Human Rights and The New World Order
Copyright 1995 by Richard K. Moore
November 23, 1995
As published in New Dawn, January-February 1996
The phrase "New World Order" (NWO) is used widely these days, without an
agreed general definition of what it means. As in "Common Sense and The New
World Order" (New Dawn, September-October, 1995), this author uses the term to
refer to the increasing centralization of global power under the control of
transnational corporations and their agents: primarily the international
financial community and a variety of commissions, treaty mechanisms, and
multilateral military arrangements.
By this definition, the NWO is an observable phenomenon, already firmly
entrenched and growing visibly more powerful each day. No conspiracy theories
are needed to describe its nature or to observe its consequences. The daily
news (despite its bias and selectivity) provides most of the information
needed. In addition, many excellent analyses have been published which deal
with this subject. This article contains only a few references, but the
following pieces provide background material for those who would like further
substantiation of the points made here:
The Nation, June 14, 1993, Charles Lewis & Margaret Ebrahim:
"The Big Buy"
The Nation, September 6/13, 1993, Patrick Bryant:
"NAFTA and Human Rights"
The Nation, December 6, 1993, Jeremy Brecher:
"After NAFTA: Global Village or Global Pillage?"
In These Times, February 21, March 6, 1994, Noam Chomsky:
"Time Bombs"
The Nation, March 28, 1994, Paco Ignacio Taibo II:
"The Phoenix Rises"
The Nation, October 10, 1994, Ralph Nader:
"Get Off the GATT Track"
The Nation, December 19, 1994, Richard J. Barnet:
"Corporate States"
The Nation, December 19, 1994, Jeremy Brecher & Tim Costello:
"Beating the Multinationals"
The Nation, February 6, 1995, Bill Weinberg:
"Chiapas A Year Later"
The Nation, March 6, 1995, Ken Silverstein & Alexander Cockburn:
"Mexico & The Banks"
The Nation, April 17, 1995, Allan Nairn:
"C.I.A. Death Squad"
The Nation, June 5, 1995, Gore Vidal & Allan Nairn:
"Guatemala '46/'95"
A recap of the NWO will help set the stage for a discussion of its effects on
human rights.
The NWO's _ideological_ and _economic_ agendas are globalized laissez-faire
capitalism, hiding under the rhetoric of "free trade" and "increased
competitiveness". Not to be confused with free enterprise, entrepreneurial
capitalism, or classical free market economics, _laissez-faire_ turns over
control of domestic and international economies to an elite clique of
multinational corporations. Free trade and fair competition are the last
thing this clique wants -- predatory monopoly capitalism (such as was
prevalent with the 19th century Robber Barons: Rockefeller, Carnegie, Krupp,
et al) -- is their preferred mode of operating. The so-called "free trade"
treaties are not about trade, but about opening up the world's economies,
resources, and labor pools to unregulated exploitation by the multinationals.
The NWO's _political_ agenda is the erosion of national sovereignty and
democracy, with power being transferred by various treaties (such as GATT,
NAFTA, and Maastricht) to various commissions and organizations. These
entities exhibit few or no democratic characteristics, but are designed to
represent the interests of the NWO corporate elite. See William Greider's
"Who Will Tell the People?" (Simon & Schuster) for a brilliant investigation
into the systematic corporate undermining of the American democratic process,
the growing detachment of corporate loyalties from their traditional national
home bases, and the shift of power to technocratic commissions beyond the
jurisdiction of any democratic process.
The NWO's _social agenda_ can be summarized as "no more entitlements," or
expressed more poignantly, "Let them eat cake." This agenda is being
implemented with alarming rapidity worldwide. In Britain and the U.S., for
example, we see the dismantlement of social programs and regulatory agencies,
privatization (at give-away prices) of service infrastructures to large
corporations, increasing unemployment and impoverishment as a result, and an
emphasis on more prisons and law enforcement to deal with the problems created
by this (anti-)social agenda. In the Third World, we see even more draconian
social disruption, impoverishment, and heavy-handed suppression, dictated by
the International Monetary Fund's inhumane "guidelines", and facilitated by
assistance to Third-World police forces by the U.S., Britain, and other First
World regimes.
