Dissidents have been much in the news after the dramatic rescue of the blind Chinese civil-rights activist Chen Guangcheng.
"The international commotion," Samuel Moyn wrote in The New York Times last month, "aroused memories of earlier dissidents like Andrei D. Sakharov and Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, the Eastern bloc heroes of another age who first made 'international human rights' a rallying cry for activists across the globe and a high-profile item on Western governments' agendas."
Moyn is the author of "The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History," released in 2010. In The New York Times Book Review, Belinda Cooper questioned Moyn's tracing the contemporary prominence of these ideals to "(President Jimmy) Carter's abortive steps to inject human rights into foreign policy and the 1975 Helsinki accords with the Soviet Union," focusing on abuses in the Soviet sphere. She finds Moyn's thesis unpersuasive because "an alternative history to his own is far too easy to construct."
True enough: The obvious alternative is the one that James Peck provides, which the mainstream can hardly consider, though the relevant facts are strikingly clear and known at least to scholarship.
Thus in the "Cambridge History of the Cold War," John Coatsworth recalls that from 1960 to "the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites." But being non-atrocities, these crimes, substantially traceable to U.S. intervention, didn't inspire a human-rights crusade.
Also inspired by the Chen rescue, New York Times columnist Bill Keller writes that "Dissidents are heroic," but they can be "irritants to American diplomats who have important business to transact with countries that don't share our values." Keller criticizes Washington for sometimes failing to live up to our values with prompt action when others commit crimes.
There is no shortage of heroic dissidents within the domains of U.S. influence and power, but they are as invisible as the Latin American victims. Looking almost at random around the world, we find Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, co-founder of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, now facing death in prison from a long hunger strike.
And Father Mun Jeong-hyeon, the elderly Korean priest who was severely injured while holding mass as part of the protest against the construction of a U.S. naval base on Jeju Island, named an Island of Peace, now occupied by security forces for the first time since the 1948 massacres by the U.S.-imposed South Korean government.
And Turkish scholar Ismail Besikci, facing trial again for defending the rights of Kurds. He already has spent much of his life in prison on the same charge, including the 1990s, when the Clinton administration was providing Turkey with huge quantities of military aid -- at a time when the Turkish military perpetrated some of the period's worst atrocities.
But these instances are all nonexistent, on standard principles, along with others too numerous to mention.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
3
3
2
