Human Rights: Not A Partisan Issue

Do you have a favorite right-wing spouter of nonsense? Someone who particularly appalls you? I have to admit that there's one right-wing pundit who gets to me more than most, even though he's nowhere near the worst of them. So I'd like to occasionally and recurringly take issue on these virtual pages with Jay Nordlinger at National Review, who writes a column called "Impromptus," basically an excuse for him to smear Democrats and liberals in general without bothering to understand anything about their positions. I think it might be a good idea if other liberal bloggers were to "adopt" a right winger to dispute on a regular basis. The right so completely dominates political discourse in this country that we ought to take focused measures when we can. And as I wrote in my Michael Moore book, "The left has been almost criminally negligent in fact-checking the right; the right has been absolutely vigilant in fact-checking the left."

Not that there's anything wrong with the right fact-checking the left - so long as the right-wingers are really talking about facts. I always welcome an honest correction.

Before we get to the heart of the matter, let's start with some of Nordlinger's more harmless and laughable points. He recently wrote,

Bill Clinton and his people invented the "permanent campaign." They never stopped campaigning, even after they were elected (twice). They rejoiced in this phrase, and concept: "the permanent campaign." The idea was to wage political war all the time. There was no real difference between governing and campaigning. You simply stayed on Republican throats, the entire time.

This is something that, for better or worse, George W. Bush and his people do not do -- they do not permanently campaign. They campaigned in 2000 and again in 2004. After elections, they largely go about the business of government...

Nordlinger has to be kidding here, right? Right? The most viciously partisan administration in human memory doesn't campaign between elections? Whereas the Clinton administration "stayed on Republican throats, the entire time"? That's not how I remember it. I remember ceaseless Republican propaganda and obstructionism against the Clinton administration, including the refusal to confirm dozens of Clinton's quite moderate judicial nominees, accompanied by political opportunism; innumerable phony scandals like Whitewater (which even the forthrightly partisan Special Prosecutor Ken Starr had to admit in the end, in his conspicuous lack of recommendations on Whitewater charges, amounted to nothing); which culminated in an actual impeachment, for crying out loud, which was, in effect, an attempt at an extra-constitutional coup (or else lying about consensual sex acts between adults, even under oath, really does meet the constitutional standard for "high crimes and misdemeanors.") As for the present time, never mind that Bush consigliere Karl Rove simultaneously held political and policy advisorships, a sterling indication, if any were needed, of how the Bush people view these things as inseparable; or that the administration has been caught planting "news" stories with what turn out to be paid ad agencies or columnists; or that it spends almost twice as much on paid public relations as the Clinton administration did ($62.5 million of your taxpayer dollars per year, as against $32 million under Clinton. Source: Committee on Government Reform, US House of Representatives, as quoted in Harpers' Index, Harpers' Magazine, May 2005.)

But I feel silly even addressing the question of whether the Clinton or Bush administration was or is the more partisan. The question is so ridiculous, so otherworldly.

Let's get on to more serious matters. One of Nordlinger's favorite ways to use his column is to pretend that liberals are totalitarian communists: that liberals in general worship Castro, the murderous Che Guevara, that we thought of the former Soviet Union and its captive satellites with admiration and respect: In his latest column, Nordlinger refers sarcastically to East Germany as a "socialist paradise" and remarks, "People forget how East Germany was praised in 'liberal' circles. I have not. Herr Honecker was thought to have achieved a fine social justice, little seen either in the 'capitalist' camp or the communist one."

Umm, what exactly were those "liberal circles" that were saying such nice things about Honecker's Stalinist prison state? Sure, there were some undergraduate fanatics (Nordlinger never tires of reminding us that he grew up in Ann Arbor), some ignorant hippies, and of course the slavish CPUSA; and there were the proudly wacko outfits like the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Spartacists, for whom Honecker didn't go far enough (the RCP admired Mao's insanity.) But who were the normal, small-d democrats of both parties, the thoughtful, politically engaged, mainstream liberals (the enormous majority of those who would have called themselves such, which emphatically did not include the members of the RCP) who praised Castro or Honecker? I'd be interested to hear. I don't know any of them, and I know a lot of liberals.

It is indeed a travesty that so many foolish young people wear Che Guevara T-shirts. How many people over twenty-five wear them? I read this as evidence that these younger people really don't know anything about the actual person behind the image they are choosing, an image of anodyne, symbolic rebellion rather than of any political program; and that older people, those who come to consider themselves engaged political liberals, shy away from totalitarian symbols with disgust - precisely because totalitarianism, whether represented by the gulags of Guevara or Honecker, the cruel fanaticism of Islam, or the contempt for constitutional government expressed by George W. Bush, is the utter opposite of everything that political liberalism stands for.

