Levi's Children: Coming to Terms with Human Rights in the Global Marketplace
304
Levi's Children: Coming to Terms with Human Rights in the Global Marketplace
304Paperback
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802138125 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 05/08/2001 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
Read an Excerpt
Levi's Children
Coming to Terms with Human Rights in the Global MarketplaceBy Karl Schoenberger
Grove Atlantic, Inc.
Copyright © 2000 Karl SchoenbergerAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8021-3812-8
Chapter One
True WestWhen Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said, Who is on the Lord's side? let him come unto me. And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together unto him. And he said unto them, Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour. And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses: and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men. -Exodus 32:26-28
On the scale of things, the slaughter of some three thousand Israelites by the swords of their brethren-when Moses instructed the sons of Levi to smite the worshipers of the golden calf-was a relatively minor event in the context of the many appalling atrocities described in the Old Testament. Had the scene been captured live on Cable News Network, or depicted in sober tones in the next morning's New York Times, the citizenry of a modern wired world would recoil in absolute horror at this brutal party discipline. And in doing so, we would probably miss the allegorical point altogether. Moses haddescended from Mt. Sinai with a mandate from heaven inscribed in stone, ten zero-tolerance rules of human behavior dictated by God, only to find his people enraptured in spiritual anarchy, dancing wantonly before a false idol. This was a flagrant violation of the First Commandment. Certainly some form of punishment was called for if Moses was ever going to lead his flock to the Promised Land, even if it did mean casting the Fifth Commandment (Thou shalt not kill) to the wind. Perhaps this was why Moses smashed the stone tablets in utter frustration.
Now consider replacing Moses in the passage from the Book of Exodus with the eminent personage of Deng Xiaoping, the late patriarch of contemporary China. Deng was once China's most prominent political prisoner. He had suffered persecutions of biblical proportions during the anarchy of the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, only to resurrect himself and seize absolute power. Mighty Deng was determined to lead his people from the ideological bondage of impoverished communism to the Promised Land of free-market capitalism, albeit with guidance from persistent "Chinese characteristics"-which evidently meant brutal authoritarian control. In May 1989, throngs of student protesters gathered at Tiananmen Square, the sprawling ceremonial plaza in central Beijing, across the street from the Forbidden City, where China's emperors once ruled behind the Gate of Heavenly Peace. As tension rose on the square, the demonstrators fell to worshiping the false idol of the "Goddess of Democracy," a giant Styrofoam-and-plaster statue that bore a distinct likeness to the Statue of Liberty. The goddess was assembled by rebellious art students right under the unblinking gaze of Chairman Mao Zedong's billboard-size propaganda portrait on the Forbidden City's Gate of Heavenly Peace, across the street from the square. Mr. Deng did what any righteous old man would do when his own legitimacy and the binding faith of Communist Party is challenged. He called in the troops, the sons of Mao.
The story of what happened next has been told and retold many times, becoming a modern-day parable of innocent idealism and state evil. It may never be known exactly how many unarmed students and citizens were mowed down by China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) on the night of June 3-4, 1989, when peasant soldiers shot their way down a jammed boulevard toward the square. The official count is around two hundred, but informed estimates range far higher. Unlike the grim scribes of Moses' long march, China's chroniclers have yet to devise a credible system of statistical accountability in such matters.
The idea here is not to make light of mass political murder, or to justify the paranoia of Deng Xiaoping and his pathological hard-line supporters. Nor is any disrespect intended for the powerful archetypes and origin myths that are embedded deeply in the psyches of those of us who descend from the Judeo-Christian tradition and who venerate the story of Moses. Western civilization orients itself around these stories and must navigate by them, however imperfectly, through the chaos of life's meaning.
The point, rather, is that when idealistic nongovernmental organization (NGO) activists engage corporations in dialogue about the preachy concepts of human rights theory, it is important to bear in mind what everybody should already know: Moral conflicts cannot be distilled neatly into a choice between right and wrong, good and evil. Sometimes you have to go with the best solution, even if it means violating some cardinal rule. This is situational ethics, the amoral, politically expedient, and sometimes astoundingly hypocritical process that has prevailed since the dawn of civilization.
