The U.S. Versus Human Rights
in the Third World

from the book

Triumph of the Market

by Edward S. Herman

published by South End Press, 1995

The United States has had a large negative impact on human rights in the Third World, and should be regarded as a primary source of human-rights violations, rather than as a world leader devoted to their elimination. This is an incomprehensible idea for most people and virtual contradiction in the frame of conventional discourse. But the conventional view in every prosperous and relatively stable society is that its external behavior is decent, benevolent to a fault, and while perhaps influenced by interest and security considerations, operates strictly within the bounds of the rule of law and morality. The mainstream press in every such society does not dispute this patriotic and exceptionalist view. Starting from such self-serving premises, however, precludes objective analysis and genuine understanding.

The truth of the U.S. relationship to human rights was dramatically illustrated by the rise of torture in the 1960s and 1970s. In its 1975 Report on Torture, Amnesty International (AI) pointed out that human torture, which for several centuries had been largely a historical curiosity, "has suddenly developed a life of its own and become a social cancer." At the same time, AI noted that reports of torture from the Soviet bloc had declined after the death of Stalin in 1953, leaving the cancerous growth a largely Free World phenomenon. In its 1975-76 Annual Report, AI noted that "over 80 percent" of the "urgent" cases of torture were coming from Latin America. Another 1979 study of human rights found that of 35 countries that used torture on an administrative basis in the early and mid-1970s, 26 were clients of the United States.

This was hardly inadvertent. After World War II, the Third World was a scene of struggle between the remnants of the old colonial regimes and nationalistic masses seeking a better life. The United States did not align itself with the nationalistic masses. On the contrary, its leadership sought (and continues to seek) a certain form of stability, with governments in place that are friendly and even subservient, maintain an open economy, and eschew populist and radical solutions to demands from below. The late 1950s and 1960s also witnessed the U.S. establishment's trauma over Castro's victory in Cuba and the Vietnam War, its ensuing preoccupation with subversion and insurgencies, and its decision to aid and train the military and police within its sphere of influence.

The "trend in Latin America toward nationalistic regimes maintained in large part by appeals to the masses" and "an increasing popular demand for immediate improvement in the low living standards of the masses" is presented in a National Security Council Policy Statement of 1954 as a challenge and threat to U.S. interests. These interests were seen as best served by governments that participate in an "allied defense effort," eliminate "the menace of internal Communist or other anti-U.S. subversion," and "base their economies on a system of private enterprise and, as essential thereto...create a political and economic climate conducive to private investment." The U.S. establishment has long seen Third World nationalism, genuine independence, and economic radicalism or even serious reformism, as threats. The weights given the interests of the local majorities, and human-rights values, appear to have been close to zero.

In fact, human rights have been a distinct obstacle to accomplishing the primary values. Genuine political democracy would pave the way for the election of independent and nationalistic reformers and would allow subversive groups and organizations to develop. The "outstanding lesson" of the Vietnam War, according to General Maxwell Taylor, was the need to identify and counter in advance "an incipient subversive situation." This is difficult under democratic conditions, but feasible and standard practice under the rule of "authoritarian" generals trained on the omnipresence of subversion in the U.S. Army School of the Americas in Panama. This is why the United States distrusted and allowed the quick displacement of the Dominican Republic's Juan Bosch-an annoyingly independent leader who refused to kill or deport communists in the absence of illegal acts or a genuine threat. On the other hand, the Somoza family in Nicaragua, while violating all the nominal human-rights values, was properly subservient to the U.S. Ieadership, maintained an open economy (although stealing a great deal for themselves and cronies), and avoided providing unnecessary food, medical care, or education to the "oxen" majority. The result was 45 years of friendly relations and U.S. support, and no destabilization in the interest of "democracy" or "human rights."

It was in pursuit of the primary values that the United States invested heavily in the 1950s and later in building up and educating Third World client-state police and military personnel. They were educated to serve U.S. ends, to ensure their "understanding of, and orientation toward, U.S. objectives," to function as a constabulary and provide what General Robert Porter described as "an insurance policy" to protect U.S. interests. The training of these de facto agents of U.S. power stressed the threat of communist subversion, broadly and vaguely defined but tied in with popular movements and challenges to existing property relationships. As political scientist Frederic Nunn pointed out in reference to Latin America, "subject to U.S. military influence on anti-communism, the professional army officer became hostile to any form of populism."

