Time to decolonise human rights
The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilisations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”
“. . . recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”
THESE are the words in the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) promulgated 70 years ago on December 10, 1948. They were supposed to reflect a new understanding of the causes of war and a commitment to the highest values of the “international community”.
The UDHR was the first major instrument produced by the United Nations (UN), an institution itself created at the end of the Second World War. Its creation was hailed as a breakthrough that would give institutional substance to the pledge by member states to promote international cooperation, commit to peaceful relations among states and respect human rights and fundamental freedoms.
According to Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of President Roosevelt and US representative to the UN Human Rights Commission, the structure responsible for producing the UDHR, the declaration reflected those natural and eternal rights that, nevertheless, were not always seen but under the right circumstances could be revealed and nurtured.
It was thought by many that the UDHR with its commitments to freedom of thought and speech, assembly, education, life-long social security, health care, food, the right to culture, etc, represented the hope of an international community that had learned from the carnage of the second world war, grew up as a result and ready to collectively center the dignity of everyone. Seventy years later, the historic record is clear. Instead of recognising the inherent dignity and worth of individuals and collectives, the post-war period has been an era of human depravity. It is estimated that direct and indirect state and nonstate violence has resulted in over 30 million dead, whole nations destroyed, the normalisation of torture, rape as a weapon of war, millions displaced and once again the rise of neo-fascist movements across Europe and in the United States.
What happened?
What happened was the continuation of the Pan-European white supremacist colonial/capitalist patriarchy. The historic project temporarily diverted by the war as a result of the Germans bringing the horrors colonial domination unleashed by the European invasion of what became the “Americas” in 1492, back to Europe and applied to other Europeans. But once Hitler was dispensed with, the systematic brutality that created “Europe” continued.
The doctrine of discover, slavery, manifest destiny, the white man’s burden, the responsibility to protect, all of the ideological and policy expressions representing what Enrique Dussell referred to as the underside of what is referred to as Western modernity. That underside that rationalised the stratification of human beings into those with rights and those who were killable, enslavable, rapable, condemned the non-European colonised to what Fanon referred to as, “the zone of non-being.”
The Pan-European project represented a logic and rationale at the core of the European identity and its material foundation. It created an imperative that could not be easily dispensed of, without negating the very idea and materiality of Europe and what was understood as modernity.
Therefore, there was always an internal contradiction in European thought, captured and reinforced during the so-called enlightenment; that produced an analytical and conceptual malady that can only be explained as a kind of psychopathology.
In August 1941, with the Nazi march across Europe in full execution, the rhetorical force of collective human rights found expression in the Atlantic Charter produced by the United States and Great Britain. The Charter stated among other tenets that “all people have the right to choose the form of government under which they live”.
It boldly declared that for those people who had been denied this fundamental right, the goal of the war was to see “sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcefully deprived of them”.
For the 750 million colonial subjects and the tens of thousands conscripted to fight in the war, this was music to their ears.
The Atlantic Charter served as the basis for the Declaration of the United Nations, in January 1942 by 26 nations then at war and subsequently by 21 other nations. The Declaration endorsed the Atlantic Charter and expressed the conviction that complete victory over their enemies is essential to defend life, liberty, independence and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands.
Finally, many of the colonial subjects believed the principles of the war and the fight against racism and white dominance in Europe would allow all still colonised, and denied national democratic rights, to assume a new status as full human beings and exercise national rights just like white Europeans.
However, Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the British and US leaders made it clear that the principles in the Atlantic Charter did not apply to colonial subjects in colonial territories but only to those nations in Europe under the “Nazi yoke”.
What happened to the human rights idea?
Samuel Huntington was clear in “Clash of Civilisations”: “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilisations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”
So, when the interests of maintaining the Pan-European colonial/capitalist project, which is fundamentally grounded in systematic violence, clashed with respect for the “inherent dignity of all members of the human family” and their human rights and fundamental freedoms, those high-sounding liberal principles were sacrificed at the altar of realpolitik. In fact, they were not actually sacrificed. Because as we have witnessed, those liberal principles were never meant to apply to non-Europeans colonial subjects.
The European empires of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, exhausted from two devastating wars found themselves as wounded vassals to a newly emergent hegemon — the United States, which was now the unchallenged leader of the Western capitalist world, or what imperialist propagandists would call the “free world”.
British, French and the Portuguese still dependent on their colonial empires but weakened by the war, nevertheless, were compelled to attempt to re-impose themselves on their colonial subjects after the war. These efforts were supported by the United States in what Kwame Nkrumah called the post-war process of “collective imperialism”.
Therefore, despite the promulgation of the UDHR, individual and collective human rights were violated from Algeria and Vietnam, to Kenya, India and eventually Angola and Mozambique and many nations in between. The commitment to maintain European colonial/capitalist dominance resulted in a veritable bloodbath in which literally millions died and whole nations and cultures destroyed.
But what is incredible about this orgy of death and destruction imposed on so many over the decades and centuries, is that simultaneous to committing genocides and enslaving and perfecting new and more effective weapons of mass destruction, the Western world claimed to be the champion of human rights, and they largely got away with it.
Western commitments to human rights and fundamental freedoms were once again exposed for the lie that they have always been for the world’s colonised peoples. And with the cynicism and psychopathology generated by the cognitive dysfunctionality of white supremacy, the US and the Western world proclaimed themselves the creators and champions of human rights as the blood flowed across the planet. — Counterpunch.
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