The castrati of the left
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington Then came Jacob° Timerman, an Argentine newspaper publisher and Jew, one of the disappeared. After two and a half years of torture and imprisonment, he has reappeared in America to tell his story of neoand not so neo-Nazi anti-semitic persecution, first in the New Yorker magazine, next in his widely discussed book Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, and now on innumerable radio and television talk shows. Timerman, who was put on the Argentinian government's laundry list because his newspaper was unhelpful enough to publish the names of the disappeared, has upset the Reaganite suggestion that only Reds hate Jews. 'The reason there is anti-semitism in Argentina, but the Catholics are killed, is because they [the folks who run the government] are Nazis, because the regime is a murderer's regime,' Timerman told a national television audience. A stream of statements like that are making hash out of the notion, gently pushed by the White House, that the only human rights to be stood up for are the rights of Sovet Jewry. All of a sudden we have Timerman on the air everywhere saying, 'Of course, the other people who are not Jewish don't suffer from being Jewish. They suffer from other reasons of oppression. There is a repression in the Soviet Union. The Jews are repressed in two ways, as citizens of the Soviet Union and as Jews. The same happens in Argentina.'
This kind of talk from a Jewish victim of a non-communist government has reminded Jews and non-Jewish liberals alike that bigotry is one seamless strand of barbed wire. By making us acknowledge that fascists in the Argentine and communists in the Kremlin pick the same people to torture, Jacobo Timerman has recalled liberals to their traditional concerns and made something of a mess of the arguments for Reagan's policy of objecting to murders by 'authoritarian' communists while tolerating the same acts committed by 'authoritarian' rightists.
What the reappeared Mr Timerman didn't do to startle the liberals out of comatose acceptance of Reaganaut foreign policy, the infant milk formula battle at the UN did. For a number of years ecohumanitarians and others prone to grow irritable at the sight of baby carnage have been concerned about the sale of commercial infant milk formulas to what the quality white folks used to call the 'backward' parts of the world. Not only has it been felt that what comes out of a mother's breast is superior even to the finest concoctions devised in the laboratories of the American Home Products Corporation, but apparently in some places the formula is mixed with contaminated water, in others mothers who can't afford to buy enough formula dilute it so that their babies starve evert as they feed them.
The Administration's announcement that it would instruct the American delegate to vote against a World Health Organisation code discouraging the use of infant formula caused a flush of anger among the castrati of the American left. Among other reasons the State Department gave for opposing the code is that it would conflict with American anti-trust laws, not up till now a section of the statute book the Reaganauts have shown much interest in. Indeed even as the United States gained the not altogether glorious distinction of being the only entity on the globe to vote against the code for anti-trust reasons, the Administration was trying to change the law to prevent the West German government from suing American drug manufacturers in an American court for violating the very same laws in marketing their merchandise overseas.
Even before Timerman and mother's milk, there was the opposition to the appointment of Reverend Dr Ernest Lefever as Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. An old line cold war liberal, a foreign policy aide to Hubert Humphrey, he seems to have stood still during the years that the American left evolved a foreign policy for itself more elaborate than the hard dichotomy between 'commie' and 'anit-commie'. By the mid-Seventies, Lefever was explaining the official torture in Chile as consistent with 'the Iberian tradition,' and complaining that 'human rights activists' in their preoccupation with the minor abridgement of certain rights in authoritarian states. . often overlook the massive threats to the liberty of millions.'
Iberian traditions aside, it has come out that in his capacity as the head of the Ethics and Public Policy Centre, an entity of his own founding, Lefever has received financial help from the Swiss-owned Nestld company, one of the world's largest manufacturers of infant baby formula. You can imagine the good feelings between liberal and conservative when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held its hearings on Lefever's confirmation which reached the apogee of emotion the day Timerman turned up in the audience. When the Committee Chairman, liberal Republican Charles Percy of Illinois, acknowledged his presence the room broke into applause.
There was no hand clapping when the Committee asked Lefever about his testimony in front of a House sub-committee at couple of years ago when the Assistant Secretary for Human Rights designate said, 'the United States should remove from the statute books all clauses that establish a human rights standard or condition . . . it should not be necessary for any friendly state to "pass a human rights test" before we extend normal trade relations, sell arms, or provide economic or security assistance.'
'When I made that broad statement I goofed,' Lefever said, but the impression he left was he thought the goof was in the saying of it, not the believing of it. Certainly the President and the Administration which appointed him is doing very little writhing in embarrassment. The White House attitude seems to be that the man may have been a bit Lefeverish in his speech but, give or take an electrode on an nipple or two, he is basically on the right track. However, he may not be confirmed, and, at the moment, the betting is that Reagan will soon suffer the experience of having one of his appointees rejected by the Senate. It stings more the first time as many of his predecessors could tell him and, if it happens, it assuredly ought not be taken as a sign that the Reagan foreign policy is about to be nudged into quieter channels.
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