Jonathan Foreman of The Times (London) has written an outstanding report and analysis, “Nazi Scandal Engulfs Human Rights Watch.” Last year, a prominent Human Rights Watch (HRW) staff member, Marc Garlasco was forced to resign his post after it was reported that he is an avid collector of Nazi-era military memorabilia. The Times article masterfully weaves together several multiple related story threads, all of which help to explain not just the Garlasco story, itself, but also why HRW has lost so much of its credibility as a human rights organization. I spotted three story threads, but there’s probably others as well:

Thread 1:  the role that Marc Garlasco played within HRW and what that tells us about the organization. Prior to taking a job with HRW, Garlasco helped the U.S. military select targets in Iraq, where he made numerous mistakes that led to civilian deaths. According to The Times, HRW was happy to have Garlasco around because of his mitiltary expertise, but also because he helped to diversify their office culture. In essense, he was their token gun nut.

Thread 2: the Soros-backed HRW has become ”one of two global superpowers among the world’s myriad humanitarian pressure groups.”

Human Rights Watch started small, but there is now a grandness about it, a deep hum of power and connectedness. In Los Angeles, its annual Hollywood dinner is said to raise more than $2m. When he was guest editor of Vanity Fair, Brad Pitt published a profile of the executive director, Kenneth Roth . . . In London, HRW’s board meetings and fundraising parties are held in huge houses in Notting Hill and Hampstead, with wealthy expat Americans — “the Democratic party in exile”, one board member calls it — vying to outdo each other in lavishness.

Thread 3: HRW’s tendency to focus a great deal of attention on Israel’s alleged misdeeds, while mostly ignoring real human rights abuses in the Middle East, Kahsmir, Cuba, and elsewhere. The article concludes by asking whether the troubling questions surrounding HRW go beyond Garlasco’s hobby or raising money from Saudis, by the reader already knows the answer.

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My take: rarely do I encounter news articles that shed as much light on the dark underside of international “progressivism” as does this one. A lot of folks in the blogosphere were disgusted by Garlasco’s hobby, but he was never the biggest ghoul at HRW.

In 2006 Scott Long, the director of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights programme at Human Rights Watch, attacked the British campaigner Peter Tatchell, accusing him of racism, Islamophobia and colonialism for having the temerity to lead a campaign against Iran’s executions of homosexuals — a campaign that Long believed was unconstructive and based on “a Western social-constructionist trope.”

In other words, HRW is being run by a bunch of multi-cultists. Multicultism combines intellectual barbarism (moral equivalence, postmodernism, etc.) with moral/sensory desensitization, the latter of which has gotten worse in the video-game age. Indeed, the desensitivity and moral equivalency mutually reinforce each other. When Marc Garlasco writes on a Nazi memorabilia blog, “The leather SS jacket makes my blood go cold it is so COOL!” it was akin to when a teenager, playing Call of Duty, says, ”Sweet, dude, did you see that Nazi’s head explode?” To Garlasco, possessing a Nazi war medal is simply “cool.” Sure, he knows that the Nazi’s were evil. Rather than reflect on the deeper meanings of Nazi items, though, he tunes out the ghosts, relishing his medals as kitschy artifacts of a cataclysmic era, when the horrific scenes of human carnage were happening for real. Whereas “progressives” like Garlasco tend to believe that the free world is relatively safe these days, provided that the neocon/Isreali axis doesn’t start a major conflict that spirals out of control.             

Desensitization/moral equivalence is how an HRW “analyst” can viscerally condemn at an act of self-defense by an Isreali soldier, while viewing an actual act of cowardly terrorism as self-defense. Because their moral/sensory perceptions have been dulled down, they filter these events almost exclusively through their ideological lenses.

I’m not suggesting that video games (or collecting war memorabilia) are necessarily “bad” and are ruining the youth, and so forth. That would be a cop-out. I’m also not suggesting that people in previous eras had flawless moral/sensory perceptions, or that they were immune from filtering events through their ideological lenses. But I am saying that we all need to sharpen our moral senses, before the Garlascos and the Scott Longs lull us into sleep(walking).