Carter may have done some decent things after he left the presidency. But his policies probably set the stage for a lot of the awfulness in our situations now. Whenever I see nice quotes about the importance of safety for girls and women, or any other obviously decent thing I wonder how if his actual practice my undermine his rhetoric the way his "Human Rights Administration" policies undermined the images of his presidency? I wonder if all of his statements make him look good just because we, or the journalists we read never got around to commenting as was once feared: "
Sooner or later, some journalists might comment on the fact that the “human rights administration” is indeed “adding blatant hypocrisy to earlier malevolence,” as Thomas Franck had warned" (Thomas M. Franck, Professor of Law at New York University Law School witnessed the Congressional Hearings regarding Carter's policies toward Indonesia and East Timor. This episode is in
The Political Economy of Human Rights: Vol. 1, The Washington Connection by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman)...
Radical Priorities (1981) excperpt
.> Perhaps the most striking feature of the new Administration is the role played in it by the Trilateral Commission. The mass media had little to say about this matter during the Presidential campaign — in fact, the connection of the Carter group to the Commission was recently selected as “the best censored news story of 1976” — and it has not received the attention that it might have since the Administration took office. All of the top positions in the government — the office of President, Vice-President, Secretary of State, Defense and Treasury — are held by members of the Trilateral Commission, and the National Security Advisor was its director. Many lesser officials also came from this group. It is rare for such an easily identified private group to play such a prominent role in an American Administration.
.> The Trilateral Commission was founded at the initiative of David Rockefeller in 1973. Its members are drawn from the three components of the world of capitalist democracy: the United States, Western Europe, and Japan. Among them are the heads of major corporations and banks, partners in corporate law firms, Senators, Professors of international affairs — the familiar mix in extra-governmental groupings. Along with the 1940s project of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), directed by a committed “trilateralist” and with numerous links to the Commission, the project constitutes the first major effort at global planning since the War-Peace Studies program of the CFR during World War II.
.> “In an absent-minded way the United States in Vietnam may well have stumbled upon the answer to ‘wars of national liberation.'” The answer is “forced-draft urbanization and modernization.” Explaining this concept, he observes that if direct application of military force in the countryside “takes place on such a massive scale as to produce a massive migration from countryside to city” then the “Maoist-inspired rural revolution may be “undercut by the American-sponsored urban revolution.” The Viet Cong, he wrote, is “a powerful force which cannot be dislodged from its constituency so long as the constituency continues to exist.” Thus “in the immediate future” peace must “be based on accommodation” particularly since the US is unwilling to undertake the “expensive, time consuming and frustrating task” of ensuring that the constituency of the Viet Cong no longer exists (he was wrong about that, as the Nixon-Kissinger programs of rural massacre were to show). “Accommodation” as conceived by Huntington is a process whereby the Viet Cong “degenerate into the protest of a declining rural minority” while the regime imposed by US force maintains power. A year later, when it appeared that “urbanization” by military force was not succeeding and it seemed that the United States might be compelled to enter into negotiations with the NLF [National Liberation Front] (which he recognized to be “the most powerful purely political national organization”), Huntington, in a paper delivered before the AID-supported Council on Vietnamese Studies which he had headed, proposed various measures of political trickery and manipulation that might be used to achieve the domination of the U.S.-imposed government, though the discussants felt rather pessimistic about the prospects
.> Ithiel Pool (then chairman of the Department of Political Science at MIT), who explained some years ago that in Vietnam, the Congo, and the Dominican Republic, “order depends on somehow compelling newly mobilized strata to return to a measure of passivity and defeatism… At least temporarily the maintenance of order requires a lowering of newly acquired aspirations and levels of political activity.” The Trilateral recommendations for the capitalist democracies are an application at home of the theories of “order” developed for subject societies of the Third World.
.> As Huntington observes, “Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers,” a rare acknowledgement of the realities of political power in the United States. But by the mid-1960s this was no longer possible since “the sources of power in society had diversified tremendously,” the “most notable new source of power” being the media.
.> Intellectuals come in two varieties, according to the trilateral analysis. The “technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals” are to be admired for their unquestioning obedience to power and their services in social management, while the “value-oriented intellectuals” must be despised and feared for the serious challenge they pose to democratic government, by “unmasking and delegitimatization of established institutions.”
.> The authors do not claim that what the value-oriented intellectuals write and say is false. Such categories as “truth” and “honesty” do not fall within the province of the apparatchiks. The point is that their work of “unmasking and delegitimatization” is a threat to democracy when popular participation in politics is causing “a breakdown of traditional means of social control.” They “challenge the existing structures of authority” and even the effectiveness of “those institutions which have played the major role in the indoctrination of the young.” Along with “privatistic youth” who challenge the work ethic in its traditional form, they endanger democracy, whether or not their critique is well-founded. No student of modern history will fail to recognize this voice.
.> How do we return to the good old days when “Truman, Acheson, Forrestal, Marshall, Harriman, and Lovett” could unite on a policy of global intervention and domestic militarism as our “common purpose,” with no interference from the undisciplined rabble?
.> The crucial task is “to restore the prestige and authority of central government institutions, and to grapple with the immediate economic challenges.” The demands on government must be reduced and we must “restore a more equitable relationship between government authority and popular control.” The press must be reined. If the media do not enforce “standards of professionalism,” then “the alternative could well be regulation by the government” — a distinction without a difference, since the policy-oriented and technocratic intellectuals, the commissars themselves, are the ones who will fix these standards and determine how well they are respected. Higher education should be related “to economic and political goals,” and if it is offered to the masses, “a program is then necessary to lower the job expectations of those who receive a college education.” No challenge to capitalist institutions can be considered, but measures should be taken to improve working conditions and work organization so that workers will not resort to “irresponsible blackmailing tactics.” In general, the prerogatives of the nobility must be restored and the peasants reduced to the apathy that becomes them.
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