The human rights industry

The concept of human rights in its modern form gradually came into existence during the English, American and French Revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But the concept itself did not make much of an impact on international affairs until the twentieth century, particularly during the second phase (1941-1945) of the Second World War. Officially democratic countries like Great Britain and the USA, in an anti-fascist alliance with the officially communist USSR , claimed to be fighting the war for freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from fear and freedom from want. Victorious in 1945, that alliance was then transformed into the United Nations Organization, which brought together many leading jurists to write the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948. Back then, the most important author of that document, Canada’s own John Humphrey, neatly summarized the main ideological thrust of what was to become the Western-dominated human rights industry with his focus on individual, as opposed to collective, rights.

Right off the bat, many non-Western countries objected to some of the fundamental rights outlined in that document. For example, many Muslim countries, such as Saudi Arabia, refused to comply with any rights that might conflict with Islamic sharia law, such as equality between men and women. Other Muslim countries, such as Pakistan, disagreed with that radical stance, at least back then. Over the past several decades, however, the Muslim community as a whole has never really resolved that dilemma, especially since the recent, world-wide revival of radical Islam.

The Western countries, led by the USA, were quite happy to promote such individual rights as freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of religion, as part of their Cold War propaganda against the official communist movement, then in the process of developing a world-wide, Eastern bloc of countries. The USSR and its allies promptly fell into the totalitarian, anti-democratic trap by pretending to agree with most of those individual rights but then cynically refusing to implement any of them in any real way. Back then, however, the not so democratic West also included South African apartheid (1948-1991), which is still an economic reality even nowadays. Not to mention the USA’s dismal record on civil rights for African-Americans, the fact that all the newer Western countries (Canada, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, etc.) have always discriminated against native peoples generally, and so on.

Up until the implosion of the various branches of the Marxist-Leninist movement during the 1980s, the officially-communist countries fought back against the Western emphasis on individual rights by focusing instead on collective rights. Their point of view was that the political rights in the individual sphere of human existence could not truly be separated from the collective rights that tended to dominate the economic, social and cultural spheres. Before disappearing, they managed to pass on that manner of interpreting human rights to their Third World allies in the anti-colonialist movement. Most of the new nations that became independent after Western colonialism was defeated adopted that point of view and changed the UN’s initial focus on individual rights.

As a result, in 1976, the UN adopted the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, a document that was signed, but not ratified, by the USA. It emphasized such things as labor rights, and the rights to social security, an adequate standard of living, health, and free education, as well as the right to participate in cultural life. From then on, the official United Nations Organization point of view was that the International Bill of Human Rights included not only the 1948 declaration and the 1976 covenant, but also an additional International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, dealing with such issues as slavery and the death penalty. In other words, the overall UNO officially decided that it would neither emphasize individual (civil and political) rights over collective (economic, social and cultural) rights, nor collective rights over individual rights, but would instead try to promote both equally.

What really happened, however, was that none of the world’s countries ever fully implemented any of those rights. Although some progress has been made over the past few decades towards many of those goals, in several different countries, human rights as a whole are still light-years away from being fully recognized nowadays. As I mentioned before, this is particularly obvious in the unusually large number of Muslim countries run by fundamentalist governments nowadays. The idea that theocratic religion should have total control over every possible aspect of life means that the very concept of human rights is seen as devil worship, not only among radical Muslims but also in every other ultra-reactionary religious formation. Still, this has not prevented true believers all over the world from cynically using freedom of religion as an ideological weapon in their competing crusades for world domination.

But the most important enemy of human rights in the twenty-first century is, paradoxically, neoliberalism. In theory, the libertarian, laissez-faire onslaught against state intervention in economic, social and cultural affairs should have become a major ally for human rights, at least in its original version as a leading aspect of Western individualism. Instead, neoliberal privatization, deregulation, globalization, speculation, shareholder autocracy, tax evasion, public-sector austerity and the war on the welfare state, have all helped to establish the largest income gap between the social classes that has ever existed, all over the world.

