Anti-NATO demonstration by Catholic Workers in Chicago, May 2012. Photo: Steve Rhodes.
Today, hrw.org has a story at the top of its page about "Unacknowledged Deaths" and civilian causalties caused by NATO air strikes in Libya; today the top stories at RT.com (Russia Today, the Kremlin-sponsored outlet) are about the same sort of one-sided anti-NATO protests in Chicago.
Has Human Rights Watch forgotten its roots? The report they published 27 years ago about one million civilians killed by the Soviets in Afghanistan? More here).
I've just gotten about four different copies of an important flyer from various networks, a notice of a demonstration to be staged in Chicago by Awareness Projects International, an Arizona-based group that has some Uzbek emigres trying to bring attention to the horrendous human rights problems in their country -- forced child labour in the cotton industry, torture, political prisoners, destruction of the Aral Sea, and more. All of these are issues that should long ago have been picked up by "progressive" cause leaders -- they seldom are.
The demonstration's call is supported by International Labor Rights Forum and Human Rights Watch's researchers are helping to spread the word, even if it's not an event they have formally endorsed. Great! We need to use this opportunity when Foreign Minister Kamilov of Uzbekistan is visiting Chicago [it is confirmed now that President Karimov is not coming] to try to sound off about what kind of awful things our government is tacitly endorsing when they perform transactions -- even for reasons of military exigency -- with this corrupt despot.
But the problem isn't trying to get this small group noticed in a din of Occupy Wall Street and Code Pink noise related only to hating on NATO, and only about NATO's killing of less than 100 civilians in Libya or even hundreds evidently killed in drone strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere.
The real problem is getting Human Rights Watch to sound different than the Kremlin's propaganda and the sectarian left -- which it shouldn't find so hard to do.
It's right to condemn those NATO killings, but one-sided, and overlooks the very real crimes of the forces NATO opposes.
The left tends to excuse those crimes of NATO's enemies by claiming that when NATO troops show up, they exacerbate the problem and engender conflict. That's only because the left starts the clock ticking when the forces land. The NATO-Warsaw Pact military exterminism and reciprocity began long ago because of the mass crimes against humanity of the Soviet Union, where Lenin and Stalin killed more than 20 million of their own civilians, as many or more as were lost in the war with the Nazis in World War II. It overlooks the legacy of Stalin in the Kremlin today in the form of Vladimir Putin, crowned again and presiding over a system under which hundreds of journalists, human rights advocates, lawyers, business people, priests, and other civilians have been assassinated for their work with impunity.
The problem isn't getting attention for this little group, but getting the big shots at Human Rights Watch to use the powerful weapon of their web site with its millions of views and gobs of Google juice in the news searches to have a broader view than the Kremlin does in looking at the NATO summit.
It's no good putting in stories about women's rights or the Pakistani human rights commission BELOW THE FOLD in the regional section for Asia, like an afterthought. ABOVE THE FOLD is what gets attention on visits of websites that typically last a minute or less. And what goes into Google News Reader is ONLY THE FIRST THREE STORIES. Hundreds of thousands of people ONLY see those top three stories do to the mechanical limitations of the typical CMS system and the news readers.
So that's why HRW social media/PR/communications people have to pack a message that is more sophisticated than the Kremlin's agitprop at the top of the page, in the view, on the Twitter and Facebook pages and readers that isn't just anti-NATO in the predictable knee-jerk way of the thousands of protesters, but has a more sophisticated critique that brings in the real problems of the Taliban which NATO fought, and the Central Asian partners NATO has made to fight this war.
The Russians never lose an opportunity to weep huge crocodile tears about the civilians killed by NATO in Libya or Afghanistan, never uttering a word about the mass crimes of humanity with many more thousands committed in Syria with their weapons; committed in Afghanistan by the Taliban without their comment; committed by the Iranian regime; committed all over the place wherever they have a presence or an ally or an issue where they have a veto.
Code Pink only myopically focuses on the civilians killed by NATO in Libya and elsewhere, which number in the hundreds not tens of thousands like the Taliban or Al Qaeda.
But I expect better of Human Rights Watch. They should have more intelligence and breadth of vision. What, they can't add a link even on the second page of their NATO story today on the front page about Uzbekistan and Karimov, and with their other stories about women's rights concerns about what will happen after NATO leaves and the West forgets a war zone once again?
Worse, they can't even put in an appeal to NATO regarding Karimov and the other despots of Central Asia in their less-viewed "Eurasia" section under fold? This summit has been scheduled for months. Really, it's a 15-minute cut-and-paste job from old also-less-viewed press releases, guys. You can't use your powerful mindshare, your Soros millions, to put in the view something *other* than the US as a problem at this NATO summit?
I wrote to the Chicago Story curator, a fellow who clearly styles himself as an avatar of the new and different and networked and democratized, who has fashioned a site with "information" for journalists about Chicago. All of it is from the perspective of the "progressive," with the progressive agenda of issues, so it is really advocacy material or even propaganda, not "information". But there it sits, drawing lots of views as if it were merely a "resource". There's a fashionable buzz about new "programmer-journalists" (uh-oh) who are coding a new news that isn't like the old news owned by those now-bankrupt rich white dudes blah blah. (If ever there were an example of how "programmer-journalists" program their progressive views right into the apps and platforms, this is it! We should call them the prog-progs now, I guess.)
I asked him if there was anything about political prisoners in Uzbekistan. I asked knowing there wasn't, except for a little group. I asked to make him think, not link. I asked him to try to see if I could start perculating in those pre-cooked OWS boilerplates fashioned out of the depths of 100 years of Marxism-Lenism something other than the usual "hate America first" dreck.
He answered me that he couldn't find anything, but that maybe I could attend the rally against the killing of civilians by drones in Pakistan. Well, that's typical. Reroute the query to something at least, instead of thinking, not linking.
A minute later he emailed me with the same poster than six other people had already sent me from Awareness Projects.
But I want the awareness to start in his own cramped progressive mind channels. Why does NATO exist, people? It exists because there really are enemies, awful enemies, enemies not created because NATO showed up to fight them, but who existed before and will exist after NATO leaves. In Afghanistan, there is an enemy that is a fierce and violent enemy against everything you hold dear -- women's rights, gay rights, free media, the free enterprise that produces your Apple gadgets. This enemy isn't "created by the US that supported the mujahideen" in their war against the Soviets, as so many ignorant kids babble today. This enemy was created by the Soviet Red Army killing one million civilians in Afghanistan back in the 1980s, starting long before we even got there to take the side of the powerless.
Why can't you see that you must do something about these NATO enemies, too? Why can't you see that your hatred and opposition of NATO is absolutely ineffective for the majority of Americans and Europeans until you leaven your myopia with at least some awareness that there are profound crimes committed by these enemies that are far, far outweighing NATO's crimes, and indeed, giving NATO its very justification for existence and expansion?
Karimov justifies all the evils he does by pointing across the border to the Taliban and his own insurgents than have joined them, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. NATO justifies any lesser evils they commit as collateral damage in their justified fight against real enemies who kill innocent civilians and were killing them before NATO got there.
You are helping both Karimov and NATO and their allies to go on existing forever until you also tackle the root of the original enemies here, in the Kremlin.