In a remarkable display of Orwellian misrepresentation and self-deception, U.S. Ieaders and military spokespersons have regularly claimed that U.S. aid and training programs are designed to foster democratic values. ~ 5 But the intent, design, and effect of such programs have been blatantly undemocratic-they have been to orient the foreign trainees to U.S. objectives and priorities, to wean them away from indigenous loyalties and populist or radical tendencies. They have encouraged these military personnel to distrust democratic institutions and to take matters into their own hands. If carried out by an enemy power, such programs would be called blatant subversion.

What is most telling, however, are the results: In the wake of this large new U.S. effort, "Between 1960 and 1969, eighteen regimes in Latin America, of which eleven had held office constitutionally, were overthrown by the military. By 1969, more than two-thirds of the people in Latin America were living under military dictatorships." Some 80 percent of the core group of generals participating in the Brazilian coup of 1964 were U.S.-trained, whereas only 22 percent of those not involved were products of U. S. programs. The United States was an active or behind the scenes participant in many of these transfers of power, and in the aftermaths of the Brazilian and Chilean coups U.S. personnel helped write the White Papers justifying these positive developments.

The United States quickly recognized these coup-based regimes gave them protection and support, and proclaimed the clearly undemocratic results to be gratifyingly positive yields from our investment in support programs. General Robert Porter stated in 1968 that "dollar for dollar, U.S. military training assistance pays the greatest dividend of any of our assistance programs in Latin America." Defense Secretary Robert McNamara told Congress in 1966 that recent developments in Indonesia, which involved a military takeover and the massacre of somewhere between 500,000 and a million civilians, was one of the "dividends" of our military training programs.

A spectacular development of death squads and disappearances accompanied the installation of these U.S.-sponsored regimes. It has been shown time and again that U.S. aid has flowed toward human rights violators and away from democratic states; the correlation between U.S. aid and human-rights abuses and tyranny is positive and significant. This is because human-rights violators quickly improve the climate of investment by crushing trade and peasant unions and opening the door to U.S. investment, and genuflect to the United States in the Somoza manner. In short, the U.S. pursuit of its primary values has led to the systematic support of gross violations of human rights.

The Case of Guatemala

Let me illustrate the U.S. role in the genesis and protection of human-rights violations by a brief account of the U.S. relationship to Guatemalan state terror. The United States supported a dictator, Jorge Ubico, for many years, despite his systematic disregard for human rights. The revolution that ousted Ubico in 1944, and established a democratic order in the years 1945-54, was strictly indigenous and was not aided by any U.S. destabilization of the dictator. The decade of democracy was essentially free of major human-rights violations, pluralism flourished to a degree not seen before 1945 or after 1954, and tentative steps were taken toward economic democracy. These steps, notably legalizing unions in 1947 and proposals for land reform, partly at the expense of the United Fruit Company, aroused intense U.S. hostility and a search was on for "communists" whose presence would explain these menacing developments and provide a rationale for removing the offending government.

In June 1954, a U.S.-organized, funded, and directly assisted "contra" army ousted the elected government of Guatemala. Although this was done in the name of democracy, as well as to combat the communist menace, the sequel was a decisive and long-term termination of pluralism and political democracy. The crushing of unions, peasant groups, and the ending of any possibility of social reform by peaceable means, which also followed the U.S. intervention, led to the periodic emergence of guerrilla movements. The response of the United States and its political-military progeny was an escalation of force and state terror. With U.S. aid, training, and participation in anti-guerrilla activities, Guatemala became a counterinsurgency state, run by a brutal military establishment under a system of permanent state terror.

In short, Guatemala represents a case of an institutional structure of domination built to violate human rights in the interest of protecting an extremely undemocratic status quo. It emerged in the wake of a major intervention that reestablished a dominant U.S. role, along with regular U.S. inputs from 1954 onward that shaped the character of the military, police, and political establishment. The United States participated actively with Green Berets in the pacification effort of 1966 and after, introducing the worst phases of violence against the civilian population. During the Carter years, the United States cut off military aid to Guatemala, but loopholes permitted a continued flow of U.S. arms, and Israel was permitted to take up much of the arms-advisory slack. There was, of course, no destabilization of Guatemala or support of freedom fighters, as there was for the elected government of 1954.

