Peter Lemkin Wrote:Julien Benda argued in his 1927 book "The Treason of Intellectuals""La Trahison des Clercs"that it is only when we are not in pursuit of practical aims or material advantages that we can serve as a conscience and a corrective.

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"The desire to tell the truth," wrote Paul Baran, the brilliant Marxist economist and author of "The Political Economy of Growth," is "only one condition for being an intellectual. The other is courage, readiness to carry on rational inquiry to wherever it may lead … to withstand … comfortable and lucrative conformity."

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Chris Hedges Resigns From Human Rights Organization PEN

Posted on Apr 1, 2013

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[TD="align: right"]The Nation Institute and the State Department[/TD]
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[TD]Chris Hedges and Suzanne Nossel.
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The Truthdig columnist was scheduled to speak at events sponsored by PEN American Center next month, but he has resigned his membership in the writers' organization over its executive director, Suzanne Nossel, a former aide to Hillary Clinton who may have coined the term "soft power."
The following is from a 2004 Foreign Affairs article by Nossel titled "Smart Power: Reclaiming Liberal Internationalism":

To advance from a nuanced dissent to a compelling vision, progressive policymakers should turn to the great mainstay of twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy: liberal internationalism, which posits that a global system of stable liberal democracies would be less prone to war. Washington, the theory goes, should thus offer assertive leadershipdiplomatic, economic, and not least, militaryto advance a broad array of goals: self-determination, human rights, free trade, the rule of law, economic development, and the quarantine and elimination of dictators and weapons of mass destruction (WMD)

In addition to working for the State Department under Hillary Clinton as deputy assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, Nossel has worked as executive director of Amnesty International USA, and for Human Rights Watch and The Wall Street Journal.
Chris Hedges emailed the following statement to PEN and it is reprinted here with his permission:

I will not be participating as a speaker in the PEN World Voices Festival in May. I will not participate because of your decision to select Suzanne Nossel as Executive Director of the PEN American Center. This appointment makes a mockery of PEN as a human rights organization and belittles the values PEN purports to defend. I spent seven years in the Middle East, most of them as the Middle East Bureau Chief of The New York Times. The suffering of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation and the plight of those caught up in our imperial wars in countries such as Iraq are not abstractions to me. Nossel's relentless championing of preemptive warwhich under international law is illegalas a State Department official along with her callous disregard for Israeli mistreatment of the Palestinians and her refusal as a government official to denounce the use of torture and use of extra-judicial killings, makes her utterly unfit to lead any human rights organization, especially one that has global concerns. PEN American Center, by appointing Nossel, has unwittingly highlighted its own failure to defend and speak out for our dissidents, especially Bradley Manning. I hereby resign from PEN. I will wait until the organization returns to its original mandate to defend those who are persecuted, including those within the United States, before returning to the organization.
Sincerely,

Chris Hedges

More about PEN: It is a global organization made up of writer members that advocates for free expression and other human rights causes. The chapter representing the eastern United States is called PEN American Center and was founded in 1922. Its membership has included Robert Frost, Tony Kushner, Langston Hughes, Thomas Mann, Arthur Miller, Susan Sontag, Salman Rushdie and John Steinbeck.
Read more about the controversy at Dissident Voice.

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U.S. Cooption of the Human Rights Movement Continues

An Appeal to PEN: Exec. Director Suzanne Nossel Must Go
by John V. Walsh and Coleen Rowley / April 1st, 2013

When political people have finished with repression and violence PEN can indeed be forgotten. Until then, with all its flounderings and failings and mistaken acts, it is still, I think, a fellowship moved by the hope that one day the work it tries and often manages to do will no longer be necessary.
Arthur Miller who once led PEN

To advance from a nuanced dissent to a compelling vision, progressive policymakers should turn to the great mainstay of twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy: liberal internationalism… (which) should offer assertive leadership diplomatic, economic, and not least, military to advance a broad array of goals…
Suzanne Nossel, new Executive Director of PEN American Center in Smart Power, Foreign Affairs (Emphases added)

