From: nyt%nyxfer%igc.apc.org@MIZZOU1.missouri.edu (NY Transfer News)
Subject: pacifism and "human-rights," a costly illusion /mim
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: The NY Transfer News Service
Resent-From: "Rich Winkel" <MATHRICH@MIZZOU1.missouri.edu>
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1992 18:15:21 GMT

Pacifism and "human-rights," costly illusions

 Maoist Internationalist Movement
 PO Box 559
 Cambridge, MA 02140

On the USENET conferences, it appears that the main objection
many people have to Maoism centers around the use of violence
and human-rights. Chunde Shi and Jim Dyer have both said the
Sendero Luminoso in Peru should not use violence to achieve
its goals.

In the reasoning of many pacifists and "human-rights"
activists, there is some middle ground between the oppressive
status quo in Third World countries on the one hand and
revolution on the other hand. One recent critic told us s/he
criticizes "both" the Peruvian regime and the Sendero Luminoso
just like the Amnesty International group does.

These critics of the People's War in Peru and elsewhere have
middle-class illusions. They point to the capitalist and
feudal ruling class's violence in mock disgust and also object
when the oppressed try to stop the violence against them.
Somehow both sides must be wrong reasons the middle-class
activist.

These pacifists and human-rights activists think that the
people in Peru are not smart enough to try "compromise" and
"negotiation." The middle-class activists and phony leftists
wish these Maoists had the superior moral reasoning of "human-
rights."

These negotiators also unconsciously believe that the right to
food, shelter, clothing and medical care is somehow
negotiable, but they are only correct to the extent that
people who die no longer complain about food and shelter much
less "free speech." Such "negotiation" is in fact delay and
cooperation with genocide and it does resolve conflict, the
same way Hitler's "final solution" for the Jews did. From time
to time when the inevitable Warsaw Ghetto uprising happens,
the pacifists and human-rights activists condemn the oppressed
for using violence. It seems to them there is "new" violence,
because they had always overlooked and collaborated with the
much greater violence of the oppressor, as long as it did not
visibly involve prisons or guns, except by the law, which in
most countries is a law upholding the right to private
property but not the right to eat.

Amnesty International and the like have never shown anyone in
the modern industrial world a country where human-rights exist
in reality. Amnesty International does not give the oppressed
the actual option of LIVING somewhere that has real human-
rights. Even those blind to the actions of history's number
one oppressor of people's everywhere --U.S. imperialism-- do
not offer the Third World masses a chance to live inside that
fabled paradise of "freedom"--the United States. Indeed,
recently, even Amnesty International has had an occasional
word about political prisoners in the United States.

The Third World masses are not stupid. Although they rise up
in revolution in Peru, Bolivia, the Philippines, Azania,
Eritrea, Palestine etc., the oppressed would gladly quit the
revolution and walk right into the kingdom of human-rights the
day it actually existed anywhere but the minds of fence-
sitting middle-classes. Set up an Amnesty International human-
rights zone in Peru, and the masses would walk right in. There
is no question that the oppressed want to live in a world free
of political repression and violence.

Unfortunately, the pacifists and human-rights activists have no
connection to a reality of human-rights or non-violence. They
are instead apologists for the imperialists' violence. The
choice is no where between violence and non-violence. The
choice is between starving and bleeding to death on the one
hand or fighting to live on the other hand. We at MIM believe
the pacifists, so-called human-rights activists and others
have no business telling the oppressed not to defend
themselves when they are starving to death or dying from
preventable diseases. Self-defense is one of the most basic of
human-rights. (The New York Times just admitted that 40,000
Third World children die every day from preventable diseases.
9/17/92, p. a24)

Even the World Bank recognizes that in Peru for instance,
available food can only feed 90% of the population. This is
despite the fact that revolutionary China fed its people with
a much smaller economy on a per capita basis.

If the pacifists and "human-rights" activists want to preach,
let them preach the following:

1. Third World landlords: surrender your land peacefully in
land reform. The human-right to eat is not negotiable.

2. Imperialists: withdraw your military aid to landlords and
bureaucrat capitalists around the world. Withdraw your
occupation forces in Korea, the Philippines etc. The right to
self-determination and freedom from military violence is not
negotiable.

3. Multinational companies: surrender your operations to the
oppressed peoples. The food, drugs and clothing production you
control involve the inviolable rights of the people to live.

It is only where the oppressors resist the human-rights of the
oppressed that there is violence. Where the middle-class
preaches non-violence to the oppressed, the ruling class is
pleased. The ruling class knows that as long as it monopolizes
the use of force, pacifism is a good thing. Let everyone else
be a pacifist and human-rights believer as long as the ruling-
class stays in power reasons the bourgeoisie, which from time
to time gives an award to these middle-class puritans.

Related readings

Ask for articles on Mao and Gandhi, the Great Leap Forward,
and violence in the Third World. Also see Christopher
Caudwell, Studies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture.

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