Following the election of Reagan, a major effort was made to reintegrate Guatemala back into the arms and training network. Unconstrained apologetics for Guatemalan state terror, reclassifications of military items making them eligible for sale, secret transfers of military goods and provision of counterinsurgency advisers, vigorous lobbying of Congress-all set the stage for the official renewal of military aid in 1983. The Reagan administration displayed the spirit of its approach to Guatemala in December 1982 when, at the height of a new wave of Guatemalan state terror, and two months after publication of an Al report enumerating the places and character of a slaughter of 2,600 peasants, President Ronald Reagan visited Guatemala and lauded the head-of-state General Rios Montt as "totally committed to democracy" and getting a "bum rap."

Reconciling Support of Terror with Human Rights

How does the U.S. establishment (including the mass media) succeed in portraying the United States as a protector of human rights in the light of the Guatemala record and its wider role of support for regimes of terror?

First, there is the rule of selective attention and indignation. The U.S. mass media focus heavily and intensively on human-rights violations in enemy states. For example, of the 22 human-rights victims given intensive coverage by the New York Times in the period January 1, 1976 through June 30, 1980, 21 were victims of enemy states, although this was a period of increasing terror in Guatemala and other U.S. client states. The U.S. mass media prefer to feature Cuba rather than Guatemala, despite the fact that Cuba's human-rights performance is glowing in comparison with that of Guatemala. Official U.S. silence on the large-scale torture, death squads, and disappearances in its local client states is reflected in the mass media in the form of very low key treatment and considerable suppression. A dramatic illustration is the fact that the first Latin American Congress of Relatives of the Disappeared, held in Costa Rica in January 1981, at which it was estimated that the disappeared in Latin America by then totaled 90,000, was unreported in the New York Times, Washington Post, or any other U.S. mass circulation newspaper, magazine, or TV broadcast.

The second rule is that the U.S. role in originating, underwriting, and supporting regimes of terror is played down or ignored altogether, and their terroristic proclivities are portrayed as either inexplicable or a product of Latin genes or "cultures of violence."

The third and most interesting means by which the United States is made to appear a devotee of human rights is by allowing its role on human rights to be defined by official statements and actions regretting, opposing, and appearing to penalize state terror in the U.S. provinces. Given the context of ongoing support for the regimes of terror, this focus yields an Orwellian result. Because its proteges in Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Argentina, Indonesia, Zaire, South Vietnam, etc. have been guilty of massive terror, there have been periodic spurts of publicity and outcries over U.S. funding and training of the armies and police forces directly responsible. Every administration is therefore obliged to explain how deeply concerned it is with human rights violations, and to detail its valiant efforts by "quiet diplomacy" to set things right-while stressing the importance of continuing to aid the regime of terror! Very occasionally, an unusual combination of circumstances actually causes the executive authority to criticize human-rights violations fairly seriously, and Congress may force a cutback of aid and training, as in the Carter years.

The emphasis on U.S. efforts to curb human-rights abuses in its client states not only misses the forest for the trees, it even fails to identify the trees properly. When U.S. officials make statements about their deep concern and quiet efforts to curb abuses, several questions immediately suggest themselves: If the institutional apparatus of terror and its operations were put in place and are supported by the United States, is it not likely that the abusive results are expected and acceptable, if not intended? Is it not therefore also likely that these expressions of concern are only nominal and designed to placate public opinion? Wouldn't a serious attack on the "abuses" go to the heart of the supported enterprise? The press does not ask such questions, however, and allows the official claims of deep concern over abuses to prevail.

There is, in fact, substantial evidence that the primary role of U.S. officials in dealing with "difficult" cases of state terror-i.e., those that establishment institutions are unable entirely to overlook and that must therefore be explained and reconciled with our benevolent purposes-such as the holocaust in Guatemala from 1978 to 1984, the rape-murder of four U.S. religious women in El Salvador in 1980, and the army's murder of six Jesuit priests and their two employees in November 1989, has been "damage containment," designed to protect the institutions of terror. Cover-ups and false denials have been systematic and U.S. officials and client-state terrorists have been in consistently friendly alliances of mutual support and protection.