The _propaganda_ branch of the NWO is the global mass media, with ownership
increasingly concentrated in a small number of corporate conglomerates. These
news, entertainment and propaganda vendors provide a highly biased and
selective interpretation of world events, aligned with the interests and
agendas of the NWO. Again see Chomsky ("Manufacturing Consent") or Michael
Parenti ("Make Believe Media") for a treatment of how this propaganda machine
operates, and to what ends. Or pay attention to your everyday news sources,
and think about what's being left out of the stories you're being told.
Example: when Croatia launched its invasion of Krajina, forcing the
greatest migration of refugees in Europe since World War II, where were the
pictures and interviews with the refugees? Where was the condemnation of
Croatia's overrunning of areas which were homelands of Serbs for centuries?
Where was the concern with shelling of fleeing refugees, and with the rampages
of drunken, revenge-hungry, fascist-minded Croation troops? Instead the
cameras were focused on the plight of Muslims being forced out by the influx
of the Serbian refugees, and the CIA chose that time to announce satellite
evidence of Serb atrocities. Meanwhile Peter Galbraith (U.S. ambassador to
Croatia), put forward the NWO's spin for these events on BBC (August 9),
rejecting British and Serbian charges that Croatia was guilty of ethnic
cleansing. Galbraith: "...ethnic cleansing is a practice supported by
Belgrade and carried out by Bosnian and Croatian Serbs forcefully expelling
local inhabitants and using terror tactics." Why doesn't a full scale
military invasion by Croatia count as "terror tactics"? Galbraith went on:
"...the Croatian military success could prove to be a positive step in
resolving the conflict through negotiations." How Orwellian can you get? --
"War is Peace", classic Newsspeak.
Don't misunderstand: I'm not saying the Serbs should be portrayed as
innocent victims, but the media treatment of the Krajina invasion was beyond
merely "biased news" -- it was blatantly slanted propaganda, intentionally
distracting attention from the major news of the day. This one-sided
demonization of one of the parties in a civil war serves to justify the
establishment of the NWO's military agenda.
That NWO _military_ agenda, as demonstrated in Iraq, Somalia and now Bosnia,
is the creation of a multinational strike force, ostensibly under
"international" control, but in fact controlled primarily by the United
States, its client states, and closest allies.
The U.S. plays a central role in the NWO, but the NWO is not merely a disguise
for traditional American imperialism. Being firmly under the thumb of
corporations, the U.S. Government serves as a useful agent for NWO interests,
and being the only super power, U.S. military muscle forms the invincible
nucleus of the NWO's enforcement branch. But enforcement is not limited to
traditional U.S. national interests, it extends to the more general interests
of the global corporate elite. American taxpayers, being both misinformed and
uninformed by the media, largely foot the bill for the NWO's global military
operations -- at least thus far.
Human rights, the subject of this article, are affected adversely by every one
of these NWO agendas, as the above considerations already begin to reveal.
There are four primary reasons why the NWO is -- and must be -- at its very
core, anti-human rights.
First, the NWO is inherently _socially amoral_ -- its only imperatives are the
expansion of corporate power, the accumulation of wealth, and the
establishment of a global political system that facilitates those objectives.
This single-minded (yet far-reaching) agenda includes no concern for human
rights or welfare, and will naturally and without qualms tend to roll over any
person, culture, or institution that stands in its way. You might be tempted
to say this aspect of the NWO is _neutral_ to human rights, but consider this
parallel situation: if a murderer shows no concern for the life of his/her
victims, he or she is considered to be a sociopath and is generally viewed
with even more horror than one who kills out of hatred or passion. I submit
the NWO's social amorality should be judged similarly as being dangerously
sociopathic and anti-human rights. This amorality is an enabling factor: it
unleashes the NWO to pursue its agendas irresponsibly, without any internally-
imposed restraints.
Second, the NWO, as pure capitalism with no sense of human value nor
regard for a sustainable future for humanity, is insatiably, gluttonously,
_expansionist_. Like a cancer, it grows with no regard for, nor awareness
of the health of its host. Corporate managers are taught explicitly: "If
you stand still, you die." It's capital must continually seek new realms
for investments and create new markets for its products. The resulting
development-oriented initiatives (such as land commercialization and
oil/mineral exploitation) inevitably run up against competing uses for
those same resources, as we see in Chiapas, Honduras, Ethiopia, Brazil, etc.
