The new human-rights NGOs selectively condemned only left-wing regimes

Evidence

By the time of the LSF colloquium, earlier critiques of the complicity of wealthy nations in postcolonial poverty were being usurped by new concerns with human rights abuses in the post-colony. LSF argued that the Asian ‘miracle’ economies of South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan had been condemned for failing to conform to Third Worldist tenets, while disastrous programmes – in Mao’s China, Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam, Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania, Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana, Fidel Castro’s Cuba, and the Nicaraguan Sandinistas – had been presented as models. In stark contrast to the arguments of Fanon and Sartre, this new anti-totalitarian human rights organisation focused on left-wing ‘totalitarian’ regimes, largely ignoring the lamentable human rights records of both the right-wing authoritarian regimes then terrorising much of Latin America and those dictatorial Asian regimes it celebrated. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 393

Categorization

• XREF: Directly complicates the received image of 1970s human-rights NGOs as neutral defenders of victims; links to debate about whether the human-rights turn served Western economic interests. — connects to: Human rights groups competed with the left to denounce dictatorships in Chile — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 306; The right exploits the left’s internal hypocrisies and treatment of allies — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror…, 409
• SEED: Essay angle: the selective partisanship of the late-70s human-rights turn and how ‘anti-totalitarianism’ functioned as cover for economic liberalism.

Broader Connections

• The right exploits the left’s internal hypocrisies and treatment of allies #expands (0.72) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 409