What's even more offensive about Nordlinger is his selective regard for human rights. He's tireless in his advocacy of political prisoners in Cuba or China (and more power to him here; he's absolutely right and righteous to take up their causes) yet he utterly ignores any political prisoners held by right-wing regimes, or regimes allied with the United States. What about the dreadful human rights record of Uzbekistan? Not a word about political prisoners held there; Uzbekistan has important military agreements with the United States. What about Pakistan's raids on democracy advocates and even its covert aid to Islamic radicals through its Inter-Services Intelligence agency? Nordlinger has positively drooled over Pakistan's military dictator Pervez Musharraf. And he considers Amnesty International, the respected human rights reporting agency, to be hopelessly biased because it dares to take notice of American human rights violations along with those of much worse offenders like North Korea and Cuba. I don't think Amnesty ever has or ever would argue that American violations are anywhere near as bad as, say, Saudi Arabia's (much less North Korea's). But does this mean, should it mean, that we get a free pass?

And not one word from Nordlinger about Israel's numerous human rights violations. I hasten to add that I am no enemy of Israel, and that I am disgusted by the vicious political attacks on Israel from too many in the West, which (despite the repeated mantra from such people that "we are not anti-Jewish, we are anti-Israel") are too often, because of the obvious double-standard, precisely anti-Jewish. I would never pretend that Israel's human rights violations are as egregious as those of its Arab and Muslim neighbors. But does this mean, again, that Israel gets a free pass? Apparently Nordlinger thinks to.

Nordlinger has written with disgust about acts of terrorism on behalf of left-wing causes, as he should; I have no problem with this. What about acts of terrorism on behalf of right-wing causes? For all the noise that Nordlinger and his confederates at National Review made about the questionable Clinton pardons, did he or they ever write about George H. W. Bush's pardon of Orlando Bosch, a terrorist who, in 1976, blew up a Cuban airliner with seventy-six people on board? To his credit, Nordlinger did once refer to Bosch as a "(right wing) terrorist" - but that's as far as he'll go, no condemnation of the man or the pardon.

I have no doubt that Nordlinger most sincerely believes himself to be a die-hard defender of human rights. But by his selectivity, he has shown that he is not; that it is not the question of human rights - of the pain and suffering inflicted on people of honor and conviction all over the world, from all across the political spectrum, simply as a reaction to their political beliefs - that moves Nordlinger. No, his is a political stance, a partisan agenda. And if he is willing to so callously dispense with the reality of those who suffer for their beliefs when these sufferers disagree with him politically, in what sense is he more noble, more thoughtful, more concerned with humanity than were his callow college comrades of long ago, those who put up iconic posters of mass murderers like Guevara and Mao on their dorm room walls?

I think it's a shame that Nordlinger, no matter what good work he has done on human rights issues in Cuba and China, so demeans the larger issue of human rights with his dedication to politics. I wish he could realize this. But then, he believes that George W. Bush is a fine and upstanding man, an honest man, a man of great character. What degree of willful blindness is necessary here? How could I expect a decent and humane outlook from someone so desperate for the comforts of ideology?

Comments

[Herrington]

The mining of right wing rhetoric for errors is probably justified and even sporting. Rush can infuriate me by taking a breath, because I know that this breath will power a lie as surely as beans cause gas.

But to determine the efficacy of trading barbs with the right, examine propaganda wars. Did propaganda bring down the Soviet Union or did the fallacies in its confirmation? Did Goebbels win WWII with propaganda or just insure the eventual ruin of the Reich he sought to build? Has Rove created a permanent Republican majority or so filled the American public with loathing that his president is among the most despised that there ever has been? The short answer is that actions and outcomes speak louder than words, especially if the words do not reflect the reality of the outcomes.

Also, consider organized religion, that the parable and psalm were consciously made to assuage doubt. How long would a religion last if it did not adhere to a strict regimen of indoctrination and conditioning to accept that which it is not possible to prove?

In arguing with the right wing, it almost literally like walking into a church and delivering a sermon discrediting every tome of faith in which they have been conditioned to believe without question. It is futile. You might be able to pick off a stray here and there but your message will be met by the full authority of a denial machine with centuries of practice at denial.

It may be that his election will turn on picking off a few strays. Fine. But a future worth considering cannot be reached through nattering on points of fact that are lost on people who do not care about fact. Don"t meticulously study poll tested sound bites. Inspire. Reach into your soul and say what it is that you most want to say, and political consequences be damned. The passion that burns in your heart is what drives the fair, the honest and the charitable deeds of all history. That truth in you is as implacable as the tides. Lies destroy.