The people (along with their rights) who stand in the path of the NWO must
be killed or swept aside to make room for the never-ending growth. The
murder and forced dislocation of people and cultures, and the dismembering
of their economic infrastructures, strikes directly at the very heart of
human rights.
Classic examples of this were the British Enclosure Acts (sixteenth
century) and the western expansion of the United States (primarily nineteenth
century). The land-use patterns of the Native Americans (and earlier, the
British peasantry) were inconsistent with maximal capitalist exploitation of
those same lands. The people therefore "had to go", and (in the American
case) were demonized by the media, massacred by the army, and pushed into
concentration camps ("reservations") -- despite their historic claim to the
lands, their God-given right to life and livelihood, and the numerous treaties
concluded with them, and later broken. In the British case, the peasants were
pushed into urban centers to form a cheap industrial workforce. Both of these
development patterns continue to operate identically today throughout the
world, fueled by multinational investments and pressure applied to Third-World
governments by international financial interests.
Third, the NWO is inherently _anti-democracy_ -- this is a classic case of
conflicting class interests, the two classes in this case being _people_ and
_corporations_. A government beholden to people is democratic, while a
government beholden to corporations is essentially fascist. It is no accident
that those nations most directly controlled by corporations -- the smaller
Third World countries -- are frequently ruled by overtly fascist military
dictatorships. People, if they have the power, naturally have a tendency to
promote their own self-interest, which includes things like social welfare
legislation, minimum wages, imposition of taxes on corporate profits, health
and safety regulation of industry, collective bargaining, etc. For this
reason, the NWO and its corporate constituency stridently oppose effective
democratic governance. In some cases this means supporting overtly non-
democratic forms of government, in other cases this means subverting so-called
"Democracies" through bribery, election funding, intensive lobbying, media
propaganda, control of political parties, supportive media coverage for
favored citizen pressure groups, etc. This anti-democratic activism attacks
human rights both directly and indirectly: it directly undermines the human
right to control one's own government, and it indirectly undermines other
rights, since corporate-dominated, undemocratic governments tend to undermine
human rights generally.
Fourth, the NWO naturally _opposes national sovereignty_ and _promotes
unaccountable internationalism_ -- this is where the NWO stands out in
comparison to earlier manifestations of capitalist power. Whereas,
capitalists have traditionally supported strong national sovereignty in their
home-base countries, the NWO stands apart from "parochial" national interests
and actively promotes a technocratic, super-national, investment-friendly
World Order. This attacks human rights by undermining the meaning and value
of citizenship and by depriving people of life and livelihood through NWO-
sponsored armed conflicts. It further attacks human rights indirectly by its
strangulation of national budgets so that nations do not have the means to to
pursue beneficial economic development.
Beyond these inherent characteristics -- which guarantee that an unchecked NWO
must always be on a collision course with human rights -- we can look at the
actual record. We can examine specific programs, actions, and behaviors of
the NWO, and observe the appalling consequences for human rights. These are
even worse, it turns out, than what one might expect from a straightforward
unfolding of the NWO agendas. The NWO's inherent sociopathic amorality seems
to somehow encourage an almost demonic mentality in its operatives, leading to
capricious torture, brutality, and murder on a colossal scale. In the case of
Native Americans, to return to that foreshadowing precedent, the army didn't
just massacre the natives, it massacred them with relish -- burning babies
before the eyes of parents, raping women, cutting trophy-parts from corpses,
etc. There is enough racism, sadism, and intolerance buried in the human
psyche that when political permission is given for it to be unleashed, it
seems, alas, to run amok.
In the 1950s Nelson Rockefeller undertook an official good-will tour of Latin
America. Almost everywhere he went he was greeted by angry crowds and shouts
of "Yankee go home". It was made abundantly clear that the roles played by
the U.S. and multinational corporations was deeply resented by the people of
the region, and that Rockefeller was seen as a symbol of those roles. When
Rockefeller returned home, he formed one of his many influential "study
commissions" to evaluate the response he had encountered. Rather than
concluding that the U.S. should respond to the complaints of the Latin
Americans, and adopt more acceptable policies, the conclusion was instead that
the U.S. should undertake a massive program of training and arming the police
forces of the region. As per the standard NWO pattern, if there's a conflict
between people and the investment interests of the multinationals, it's the
people who must give way. In this case, stronger police forces were seen as
the way to accomplish this objective.
