issues."
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews