I was left quite unhappy with Human Rights Day yesterday. Of course, so many human wrongs keep happening -- the Taliban had to celebrate the day shooting dead a prominent female official who worked for women's rights.
The Committee to Protect Journalists announced that there was a record number of journalists in jail -- and if you look at the list, a lot of them are in what I call "Soviet legacy states" -- Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, directly part of the Soviet Union, or the Soviet Union's allies where it fomented trouble, like Ethiopia and Eritrea. The method of jailing or beating or killing journalists isn't proper only to communism and post-Soviet spaces, of course, but it really is a hallmark of that communist idea -- shut the mouth. Of course, quite a few of the cases, such as in Turkey, are branded as terrorists, a challenge of our time which I wish human rights activists were better at fighting as much as states. I trust CPJ has done the due diligence on these cases as I know they have been careful in the past.
And then I was bothered by the news, delivered in my email with a press release and then tweeted triumphantly by Minkie Worden, Human Rights Watch's director of global initiatives and essentially a "strategic communicator," that the Empire State Building was going to be turned blue for the occasion of Human Rights Day in honour of Human Rights Watch.
The press release didn't explain what we know is obvious: Human Rights Watch rents floors from the management of the Empire State Building; that's where they are located in midtown. So management was doing them a kindness, but not without its reward. The Empire State Building changes its colours all the time and it's a popular thing to do -- pink for the Gay Parade or red and green for Christmas or purple for Easter or red, white and blue for 9/11. It's not without its controversaries, like lighting up red and yellow for the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China (!). And its preferences -- like lighting up blue for Barack Obama's winning of the presidential race this year.
But just for Human Rights Watch?! It couldn't be blue in honour of the United Nations, which also has blue in its colour -- and whose Human Rights Day it is, after all? Couldn't it have been a broader understanding of why we were turning the building blue? Could HRW have risen to that occasion? New York City has had a contentious relationship with the UN at times -- the conservative and populist daily tabs hate it; the mayors dislike its many scofflaws who run up huge parking fines; there are always building and construction squabbles. Couldn't -- on this one day -- the city admire something good about the UN? But what this lighting shows is that the Empire State Building is not the city government; it's a private building management; it can do what it wants, and is going to make controversial judgement calls.
Then there was Minkie Worden's tweet of her hubby's article (she is always careful to disclose this spousal relationship as if disclosure removes the implications of this power couple from our scene) in the Wall Street Journal -- L. Gordon Crovitz essentially advocating in a headline that the ITU be "deleted". She refers to the former Googler and former State Department official Andrew McLaughlin as an "Internet defender" as if he has no obvious baggage (more on this later). Crovitz revelled in his feature of McLaughin calling for the ITU to be "knee-capped". Honestly, Human Rights Watch, and its owned press, they have become like a kind of state or an embassy. I've often noticed that when the numerous offices around the world at HRW put out a press release, they will go up higher in the Google search with their Google juice than even Reuters, much less any news site I've worked for like EurasiaNet, which is why I always felt their "embargoes" were pretty pointless -- their own press releases jamming Google for 24-48 days would trump just about any news story anybody might try to write about their works.
The Empire State light-up like other things is emblematic of how HRW is becoming a kind of law unto itself, not just an organization that calls on others to abide by the law and somehow concedes that sovereign states have to have institutions like the UN and even the hated ITU, but that some meta-network of justice jet-setters can run the world better with their own "progressive" beliefs. I hate this. It's antithetical to human rights, at the end of the day.
And there's this: Human Rights Watch is not even really 34 years old. This is one of those organizational fictions that get told so many times nobody ever questions it. But I remember the real story. In fact, in 1988, when I was in Russia with Abe Rosenthal of the New York Times, visiting Perm Labor Camp No. 35 during Human Rights Day, and had to miss the celebrations HRW was organizing "for their 10th anniversary" that year, I sent a telegram saying, sort of jokingly, that they knew full well that it wasn't the 10th anniversary of Human Rights Watch; it was the 10th anniversary of Helsinki Watch. That came first, in 1978, founded by Robert Bernstein, Orville Schell and others to monitor the 1975 Helsinki Accords, with a focus primarily on the grave violations of the Soviet Union, although of course these liberals took every precaution to apply the Accords to themselves, clucking about a book barred from the Moscow book fair by the USIA as much as the jailing of Yuri Orlov.
Soviet propagandists couldn't claim these Americans didn't care about "their Indians," as the Soviet propaganda cliche in these debates was known; they took care to release at least some pro-forma reports on domestic rights issues. If somebody asked "what about the Scottsdale boys?" there was Sophie Silberberg, of Fund for Free Expression, which actually was the parent organization of The Watches (as they were known), who actually knew who the Scottsdale boys were. Jack Greenberg was another civil rights activist from the 1960s with the credibility to care about foreign human rights because he had worked on them at home first. And of course there was the vice president of Helsinki Watch, Aryeh Neier, who had spent 20 years at the helm of the ACLU before this.
Yet it was never enough, in those years, to have worked on US civil rights assiduously at home first before turning abroad to where they were demonstrably violated far more. Every leftist and socialist pointed to Latin America in distraction from the grave implications of Soviet-backed communism in Cuba and elsewhere, where the Reagan administration was backing abusive governments, and hence Americas Watch was born and headed up by Neier in order to balance the saddle bags. And rightly so, as the human rights situations were gruesome, and did involve US wrong-doing. The Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, essentially a front group for the Salvadorean communists, wouldn't have admitted, however, that the abuses they rightly publicized were the sort of thing committed on a far larger scale in the Soviet Union for years. That was always the problem.