Suzanne Nossel is a disturbing choice as the new executive director of PEN, American Center, an American branch of the worldwide association of writers and related professions devoted to free expression and "the ideal of one humanity living in peace in the world." The stark contrast between the statements of Arthur Miller and Suzanne Nossel above is enough to sound an alarm. But Nossel's career path, the masters she has served, the stances she has taken and the activities she has sponsored demonstrate profound differences with PEN. PEN cannot remain true to the ideals articulated by Arthur Miller with Nossel at the helm. She is an embodiment of the ongoing, and all too successful, cooption of the Human Rights movement by the U.S. government.
Nossel's AI Backs NATO Assault on Afghanistan: Bombing Women to Free Them
"Amesty's Shilling for U.S. Wars"
Nossel came to PEN after a year's stint as Executive Director of Amnesty International, USA (AI), in 2012. Before that she served in Hillary Clinton's State Department as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs. Let's consider her time at AI first.
Nossel assumed her post as Executive Director of AI, in January, 2012. Then in May when NATO held its "Summit Meeting" in Chicago, AI sponsored a "Shadow Summit" there. As part of this effort AI mounted a campaign which employed bus stop billboards supporting the NATO invasion in the words, "NATO, Keep the Progress Going. Human Rights for Women and Girls in Afghanistan."[SUP]1[/SUP] "Bombing the women to save them" might well have been the slogan.
AI's "Shadow Summit" featured a number of panels at a Chicago Hotel with the main speaker at the first panel former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, who famously observed to Leslie Stahl that the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, including an estimated 500,000 children, on her watch during the Clinton administration was a price "worth it" to weaken former U.S. ally, Saddam Hussein. What was such a person doing at an AI event? The same panel featured other female luminaries from the U.S. foreign policy establishment, including Melanne Verveer, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women's Issues, who was also a main speaker with Albright; U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Illinois; and Afifa Azim, General Director and Co-Founder, Afghan Women's Network; along with Moderator Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, Deputy Director of AI.
One of us (C.R.) and Anne Wright, who resigned from the State Department in 2003 to protest the war on Iraq, along with a handful of fellow antiwar activists attempted to attend the panel but were refused entrance until some in the group pointed out that they were members of AI. AI then allowed the group to enter, but in an apparent lapse of concern for free speech, only if signs opposing NATO's war on Afghanistan were left outside. Such is the forgetfulness that proximity to power breeds. In a written account of the panel entitled "Amnesty's Shilling for U.S. Wars," Rowley and Wright noted that the CIA's, "Red Cell" in a report disclosed by Wikileaks, had recommended a strategy of using "women's rights" to sell the war in Afghanistan. Rowley and Wright continued in their piece: "When we saw that audience participation was going to be limited to questions selected from the small note cards being collected, we departed. We noted, even in that short time, however, how easy it was for these U.S. government officials to use the "good and necessary cause" of women's rights to get the audience into the palm of their collective hand just as the CIA's "strategic communication" expert predicted!" One has to ask what is afoot when a former State Dept. official takes over an organization like AI, which then neatly fits its approach into that of the U.S. government.
A few months after the appearance of the Rowley/Wright piece and complaints by other members and donors of AI, Nossel resigned unceremoniously. A call to AI's national office unearthed the reply from a staff member that the "staff had been told" that Nossel had resigned "for personal reasons." The promise of a return call by someone more knowledgeable did not materialize. Who was responsible, on or off the board, for hiring Nossel in the first place remains a mystery.
The Revolving Door: A Formula for Cooption
Nossel had previously worked at the State Department under Hillary Clinton. Nossel is often credited with coining the phrase "Smart Power,"[SUP]2[/SUP] which Clinton repeated interminably in her Senate confirmation hearings to characterize how she would run State and which Nossel defined in a 2004 article in Foreign Affairs as "assertive leadership diplomatic, economic, and not least, military." What was this smartly powered State Department like into which Nossel was hired? Perhaps Ralph Nader has taken the measure of it most perceptively, in a CounterPunch essay entitled, "Hillary's Bloody Legacy: Militarizing the State Department":

Behind the public relations sheen, the photo-opportunities with groups of poor people in the developing world, an ever more militarized State Department operated under Clinton's leadership.
A militarized State Department is more than a repudiation of the Department's basic charter of 1789, for the then-named Department of Foreign Affairs, which envisioned diplomacy as its mission. Secretary Clinton reveled in tough, belligerent talk and action on her many trips to more than a hundred countries. She would warn or threaten "consequences" on a regular basis. She supported soldiers in Afghanistan, the use of secret Special Forces in other places and "force projection" in East Asia to contain China. She aggressively supported or attacked resistance movements in dictatorships, depending on whether a regime played to Washington's tune.
Because Defense Secretary Robert Gates was openly cool to the drum beats for war on Libya, Clinton took over and choreographed the NATO ouster of the dictator, Muammar al-Gaddafi, long after he had given up his mass destruction weaponry and was working to re-kindle relations with the U.S. government and global energy corporations. Libya is now in a disastrous warlord state-of-chaos. Many fleeing fighters have moved into Mali, making that vast country into another battlefield drawing U.S. involvement. Blowback!

