Dishonest scales

Am I still to forget, O wicked house,
your ill-gotten treasures and the short ephah, which is accursed?
Shall I acquit a man with dishonest scales,
with a bag of false weights? (Micah 6:10-11)
[an ephah is a unit of measure]

It’s the kind of thing that makes one want to tear up one’s membership in any human rights organization. Human Rights Watch has issued a strongly critical report of Venezuela. Their basic points:

discrimination on political grounds (unlike the US, with its long history of political blacklisting, dating to as recently as the K Street project)

disregard for the principle of separation of powers, especially in the takeover of the Supreme Court by pro-Chavez people (unlike the US with its 7:2 right-wing majority on the Supreme Court and politically-stacked courts)

undercut journalists’ freedom of expression, workers’ freedom of association, and civil society’s ability to promote human rights (unlike the mass arrest of reporters in the Twin Cities, the Administration’s attacks on labor unions, and mass wiretapping focused at peace activists and other dissenters)

 

Readers of Mercury Rising know that I have had my criticisms of Chavez. But as a central, guiding principle, one has to look at the context in which events occur. There have been coup attempts against Chavez, one of which nearly cost him his life and a second of which almost destroyed the Venezuelan economy. Yes, the government has been firmly in the saddle since ca. 2003, but just recently several of Venezuela’s neighbors (Bolivia and Honduras) have severed or downgraded their diplomatic ties with the U.S. over interference; in Bolivia’s case, that interference involves seizure of a large part of the country by US-encouraged separatists.

Now Paraguay reports a coup effort.

Indeed, Venezuela itself claims a recent coup attempt. If South Americans are nervous, well, who can blame them? The US is one of the few nations in modern history to have actually invaded a country.

Past coup attempts don’t absolve Venezuela for the complaints that Human Rights Watch has. But the state of siege created by the United States is the context in which Venezuelan human rights abuses occur. Most countries would have declared martial law under those conditions. Indeed, the United States, with far smaller reason to fear foreign attack, is close to a state of martial law, if not actually under a Cheney Dicktat.

And so this 230 page long report by HRW, whose publications about the United States in the last six months are thin indeed, seems disproportionate.

Just judge even-handedly.