During the early 1980s era of mass killings in Guatemala, Reagan administration officials not only engaged in continuous apologetics and serial Iying on Guatemalan government actions and responsibility, they carried out a systematic campaign of derogation and intimidation against AI, Americas Watch, and other human-rights groups in an attempt to discredit and silence them. In the case of the rape-murders of the four U.S. religious women by members of the Salvadoran National Guard in December 1980, it took three-and-a-half years and a congressional threat to cut off U.S. funds to get a few low level Guardsmen tried and convicted of the murders. With the help of U.S. officials, the involvement of higher-level Salvadoran political and military leaders was kept out of the press and trial in an outstanding example of protection of a regime of terror.

In connection with the November 1989 murder of the six Jesuits and their two employees, the record of protectionism of the terrorists was so blatant that even the New York Times used the word in reference to the case. For over a month the U.S. Embassy suggested that the murders were carried out by the rebels. When a Salvadoran soldier came forward with evidence of Salvadoran army responsibility, U.S. officials released his name to the Salvadoran military, thereby jeopardizing his life and warning others to remain silent. A woman who witnessed the murders was taken to the United States, threatened, and treated as a hostile witness. A CBS "60 Minutes" program on the murders reported that the U.S. Ambassador had coached the Salvadoran army chief on probable questions and appropriate answers for the program. Shortly thereafter, the New York Times reported that four army witnesses in the case had "disappeared." It soon turned out that the reporter had neglected to note that the soldiers had "disappeared" to Fort Benning, Georgia, which apparently put them out of the jurisdiction of Salvadoran law! On August 11, 1990, it was reported that U.S. officials were refusing to release documents pertaining to the murders on "national security" grounds.

Attempting to explain the tacit U.S. support of torture in Greece in the late 1960s, Al pointed out that as the Greek military regime met the U.S. criteria of strategic compliance and suitable political stability, and with other matters being of little account, U.S. policy on Greek torture "has been to deny it where possible and minimize it, where denial was not possible. This policy flowed naturally from general support for the military regime. " This analysis has wide applicability.

In the Reagan years, Congress imposed a requirement that the administration certify each year that human rights were improving in El Salvador, as a condition for further aid to the Salvadoran government. It is well known that during this period over 50,000 Salvadoran civilians were killed by the armed forces and death squads, without any officer ever being brought to trial for murder. Nevertheless, the administration never failed to find improvement and Congress never failed to accept these findings. The fact that mass killings at the rate of some 1,000 civilians per month occurred in the base years of 1980-1981 helped support the claims of improvement, but it is a notable fact that the immense height of the initial level of state terror never caused Congress to refuse support. This process, which did not interfere with U.S. aid to the Salvadoran government, allowed the establishment institutions to show U.S. devotion to human rights by reporting these concerns and debates, while ignoring their largely nominal character and deflecting attention from the main human-rights decision-to support the regime of terror in the first place.

The Role of National Security and Anti-communism

It is often argued that U.S. support for human-rights violators is based on "national security" considerations, rather than any mundane motives. This rationale for intervention, however, even if valid, which it is not (see below), does not eliminate U.S. responsibility for the regimes of terror and human-rights violations which it supports; it merely tries to explain them in more acceptable terms.

The great virtue of the national security argument from the standpoint of U.S. economic and military elite interests is its combination of apparent virtue, compelling importance to politicians and press, and virtually unlimited elasticity. Politicians and mainstream editors and journalists cannot withstand the accusation that they are damaging U.S. national security, especially as "communists" are usually alleged to be standing in the wings waiting to take over and commence their march on Washington. Anti-communism and national security in tandem have thus been a primary control mechanism that allows the political and military machinery of the state to serve the larger interests that benefit from the global expansion of the U.S. economy.

It must be acknowledged, however, that these ideologies and fears are internalized and take on a life of their own, and that the "threat" of Grenada, Nicaragua, and a virtually disarmed Guatemala in the early 1950s may seem real to national security managers and mainstream editors. The NSC Policy Statement on "U.S. Policy in the Event of Guatemalan Aggression in Latin America, " dated May 28,1954, conveys an aura of panic, as if Guatemala, "increasingly [an] instrument of Soviet aggression in this hemisphere," was truly about to launch an attack. In the real world, Guatemala had not moved one inch outside her own borders, and was to be easily toppled by a U.S.-organized invasion within one month of the date of the NSC statement. Did the NSC members believe their own claptrap, or was it tongue-in-cheek? Whatever the answer, the service of such claims to the U.S. policing and removal of deviants from its backyard is real and hardly coincidental.

