Quoted: Naomi Klein on the de-politicization of human rights

I've been reading Naomi Klein's excellent book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which is basically a re-telling of the history of neoliberal economics. Klein's thesis is essentially that every country which has adopted neoliberal, Chicago School economic policies (privatization, trade liberalization and dramatic cuts in government spending) has done so via fundamentally undemocratic means, and that enforcing these policies has often required brutal repression. Here, she talks about the Pinochet regime in Chile: how the brutal torture and murder carried out by the government was condemned by the Ford Foundation and human rights groups, but how none of these groups drew the connection between the repression and the economic policies served by it.

“When Ford rode to the rescue, its assistance came at a price, and that price was—consciously or not—the intellectual honesty of the human rights movement. The foundation’s decision to get involved in humans rights but “not get involved in politics” created a context in which it was all but impossible to ask the question underlying the violence it was documenting: Why was it happening, in whose interests?

That omission has played a disfiguring role in the way the history of the free-market revolution has been told, largely absent any taint of the extraordinarily violent circumstances of its birth. Just as the Chicago economists had nothing to say about torture (it had nothing to do with their area of expertise), the human rights groups had little to nothing to say about the radical transformations taking place in the economic sphere.”