The words moral and ethical get tossed around so loosely, they are too often used interchangeably, conveniently muddling discussions among people who are responsible for making moral and ethical decisions. Indeed, even the dictionary definitions overlap somewhat. But for the sake of consistency, let us say that morality relates to the capacity to distinguish between right and wrong, and ethics has to do with conforming to a particular set of standards for behavior. Situational ethics might be understood as the practice of using a fluid set of values to justify doing what is necessary to serve one's pragmatic self-interests, collectively or individually. This self-centeredness is mitigated by an intrinsic assumption that it would be against one's own interests to do horrible things to others, lest they be done in return or otherwise invite the wrath of an external wielder of power. Learned theologians and philosophers and academicians no doubt have contrary and more sophisticated views on this. But they seldom have to make business decisions in the real world.
Ethics is a balancing act, whereby behavior is constrained by obligations to the collective interests of one's immediate group or community. The overriding obligation can then extend diffusely in concentric circles to larger societies, political parties, nation states, religious sects, international conspiracies-"stakeholders," as proponents of corporate social responsibility would say.
It doesn't matter if it's the biblical Moses liquidating worshipers of the golden calf, or Soviet leader Joseph Stalin murdering millions of counterrevolutionary peasants, or Harry Truman dropping the atomic bomb on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In business it could be Microsoft tycoon Bill Gates snaring unsuspecting consumers into using his Internet browser software at the exclusion of a competitor's product, a practice vigorously contested by the U.S. Justice Department's antitrust division, and if you think about it, you might agree it's simply wrong. But it's also ingenious. With situational ethics, distinguishing between what's wrong and right is something that necessarily depends on your circumstances and your point of view. Notwithstanding all the striving toward piety and global peace, toward the strictures against man's cruelty to his fellow man, history suggests that the puny human's franchise on earth is one of bending the rules, of subjugation, and periodically of calculated carnage.
* * *
Conventional wisdom dictates that the world reached a turning point in collective moral repugnance after bearing witness to the indescribable horrors of the Nazi Holocaust in World War II.
The atrocity has since been conceptualized and encapsulated as an isolated event, perpetrated against European Jewry by a depraved and totalitarian military regime. But at the close of the century, stories continued to emerge about the many civilian accomplices who willfully turned a blind eye to-or secretly supported and profited from-the mechanism of the Holocaust. Swiss banks had laundered the gold that the Germans stole from their Jewish victims, some of it ripped from the teeth of the dead. These prominent and powerful financial institutions were only reluctantly settling claims on the disputed booty after fifty years of denial.
Survivors of the Nazis' slave labor camps filed class action lawsuits claiming billions of dollars in compensation for the work they were forced to perform at factories owned by such German industrial giants as Volkswagen, Daimler-Benz, and Siemens. Investigators examined whether the German subsidiaries of Ford and General Motors might have collaborated similarly in the Nazi labor scheme-suspicions that American automakers vigorously denied. Volkswagen, the brainchild of Adolf Hitler himself, did not have the option of explaining away its tainted past, and it settled swiftly with lawyers representing former slave laborers. Coincidentally, the company was introducing a newly restyled model of its classic Volkswagen Beetle compact car in 1998, launching a blitzkrieg of nostalgic feel-good television commercials in a gambit to recapture lost market share in the United States. The mere dollars-and-cents cost of settling on alleged corporate liability for past injustices, the VW Bug campaign suggests, pales in comparison with the price of potential fallout from an unresolved human rights scandal. If seeing a cute candy-colored little car on the street evoked lurid visions of Nazi slave labor, emaciated skeletons of Jews and Gypsies and political dissidents working the assembly line, Volkswagen could never repair the damage to its image in the American car-buying public.
In what may prove to be the last act of German war reparation for the crimes of the Nazi era, German government and business leaders agreed in December 1999 to settle the forced-labor law suits with a $5.1 billion payment to surviving victims. Initial reports suggested that the German subsidiaries of GM and Ford were expected to join the accord, but that the settlement may not eliminate the challenges of related class action suits filed in the United States.
If anything can be considered an absolute and unmitigated evil, it would have to be the bureaucratized genocide of the Nazi Holocaust. Civilized people-politicians, jurists, and captains of industry-went insane en masse and kept copious records of the blood-lust. The stories of imperial Japan's gruesome atrocities across Asia also resonated deeply in the aftermath of World War II, adding to the angst. The United Nations in 1948 expressed the world's feelings of outrage, remorse, and shame when it enshrined the principles of a postwar collective conscience in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The moral tone of the document's preamble lays out high hopes for humanity: "Disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people.... It is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law...."