National security has the merit of vagueness and thus easy extensibility to anything that stands in the way. Especially with Moscow to "link" to the local radicals, governments that show signs of excessive independence, allow local communists and radicals to proselytize, tolerate, and even encourage union and peasant organization, and worst of all, take positive steps to serve the majority (as did the Sandinistas), quickly become national security threats. I have long contended that one of the main purposes of the boycotts of countries like Guatemala, 1948-1954, and Nicaragua in the early 1980s, was to force a greater dependence on the Communist powers, thus proving a desired linkage and justifying actions allegedly based on such connections.

One form of evidence that national security is convenient pathology is the extent to which neighbors of the states allegedly threatening U.S. security, who are closer to and less able to defend themselves from the menace than the United States, are much less concerned than the pitiful giant, and have had to be bribed and browbeaten to join the U.S.-sponsored opposition. Arm-twisting was notorious in the case of the U.S. attack on Guatemala in the early 1950s. With the Nicaraguan "revolution without borders" in the early 1980s, the supposedly threatened local governments formed a Contadora group whose main function was to try to contain the United States by confronting it with an unwanted negotiating option. For the neighboring states, U.S. intervention was a far greater threat than Nicaragua.

The history of Contadora provides further evidence that the national security threat was nominal only, and a cover for a great power's determination to brook no opposition in its backyard. The moment of truth came in 1984, when Nicaragua suddenly agreed to sign without reservation a proposed Contadora agreement that would have precluded all foreign advisers and bases and cross-border aid to rebels, and would have provided for continuous and virtually unrestricted on-site monitoring by third parties. This caused the Reagan administration to panic, and it quickly got its most amenable dependencies, Honduras and El Salvador, to find serious objections to the Contadora provisions. An agreement that resolved the alleged national security concerns of the United States was an annoyance, for reasons that are all too clear.

Elections and Democracy

While U. S. sponsorship of regimes of terror, and the human-rights implications of this support, are not discussed very much in the mainstream media, and are typically explained away in terms of our alleged national security interests, a great deal of attention is given to U.S. support of free elections and thus democracy in vindication of the genuineness of U.S. concern for human rights. This proof suffers from several serious limitations, however. One is its narrow conception of democracy. A second is the selectivity of application even within its own limited frame of reference. A third limit is that it ignores the ability of a great power to use free elections in ways that pervert them to its own ends and cause them to have an inverse relation to the substance of democracy.

On the concept of democracy, the focus on elections addresses only political rights and powers, not the economic and social aspects of democracy. This conforms to the Western emphasis on rights that do not directly address inequality of wealth and income and the structural basis of inequality, which in turn affect the substance of personal and political rights. Where structural change is needed for the attainment of basic needs for the majority, it is a precondition for political justice and rights as well, and the focus on elections may not only be a diversion, it may be a means of combating the struggle for human rights.

In the case of Nicaragua in the 1980s, the Sandinista government put great weight on economic and social rights, pursuing what the Latin American Studies Association team called the "logic of the majority," mobilizing a long repressed majority to participate in organizations, and carrying out educational, medical, and economic programs oriented to majority interests. These programs were highly regarded by Oxfam and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB). The former noted that: " ... from Oxfam's experience of working in 76 developing countries, Nicaragua was to prove exceptional in the strength of that government's commitment 'to improving the condition of the people and encouraging their active participation in the development process' [quoting a World Bank report]." The IADB stated in 1983 that "Nicaragua has made noteworthy progress in the social sector, which is laying a solid foundation for long-term socio-economic development."

The "logic of the majority" was not appealing to the Reagan administration and U.S. establishment, which quickly built up the exiled Somoza National Guard to attack the new order in Nicaragua. A variety of nominal reasons were given for this assault, reasons which shifted over time and were often based on fabricated evidence. However, it is important to recognize that Sandinista failings on political and personal rights, while vociferously alleged and strenuously protested by the Reagan government, merely provided public relations ploys whose use involved the Reaganites in remarkable hypocrisy. This same administration was entirely oblivious to the absence of political rights in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and to what AI described as "A Government Program of Political Murder" in Guatemala, among many other cases.