These recommendations became U.S. policy, both openly and covertly, and large
amounts of military and "security" assistance were provided to many Latin
American countries. There followed decades of police brutality, torture,
"disappearances", and death squads -- all frontal assaults on human rights.
The U.S didn't officially endorse such practices, and frequently condemned
them in public speeches, but the arms, funding, and training assistance
continued to flow. Only recently has it officially been "revealed" that CIA
agents participated directly in these brutal activities, although the
revelation was no surprise to attentive observers.
Other similar examples over the past several decades include the massacre of
millions of Chinese in Indonesia, slave labor in Brazil, countless civil wars
in Africa, toleration and support of the former racist government of South
African, and the acceleration of trade with a Chinese government that operates
slave labor camps and executes democracy advocates.
As a final example, consider the events unfolding at this moment in Chiapas,
Mexico. One of the results of the Mexican Revolution (early this century) was
the dedication of Mayan homelands to their traditional use for communal
farming. This showed respect for the human rights of the natives, both
individually and collectively, to retain their traditional way of life and
economic activity. An essential policy in making this system work was a
proviso that the land must be held in common, and not divided up into
individual plots, which would inevitably be sold off to outside interests.
This system lasted up until very recently, when Chiapas became one of the
latest frontiers of NWO expansionism.
What happened is that NAFTA came along. One of the central goals of NAFTA, in
support of U.S. agribusiness interests, was to open up Mexico as a market for
U.S. agriproducts, and to open up Mexico's farmlands for exploitation by
American agricultural operators. President Clinton succeeding in pressuring
Mexico into abrogating the communal land policy as a condition of adopting the
NAFTA treaty. NAFTA, a typical NWO-sponsored initiative, spelled the doom of
the indigenous way of life, and probably death for many of the indigenous
peoples. Not only does the partitioning of the land make the system
vulnerable to dissolution, but the influx of discounted, surplus, American
agriproducts undercuts the traditional markets served by the natives, forcing
the natives to sell their land to survive.
But that's not the end of the NWO's role in this drama. The Chiapas Indians
rose to protect their human rights and to resist this onslaught against them.
Together with sympathetic allies from the rest of Mexico, they organized
themselves under the banner "Zapatistas" and began active resistance. The
Mexican government was somewhat hesitant in responding to this situation. It
didn't want to spark more widespread resistance through precipitous
suppression, and it didn't want to suffer damage to its international
reputation. But at the same time, it had no intention of backing out of its
NAFTA commitments.
So into the fray came Riordan Roett, advisor to Chase Manhattan Bank, writing
a memo which includes, ominously:
"While Chiapas, in our opinion, does not pose a fundamental threat
to Mexican political stability, it is perceived to be so by many
in the investment community. The government will need to eliminate
the Zapatistas to demonstrate their effective control of the national
territory and of security policy."
As reported by Ken Silverstein and Alexander Cockburn in Counterpunch,
February 1, 1995, "Major U.S. Bank Urges Zapatista Wipe-Out: 'A litmus test
for Mexico's stability'", this statement was incorporated by the bank into its
Jan. 13 1995 "Political Update on Mexico," and serves as a green light to
encourage military suppression of those who are fighting to retain their way
of life. Here we see the whole pattern of NWO operations in microcosm. We
see the sociopathic amorality of this multinational bank in its cold-blooded
decision that "elimination" of a group of people is the rational action to be
taken when corporate investments are _perceived_ to be at risk. We see the
undermining of Mexican sovereignty by NWO-sponsored treaties and dictates from
the NWO financial community. And we see that human rights carries no weight
in the NWO balance sheet.
Ultimately the prime movers of the NWO -- both individual and corporate --
must bear responsibility for the excesses of their operatives and client
states, whether intended or not, especially when the practices continue year
after year. In a case such as that in Chiapas, the chain of responsibility
and intention turns out to be very short indeed.
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