Amnesty International is U.S. State Department Propaganda

[webglider]

This is pretty shocking news to me. I always thought Amnesty International were the good guys.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=32444

There are too many pictures to copy and paste otherwise I would have reproduced it here.

 

[Voyageur]

This is pretty shocking news to me. I always thought Amnesty International were the good guys.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=32444

There are too many pictures to copy and paste otherwise I would have reproduced it here.

Became aware of the article also on SotT. Fwiw, think the lessons Andrew Lobaczewski laid out concerning ponerization, clearly mark organizations; who might have started with different intents, to become at some levels co-opted for political, commercial and social reasons. Amnesty, being a proponent of human rights, pointing out atrocities and such, with a wide following, would never be far from the eyes of those conducting foreign policy, and as such marked. There are likely a great many well intentioned people in AI who care and a few with ulterior motives. As such, am reminded about those who move to the top and how convincing they can be to the many.

 

[Don Genaro]

This is pretty shocking news to me. I always thought Amnesty International were the good guys.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=32444

There are too many pictures to copy and paste otherwise I would have reproduced it here.

Became aware of the article also on SotT. Fwiw, think the lessons Andrew Lobaczewski laid out concerning ponerization, clearly mark organizations; who might have started with different intents, to become at some levels co-opted for political, commercial and social reasons. Amnesty, being a proponent of human rights, pointing out atrocities and such, with a wide following, would never be far from the eyes of those conducting foreign policy, and as such marked. There are likely a great many well intentioned people in AI who care and a few with ulterior motives. As such, am reminded about those who move to the top and how convincing they can be to the many.

When I saw this thread I immediately thought of Naomi Klein and what she wrote about Amnesty International in "Shock Doctrine." I found this article which discusses it: _http://invisiblecollege.weblog.leidenuniv.nl/2008/01/28/naomi-klein-on-the-why-of-human-rights-v

The basic premise of the book, which I will not get into here, is that the shock, confusion and dislocation caused by natural disasters (like Katrina), wars (Iraq or the Falklands), coups (Pinochet in Chile, Suharto in Indonesia, etc.) or economic crises (like the kind gripping Eastern Europe after the fall of communism and the whole developing world during the 1980s) have provided fertile grounds for the implementation of extreme right-wing economic policies by alert and opportunistic ideologues and powerful interests. In the chapter "Entirely Unrelated" Klein explores how the restricted domain of analysis of the international human rights movement in the 1960s (to this day) resulted that "an ideology was cleansed of its crimes." She points out that Milton Friedman, the main intellectual force behind the economic policy and personnel of the dictatorial regimes of Chile and Argentina, won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1976; a year later Amnesty International won the Nobel Peace Prize largely for its work exposing the human rights abuses in Chile and Argentina. She writes:
From afar, however, it seemed as if, with the two Nobel prizes, the most prestigious jury in the world had issued its verdict: the shock of the torture chamber was to be forceful condemned, but the economic shock treatments were to be applauded - and the two forms of shock were, as [Orlando] Letelier had written with dripping irony, "entirely unrelated."

Another strange contradiction of this period was that the Ford Foundation spent $30 million during the seventies and eighties devoted to human rights in Latin America, while the economists dominating these governments had their education and training largely funded by... the Ford Foundation. She writes:
After the left in those countries had been obliterated by regimes that Ford had helped shape, it was none other than Ford that funded a new generation of crusading lawyers dedicated to freeing the hundreds of thousands of political prisoners being held by those same regimes...Given its own highly compromised history, it is hardly surprising that when Ford dived into human rights, it defined the field as narrowly as possible. The foundation strongly favoured groups that framed their work as legalistic struggles for the "rule of law," "transparency" and "good governance." As one Ford Foundation officer put it, the organization's attitude in Chile was, "How can we do this and not get involved in politics?"... The foundation's decision to get involved in human rights but "not get involved in politics" created a context in which it was all but impossible to ask the question underlying the violence it was documenting: Why was it happening, in whose interests?

But Amnesty International to this day proclaims principles of independence and impartiality on its website :

We have a number of safeguards in place to protect our autonomy. We are: * Independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion * Democratic and self-governing * Financially self-sufficient, thanks to the generous support of donations provided by individual members and supporters We do not support or oppose any government or political system and neither do we necessarily support or oppose the views of the victims/survivors or human rights defenders whose rights we seek to protect.

While I think there is a role for a human rights watchdog that strives to be as non-political as possible, I think Naomi Klein is right to point out the deficiencies of this approach. When human rights violations are documented and condemned without any analysis of the raison-d'etre, we invariably end up with the impression that either (a)these are just random acts of violence, or (b)there are truly evil people in the world. This is problematic from both an intellectual and a practical point of view. From an intellectual point of view, focusing on human rights and their violation in a purely formal or legal sense abstracts from the political economy that governs the use of power and force in the first place. This greatly impoverishes our understanding of history and conflict. In some cases, this leads to the perception that human rights violations are carried out as part of a struggle for survival between mortal enemies - the national defense and security rationale for imprisoning, torturing, disappearing and executing enemies of the state. This justification of the use of force is usually only a veil, masking a deeper struggle for power and resources. The economic ideology underlying the massive repression carried out throughout Latin America and elsewhere has escaped condemnation precisely because it has convinced the world that the facts of human rights violations (such as the imprisonment or disappearance of union leaders and left-wing journalists) are distinct from the questions of why they occur and for whose benefit.

 

[webglider]

Quote from: webglider on August 22, 2012, 08:14:57 PM

This is pretty shocking news to me. I always thought Amnesty International were the good guys.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=32444

There are too many pictures to copy and paste otherwise I would have reproduced it here.