Thus did Nossel's strategy of "Smart Power" play out as she worked at the side of Clinton.
Before working at State, Nossel worked at Human Rights Watch, which has come under increasing criticism for its distorted accounts of the Chavez government in Venezuela and other official enemies of the US. And before that she worked at the UN under Richard Holbrooke as the Clintons masterminded the bombing of Yugoslavia and pushed NATO eastward in violation of assurances given by Reagan to Gorbachev.
Here we behold a revolving door between government and human rights NGOs, much like the one connecting the Pentagon and defense contractors or between regulatory agencies and the corporate entities they are to regulate. Nossel is clearly aware of the use that the U.S. government can make of organizations like PEN, writing in her 2004 "Smart Power" essay that "that the United States' own hand is not always its best tool: U.S. interests are furthered by enlisting others on behalf of U.S. goals." In what sense can PEN claim to be a "non-governmental organization" with Nossel in charge? In what sense can PEN claim to protect writers from the state with someone in charge who has been a frequent and unapologetic presence in the corridors of power?
The Subversion of Human Rights Organizations
For many decades the rhetoric of human rights has been used by the West to justify its aggressive actions around the world. James Peck in his superb and much neglected work, Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-Opted Human Rights, painstakingly and meticulously documents such subversion over the past 50 years. But the subversion goes farther than the selective attention often paid to official enemies and the relative neglect of human rights violations by U.S. allies. He also points out that the concept of human rights that has prevailed in the West over this period is a shriveled one, basically confined to civil rights. Although the mainstream human rights movement in the West claims to take its inspiration from the UN Declaration of Human Rights, it rarely mentions Articles 25 and 26, among others, which affirm health care and education as rights. Thus the fact that Gaddafi's Libya had the highest literacy rate or highest score in all of Africa on the UN's Human Development Index counted for nothing in assessments of Gaddafi. Nor is faintest praise to be found for the many hundreds of millions lifted from poverty and made literate in New China.
Similarly, Jean Bricmont in his insightful, Humanitarian Imperialism, another book studiously avoided by "progressives" in the West, details the use of human rights rhetoric to gain the support of European intellectuals for the Clintons' assault on the Balkans. This in fact marked a turning point in the view of intellectuals toward the wars of present day imperial powers on weaker nations, a view that set the stage for assaults on Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and now Syria. It marked a sharp break with the opposition of intellectuals to the U.S. war on Vietnam. The important principle of sovereignty enshrined in international law to protect weak nations from falling prey to powerful ones was rudely tossed aside, with much talk of human rights as the justification.
PEN Shows No Concern for Julian Assange or Bradley Manning
The principle at work here is not new. Julien Benda raised it long ago in The Treason of the Intellectuals. As Benda said, "There are two sets of principles. They are the principles of power and privilege and the principles of truth and justice. If you pursue truth and justice it will always mean a diminution of power and privilege. If you pursue power and privilege it will always be at the expense of truth and justice." In our time we may identify Noam Chomsky and the late Alexander Cockburn among those who follow in the tradition of Benda. They represent the best in the tradition of PEN.
The question is which way will PEN go the way of Benda or continue along the way of Nossel. Today a search on the PEN, America, web site readily yields entries for Pussy Riot, Ai Weiwei, and Liu Xiaobo, but nothing is to be found for "Bradley Manning" or "Julian Assange"! That in itself speaks volumes about Nossel's PEN. As Chomsky and others have often pointed out, the primary duty of intellectuals is to critique their own ruling elite. After all, we can most affect our own rulers and it is their actions we are most responsible for. And that is what requires genuine courage. Criticizing elites in countries that are America's official enemies is an easy and secure career path.
PEN members should take action
For those who are appalled by what is happening at PEN, here are links to a list of current and newly elected officers and Trustees. They bear ultimate responsibility for the path that PEN is taking and for Suzanne Nossel's employ. The issue can also be raised at the upcoming PEN World Voices events in NYC. It is clear that many speakers at these events, perhaps the overwhelming majority, hold views quite the opposite of Nossel's, as well they should. Nossel should resign. Speaking out in cases like this is the only way to prevent the Empire from corrupting all it touches, including the human rights movement.

• The poster can be seen here. [↩]
  
• Although Nossel is often credited with the term "Smart Power," from the title of her article in Foreign Affairs in 2004, Joseph Nye, Dean emeritus of Harvard's Kennedy School of government and another Pentagon and State Department functionary over the decades when not slaving in the fields of academe, published a book in 2003 with the title, Smart Power. [↩]
  

John V. Walsh, lately become an associate member of PEN, is a biophysicist/neuroscientist living in the Boston and area and a contributor to DissidentVoice.org, CounterPunch.org, and Antiwar.com. Coleen Rowley, now an antiwar activist in the Twin Cities area, is a former FBI special agent and legal counsel in the Minneapolis field office, who wrote a "whistleblower" memo in May 2002 and testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee about some of the FBI's pre-9 / 11 failures. The authors can be reached at: John.Endwar@gmail.com">John.Endwar@gmail.com. We are interested in hearing from members of PEN and others who are interested in taking action. Read other articles by John V. Walsh and Coleen Rowley.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/04/u-s-cooption-of-the-human-rights-movement-continues/#more-48267

Magda Hassan Wrote:Yep. So many universities are part of the whole corporate structure these days. And indeed have brought it in to being. Fee paying students for big money making courses. Whole departments of history and philosophy gone in some places. Tenure is gone. Funding is comes with corporate strings attached. High work loads and short contracts for the lower ranking lecturers and tutors.

Jeffrey Orling Wrote:Not to mention all the military funded research done in Academia.

Magda Hassan Wrote:

Jeffrey Orling Wrote:Not to mention all the military funded research done in Academia.

Yes, there is much of that too. The armed branch of the corporate world.

David Guyatt Wrote:... For all sorts of reasons, but restraint (or actually the lack of it) being a primary reason.

I remember thinking at the time that this would never come to pass as it sounded so bizarre.

More fool me.