Why Not Abolish Ignorance?

I would like to say a word by way of preface about my own relationship with the subject of human rights and foreign policy. Somewhat to my surprise, after the article of mine [“Dictatorships and Double Standards”] that appeared in Commentary in November 1979—the article the President read—I began to find myself described as a critic of Carter’s human-rights policy and even as a leading critic of Carter’s human-rights policy. The surprise to me was that I didn’t know that I had written an article about human-rights policy at all. It had not been my intention. The words were never used in the article, and when I finished it I didn’t think it was about that. I still don’t, except that everybody else does—and that fact alone has led me to speculate a good deal about what it was that was going on here.

From my point of view I was describing in that article the failure of a policy to produce its expected goals. The goals, I thought, were moderation and democracy; and the results, I thought, were Khomeini and the Ortegas. The decisive instrument of the failure, I thought and still think, was a mistaken conception of how democracy comes into being, of how democracy is established and how it is preserved. And it was only after other people began to describe this as an article about human-rights policy that I began to do some serious reading about our human-rights policy and discovered that, indeed, human-rights policy had become for the Carter Administration—and I guess in the minds of a great many other people—co-terminous with the promotion of democratic government and of all good things in the world. Once I really began to look into it I decided, yes, I was a critic of that human-rights policy—and I’ve been visibly a critic of it ever since.

JK

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Jeane J. Kirkpatrick

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I would like to say a word by way of preface about my own relationship with the subject of human rights and foreign policy. Somewhat to my surprise, after the article of mine [“Dictatorships and Double Standards”] that appeared in Commentary in November 1979—the article the President read—I began to find myself described as a critic of Carter’s human-rights policy and even as a leading critic of Carter’s human-rights policy. The surprise to me was that I didn’t know that I had written an article about human-rights policy at all. It had not been my intention. The words were never used in the article, and when I finished it I didn’t think it was about that. I still don’t, except that everybody else does—and that fact alone has led me to speculate a good deal about what it was that was going on here.

From my point of view I was describing in that article the failure of a policy to produce its expected goals. The goals, I thought, were moderation and democracy; and the results, I thought, were Khomeini and the Ortegas. The decisive instrument of the failure, I thought and still think, was a mistaken conception of how democracy comes into being, of how democracy is established and how it is preserved. And it was only after other people began to describe this as an article about human-rights policy that I began to do some serious reading about our human-rights policy and discovered that, indeed, human-rights policy had become for the Carter Administration—and I guess in the minds of a great many other people—co-terminous with the promotion of democratic government and of all good things in the world. Once I really began to look into it I decided, yes, I was a critic of that human-rights policy—and I’ve been visibly a critic of it ever since.