Quote from voyageur on August 22, 2912

Became aware of the article also on SotT. Fwiw, think the lessons Andrew Lobaczewski laid out concerning ponerization, clearly mark organizations; who might have started with different intents, to become at some levels co-opted for political, commercial and social reasons. Amnesty, being a proponent of human rights, pointing out atrocities and such, with a wide following, would never be far from the eyes of those conducting foreign policy, and as such marked. There are likely a great many well intentioned people in AI who care and a few with ulterior motives. As such, am reminded about those who move to the top and how convincing they can be to the many.

Thank you voyageur for reminding of how ponerized has become. Viewed through this lens, it makes perfect sense that Amnesty International would be infiltrated.

This is probably the work of those who want to marginalize Amnesty's work by connecting it to the Pussy Riot event. Something did seem really off about that.

Quote from Don Genaro:

When I saw this thread I immediately thought of Naomi Klein and what she wrote about Amnesty International in "Shock Doctrine." I found this article which discusses it: _http://invisiblecollege.weblog.leidenuniv.nl/2008/01/28/naomi-klein-on-the-why-of-human-rights-v

Quote

The basic premise of the book, which I will not get into here, is that the shock, confusion and dislocation caused by natural disasters (like Katrina), wars (Iraq or the Falklands), coups (Pinochet in Chile, Suharto in Indonesia, etc.) or economic crises (like the kind gripping Eastern Europe after the fall of communism and the whole developing world during the 1980s) have provided fertile grounds for the implementation of extreme right-wing economic policies by alert and opportunistic ideologues and powerful interests. In the chapter "Entirely Unrelated" Klein explores how the restricted domain of analysis of the international human rights movement in the 1960s (to this day) resulted that "an ideology was cleansed of its crimes." She points out that Milton Friedman, the main intellectual force behind the economic policy and personnel of the dictatorial regimes of Chile and Argentina, won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1976; a year later Amnesty International won the Nobel Peace Prize largely for its work exposing the human rights abuses in Chile and Argentina. She writes:
From afar, however, it seemed as if, with the two Nobel prizes, the most prestigious jury in the world had issued its verdict: the shock of the torture chamber was to be forceful condemned, but the economic shock treatments were to be applauded - and the two forms of shock were, as [Orlando] Letelier had written with dripping irony, "entirely unrelated."


Quote

Another strange contradiction of this period was that the Ford Foundation spent $30 million during the seventies and eighties devoted to human rights in Latin America, while the economists dominating these governments had their education and training largely funded by... the Ford Foundation. She writes:
After the left in those countries had been obliterated by regimes that Ford had helped shape, it was none other than Ford that funded a new generation of crusading lawyers dedicated to freeing the hundreds of thousands of political prisoners being held by those same regimes...Given its own highly compromised history, it is hardly surprising that when Ford dived into human rights, it defined the field as narrowly as possible. The foundation strongly favoured groups that framed their work as legalistic struggles for the "rule of law," "transparency" and "good governance." As one Ford Foundation officer put it, the organization's attitude in Chile was, "How can we do this and not get involved in politics?"... The foundation's decision to get involved in human rights but "not get involved in politics" created a context in which it was all but impossible to ask the question underlying the violence it was documenting: Why was it happening, in whose interests?



Quote

But Amnesty International to this day proclaims principles of independence and impartiality on its website :

Quote

We have a number of safeguards in place to protect our autonomy. We are: * Independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion * Democratic and self-governing * Financially self-sufficient, thanks to the generous support of donations provided by individual members and supporters We do not support or oppose any government or political system and neither do we necessarily support or oppose the views of the victims/survivors or human rights defenders whose rights we seek to protect.

While I think there is a role for a human rights watchdog that strives to be as non-political as possible, I think Naomi Klein is right to point out the deficiencies of this approach. When human rights violations are documented and condemned without any analysis of the raison-d'etre, we invariably end up with the impression that either (a)these are just random acts of violence, or (b)there are truly evil people in the world. This is problematic from both an intellectual and a practical point of view. From an intellectual point of view, focusing on human rights and their violation in a purely formal or legal sense abstracts from the political economy that governs the use of power and force in the first place. This greatly impoverishes our understanding of history and conflict. In some cases, this leads to the perception that human rights violations are carried out as part of a struggle for survival between mortal enemies - the national defense and security rationale for imprisoning, torturing, disappearing and executing enemies of the state. This justification of the use of force is usually only a veil, masking a deeper struggle for power and resources. The economic ideology underlying the massive repression carried out throughout Latin America and elsewhere has escaped condemnation precisely because it has convinced the world that the facts of human rights violations (such as the imprisonment or disappearance of union leaders and left-wing journalists) are distinct from the questions of why they occur and for whose benefit.

Thank you so much for connecting the dots Don Genaro. It's so much clearer now how different aspects of an atrocity are vectored off in different directions so that it becomes increasingly difficult to find the connection that allows putting the pieces together. I can see now how human rights was a less important issue than pushing the neo-liberal agenda. Klein does do this type of analysis very well.

Sometimes literature can do this work - tell the truth in fiction because there is more leeway to do so.

I taught Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits for many years when I was a high school English teacher. Isabel Allende is the niece of Salvador Allende, the democratically elected President of Chile during a coup whose date strangely enough was on 9/11 I forget which year.

The genre Allende uses is magical realism which puts the events in a somewhat alternate realm of reality. But if you read it, you find everything is there, the military, the U.S. influence, the death squads, the stronghold of the ruling class over the population, the psychopaths, the methods used to discredit Allende to the people, the economic upheaval.

Just one personal side note here about Isabel Allende. Several of my students were so moved by the book that I encouraged them to write to her. She wrote back on stationery she had made herself. My students were very touched by this gesture and so was I. Here she had gone through all this horror, and still took the time to send these beautiful cards.