It should also be reiterated that the absence of political rights under the Somozas never elicited U.S. hostility. The Somozas, however, pursued the "logic of the minority." There may have been other variables affecting their relations with the United States, such as the Somozas' artful acknowledgment of inferiority and willingness to serve Godfather, but it is striking that their systematic violations of human rights of all types caused no substantial negative U.S. reaction.

When the Sandinista government held an election in November 1984, the Reagan administration went to great pains to discredit it, to prevent it from legitimizing the Nicaraguan government and thereby interfering with the ongoing program of destabilization and low intensity warfare. This effort at discrediting, based on an intense focus on official censorship and harassment of the newspaper La Prensa and the voluntary withdrawal from the election of a potential candidate, Arturo Cruz, was largely successful. The Reagan administration was thus able to continue its boycott, harassment, and military attacks on Nicaragua via a proxy army.

By 1990, with the Nicaraguan economy virtually destroyed and per capita real income reduced by more than 50 percent, in a further free election the candidate sponsored and aided by the United States finally ousted the Sandinista government. This was almost universally regarded in the United States as proof that the patient pursuit of the electoral option works! The complementarity of the incessant, decade-long and large-scale intervention damaging to the governing (and elected) party to the benign electoral result was hardly noticed.

Elections were also held in El Salvador in 1982 and 1984 and in Guatemala in 1984 and 1985. These elections were sponsored and supported by the United States to legitimize governments that were engaged in very severe human-rights violations, but which pursued the "logic of the minority. " They were held under conditions of army rule and ongoing state terror, and only after any Left oppositional organizations and parties had been decimated, eliminated, or pushed underground. These were "demonstration elections," demonstrating that democracy prevailed, as evidenced by free elections, and thus vindicating the terrorist regimes. In these cases, in contrast with the Nicaraguan election, the Reagan team focused not on press constraints and the inability or unwillingness of an alleged "main opposition" to run, but on the long voting lines, the guerrilla opposition to the elections, and the extent to which the elections met formal procedural criteria. The Western media followed this agenda, and El Salvador and Guatemala, unlike Nicaragua in 1984, were found to be democracies run by elected governments.

These were not free elections in substance but the power of superstate propaganda, with media support, allowed them to be portrayed as such. The Salvadoran and Guatemalan elections therefore served to damage human rights by improperly accrediting regimes of terror, thereby facilitating (for El Salvador) continued financing and underwriting further oppression. Through the same process of superpower propaganda and media cooperation, the relatively free Nicaraguan election of 1984 was not permitted to legitimate the government and therefore failed to bring an end to a program of external intervention and state-sponsored terror designed to terminate the pursuit of the logic of the majority. The Nicaraguan election of 1990, successfully portrayed in the United States as fair, was not fair at all-it was an electoral ratification of the defeat of the Sandinista program by foreign aggression. Not only had the position of the ruling party been undermined by incessant foreign economic and military attack, the elections were held under conditions of de facto extortion, as the hostage voting population was openly threatened with continued boycott, harassment, and renewed violence for casting their ballots the wrong way.

Concluding Note

The image of the United States as a protagonist of human rights is a result, in part, of patriotic sentiments and the self-serving claims of officials and their establishment supporters. It is also widely believed that a democracy must support democracy abroad; facts to the contrary are handled by muted coverage or rationalizations in terms of national security and the threat of communism. The possible dominance of the "investment climate" as the operational criterion of policy in the Third World, its implications for human rights, and the "insurance policy" strategy, are simply not discussed. The possibility that the assertion of national security concerns may be a cover for the support of clients whose rule violates all of our nominal values is also avoided.

The United States is, in fact, a strong supporter of political and trade union rights-in enemy states. In the early 1980s, the public would have had reason to be impressed with the passionate official concern with trade union rights in Poland. They would not be aware of the same officials' almost simultaneous support of the Turkish military government and its violent crackdown on Turkish trade unions. Turkey was an ally and client.

Bringing about change in U.S. policy toward human rights is a formidable task as it is rooted in a structure of interests and power. As these interests dominate the state and are able to shape media agendas they have also been able to engage in effective role reversals, making themselves appear to be fighters for democracy and human rights, and hostile to terrorism and the use of force. In the light of the facts, this is an achievement that a totalitarian state could strive to equal but could hardly surpass.

Harvard Human Rights Journal, Spring 1990

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