And then other watches had to be added to keep balancing, ever balancing -- the game in those years as now -- and of course Middle East Watch had to be born, and the rest is history. I don't recall exactly at what point The Watches with their independent and autonomous life ceased and Human Rights Watch was born to amalgamate and homogenize them, but I believe in fact it was 1988, right when the "10th anniversary" was being claimed. There was some resistance to this homogenization; some people left. I'll never forget a young man who said he was leaving to "work on human rights with a human face". A longer story to tell some day...
But then there's the president's proclamation. President Obama could have taken the occasion, like Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan or George Bush before him, to hold a celebration of Human Rights Day at the White House, and to bring together both domestic human rights advocates and those living in exile or those able to travel from their homelands. I don't know why Obama dropped this (and Bush II may have dropped it before him). Human Rights Day would have been the perfect opportunity for Obama to sign the Magnitsky Act into law, dramatically standing with Magnitsky's widow and mother, and those who worked hard to bring the bill into being such as William Browder, whose Heritage Capital was the investment company through which Magnitsky was ultimately hired by the law firm Firestone Duncan. The ceremony could have been held in some historic room like the Roosevelt Room, perhaps, because of Eleanor's role in developing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
It was not to be -- although the president still has some time to sign it before it lapses. Instead, however, we get this UN Human Rights Day proclamation for the first time tying the UN day to a US holiday that dog-whistles so many stealth socialism terms that reveal how much the socialist left has to invade the language of human rights to try to turn it. It's typical of other word-smithy coming from whitehouse.gov that I find very troubling.
The United States was built on the promise that freedom and fairness are not endowed only to some -- they are the birthright of all.
Fairness? You mean re-distribution? The word "fairness" is not in the preamble to the constitution. "Certain inaliable rights" are "endowed by their creator," but it doesn't say the outcome will be fair.
Ordinary Americans have fought to fully realize that vision for more than two centuries, courageously forging a democracy that empowers each of us equally and affords every citizen due process under the law.
Here we go again with the totally false notion -- really in fact antithetical to the Constitution -- that the government -- the democratic republic -- "empowers" us. I called that out in Hillary Clinton's human rights speech. Nothing "empowers" us -- no state or president -- because rights are inalieable and endowed by their Creator. You don't have to believe in God to grasp that this is a concept about the rule of law as something higher than a state that dispenses rights. Great on the "due process under law," Professor -- but not on the fundamental values -- where's free speech? Where's free association? Why aren't they mentioned at all in this proclamation, although they are the bedrock of all the other rights, and even the UN recognizes that they are indissolubly linked with economic rights?
So there's this -- which is an ideological muddle -- and frankly, deliberately so:
Societies across the globe are reaching toward a future where leaders are fairly and duly elected; where everyone can get an education and make a good living; where women and girls are free from violence, as well as free to pursue the same opportunities as men and boys; and where the voice of the people rings clear and true.
Where everyone can make a good living? But what law in the US Constitution, or even in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, guarantees that? There isn't anything of that notion. When the UN enshrines economic rights -- which US law and practice generally disavow, although entitlements in fact supply the same thing without the socialist ideology -- it's the right to work, for example. Not "the right to make a good living". No one can give you that right in a market economy and the socialist states that claim they do this for their people tend more to fail than succeed.
And then there's this fake Americana with bells ringing, "voice of the people rings clear and true."
Who decides what is true? The Obama Truth Team? Yes, there is a thing called the Obama Truth Team, and it discovers journalists, bloggers, and Republicans in "lies" and then "calls them out". The voice of the people doesn't have to ring "clear and true" by anyone's lights; it just has to be allowed to ring without the government getting in the way. This proclamation contains no reverence for that basic concept; instead, it turns it on its ear, like other subversive White House productions. Who writes this stuff?!
And here we go again with "you didn't build that" and "collectivism":
As they do, the United States stands with them, ready to uphold the basic decency and human rights that underlie everything we have achieved and all our progress yet to come.
Economic rights coming before human rights -- that "decency" dog whistle. And that "we have achieved" -- that collective" and that socialist chimera " all our progress yet to come". Oh, nonsense. Hopefully in four years or even eight, these lies will be a little more visibly threadbare.
And now, for the Marxist opiate of the people, religion:
Men and women everywhere long for the freedom to determine their destiny, the dignity that comes with work, the comfort that comes with faith, and the justice that exists when governments serve their people
Freedom of religious belief isn't a freedom; isn't a bedrock of the nation that in fact is what gives it its very notions of freedom of speech, tolerance, and the right not to believe as well. Instead, faith is merely a "comfort" -- you know, "guns and religion" for those Wal-mart shoppers in the GOP! And dignity that comes with work, not merely the right to work -- something more, something the state provides! Not free enterprise.
And finally the last line, which at least doesn't contain any of this stealth-socialism mangling in it, but which is missing Magnitsky -- read at a ceremony where that bill was signed into law, it might have been more believable:
This week, we rededicate ourselves to fortifying civil rights in America, while reaffirming that all people around the world should live free from the threat of extrajudicial killing, torture, oppression, and discrimination. And we renew our promise that the United States will be a partner to any nation, large or small, that will contribute to a world that is more peaceful and more prosperous, more just and more free.
I truly don't care if you find this article "red-baiting" and if it forces that creepy "McCarthyism" bot to retweet me on Twitter. I think it's important to call out things like this when you see them. They aren't imaginary. They're real. They are troubling. They are profoundly disturbing. They subvert language deliberately to rewrite and rewire memes.
When you lose your freedom, it can happen bit by bit like this. This proclamation -- surrounded by simplistic Soviet-poster-like proclamations of the need for "middle class tax cuts" (i.e. imposition of more taxes on the rich in the distribution gambit); Plouffee's artificially contrived "stories" that are injected every day into the meme-stream -- well, it sucks.
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