The number of people in extreme poverty, defined as living on less than two US dollars a day, may have declined in many different countries, but the enormous increase in the wealth of a few million ultra-rich people has made the entire world an even more unequal place than it was before neoliberalism began its propaganda onslaught during the 1980s. This is particularly true in the world’s most unequal countries such as Saudi Arabia, China, South Africa and the USA. Curiously enough, the world’s leading billionaires not only support the entire neoliberal agenda, they also simultaneously finance every kind of religious atavism as well.

Naive observers and sycophants often claim that the rise of the middle class in formerly Third World countries is leading toward greater equality instead. But one billion “extremely poor” people (living on less than 700 dollars US per year), three billion “poor” people (700 to 3000 dollars per year), and two billion not really “middle class” people (3000 to 30000 dollars per year), by Western standards only leaves one billion people with anything near a decent standard of living. And given the fact that the top 500 ultra-rich people control half of the world’s global income, the least that can be said is that social equality is regressing badly at the moment.

Neoliberal sycophants also refuse to admit that the rising income gap has any effect whatsoever on human rights, not only economic, social and cultural rights, but also political and individual rights. In reality, however, there is nothing like abject poverty to convince people to focus on economic and social survival rather than enjoy the luxury of complaining about their theoretically guaranteed rights. In most parts of the world nowadays, people who complain about their rights anyway are constantly being beaten over the head, thrown in jail and/or killed, quite similar to the way the working-class in the West was treated during the first and second industrial revolutions.

If people in the Western-based human rights industry were truly interested in achieving their official goal of gaining human rights for all, they would aim most of their propaganda at promoting at least a modicum of social equality. Instead, most of the non-governmental organizations inside the human rights movement spend most of their time trying to defend minority groups whose causes have become popular with the middle-class activists who belong to those organizations. By focusing on minority rights in particular, they leave everyone the impression that discrimination against minorities is a thing unto itself, that can only be overcome by patiently teaching the general public about the moral evils of prejudice.

Unfortunately, the human rights industry’s general focus on individualism allows  billionaires and other powerful people the opportunity to blame popular prejudice for recent backsliding on human rights issues. But the various different minorities are not just suffering from the disgusting behavior of evil ordinary people, they are also suffering from the same onslaught that afflicts the moderate (silent) majorities, namely the diversion of investment resources from social progress to social regression. Even women, half the entire human population, are often treated as just another minority group. Many organizations in the human rights industry allow freedom of religion to trump women’s rights, not to mention gay rights and the rights of those who want freedom from religion rather than freedom of religion.

By accepting the ideological straitjacket of thinking about human rights as being mainly involved with the treatment of minorities, the human rights industry tends to ignore the class or income divisions that affect everyone. This reduces its capacity to understand society as a whole and therefore to let the world’s most important decision makers get away with a divide and conquer strategy, pitting majorities against minorities and one kind of minority against another kind of minority.

A particularly poignant example of this kind of thing comes from the very unequal dispensation of justice in just about every country. Someone who was truly interested in human rights as a guiding principle of social governance would normally be expected to  ask himself (or herself) why hundreds of millions of people are now languishing in prison, not always for good reasons, whereas hundreds of millions of other people having committed the same crimes, or worse, have never even been arrested. Aside from the simple-minded rejoinder that the overworked police forces cannot be expected to arrest every single perpetrator, a more penetrating analysis would undoubtedly focus on why a much larger percentage of people in high places get away with their crimes than do more ordinary criminals.

Not to mention the fact that most ordinary criminals commit their crimes under orders from the world’s most important people, and that many police forces all over the world often participate in those crimes, rather than suppressing them. Why do human rights organizations so seldom focus their attention on criminality, not just from the standpoint of minorities proportionately ending up in prison far more often than (silent) majorities, but from the standpoint of massive corruption in high places? Isn’t the fact that very few of the world’s most important people end up in jail for crimes committed under their orders a major kind of human rights abuse? If an abuse is committed for reasons of social standing, isn’t that just as important as an abuse committed because those in power are constantly taking advantage of minority populations?

Human rights are not some kind of special category of life that can be separated from everything else. All the rights that are respected, or ignored, are treated in one way or the other because of the very same social forces that make real democracy for everyone so difficult to put into practice. Nothing will ever be achieved on a permanent basis for human rights unless or until humanity figures out how to deal with today’s unprecedented levels of social inequality.