The declaration was a radical document, which, in the words of Henry Steiner, a human rights scholar at Harvard Law School, has had a "subversive effect" on the sovereignty of individual states. "However self-evident it may appear today, the Declaration bore a more radical message than many of its framers perhaps recognized," Steiner wrote on the document's fiftieth anniversary. "It proceeded to work its subversive path through many rooted doctrines of international law, forever changing the discourse of international relations on issues vital to human decency and peace."
Over a period of five decades this document inspired new generations of legal scholars, launched careers in various human rights bureaucracies and NGOs, and generated a canon of literature on theory and practice. Its application in the Helsinki accord contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union through an open dialogue on human rights. The inspiration it provided in the South Africa divestiture movement helped bring an end to apartheid.
Sadly, however, the aspirations of the declaration appeared woefully unrealized as the document entered its fifty-first year. The 1998 holiday season opened with the United States and Britain raining bombs and cruise missiles on Iraq to enforce a failing United Nations scheme to prevent Iraqi president Saddam Hussein from developing the technology for weapons of mass destruction. At the same time, international relief agencies protested that thousands of Iraqi children were dying each week for lack of adequate food and medical supplies, a tragedy caused by devastating UN economic sanctions, ostensibly aimed at starving out Saddam. In a cynical nod to moral decency in warfare, the Anglo-American bombing strike was halted abruptly on the first day of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting.
A year later, Serbian strongman Slobodan Miloevic took over in the role of America's favorite despot, committing atrocities against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo and greeting air strikes by war planes of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) with contemptuous defiance. It was far from clear who had the moral high ground-or how to end the cycle of carnage in the Balkans. Both sides were wrong: American-led NATO extracted an intolerable civilian death toll from the "collateral damage" of its bombing. The Serbian task of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo took on genocidal elements, with hundreds of thousands of civilian refugees fleeing burning villages and mass graves-and dodging NATO bombs. When the smoke cleared and Kosovar refugees returned to their wrecked villages, reports of revenge killings of Serbian neighbors began, making the mission of NATO peacekeeping troops on the ground seem impossible.
Where is the crisp line between the good and evil in these terrifying episodes of international diplomacy? U.S. commander in chief William Jefferson Clinton ordered the attack on Iraq while he was under impeachment by Congress, accused of lying under oath about a sexual peccadillo with a White House intern. The immediate effect of bombing Yugoslavia was to galvanize popular support for Miloevic, stoking the fascist fires of Serbian nationalism instead of containing them. In a fluke accident, a U.S. stealth bomber attack on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade had devastating effects on Sino-U.S. relations, cutting off the fragile dialogue on human rights.
Continues...
Excerpted from Levi's Children by Karl Schoenberger Copyright © 2000 by Karl Schoenberger. Excerpted by permission.
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What People are Saying About This
Karl Schoenberger has written an important book that sheds new light on the complicated intersection of human rights and global business. By scrutinizing the difficulties encountered by Levi Strauss as it seeks to follow an ethical course in turbulent times of globalization, Schoenberger takes readers on an illuminating journey through the inner reaches of corporate America and the outer reaches of Third World sweat shops. Amid the hyperbole in the media over the costs and benefits of globalization, Schoenberger has written a book that clarifies the dilemmas and points the way toward an equitable future for everyone on the economic food chain.
—(Peter Maass, author of Love Thy Neighbor)
Levi's Children is a careful, thorough, and provocative examination of the complex relationship between free economic exchange and the free exercise of political rights. At one level, it's the story of the surprising obstacles a group of well-intentioned business leaders encountered. At another, it is a guide to the obstacles likely to occur in relations between the developed and developing world and in particular, between the United States and China. Anyone curious about the effect of world commerce on world welfare in the broadcast sense will find this a valuable book.
—(James Fallows, author of Breaking the News)
Levi's Children is a well-told and fascinating story of Levi Strauss's efforts to keep ethical practices integrated into its overall strategy for doing business around the world. As the process of globalization proceeds apace, it is a tale that corporate leaders, diplomats, and rights activities alike will find close to the heart of the matter.
—(Orville Schell, author of Mandate of Heaven)