There is righteous anger fueling the OWS movement, especially for young people who stayed on script and did the right thing only to find nothing to show for it (trust me, I know how infuriating that can be). As I mentioned in my previous post, the danger is that righteous anger will be channeled into unrighteous ends, as so often occurs when government commandeers language. And so it has with "human rights," a phrase percolating around the OWS-sphere that spells trouble.
This may sound confusing because no sane person would oppose human rights, and I certainly do not. Humans have rights. What we are dealing with, though, is the artificial and government-supplied definition of that term, which naturally is conducive to government power. As a result, the official term "human rights" poses perhaps the greatest threat to actual human rights.
I discussed this at length in something I wrote a few years ago. The chapter is too lengthy to re-print in one shot, so I will give a first installment here and follow up in later posts.
THE HUMAN RIGHTS HOAX
The appealing phrase “human rights” has taken root in the public consciousness as an unquestioned good, assuming its exalted place next to “civil rights,” “equality,” and “democracy.” What all of these slogans bear in common – apart from their effectiveness at shutting down rational debate – is that governments monopolize their definition and implementation, thereby fusing idealism with statism and advancing central control more speedily than otherwise possible. “Human rights” is a shibboleth that has proved especially handy in this regard because it delivers a pre-packaged (though nebulous) set of notions to every private citizen worldwide and encourages him to chisel away at his own nation’s institutions from within, thereby complementing the efforts of globalists from without. In so doing, “human rights” rips apart international law as a humble system prescribing the rights and duties of nations, beckoning us to rush into the arms of a supranational legal order that will dictate our rights and duties as individuals. Unsurprisingly, several treaties and U.N. declarations have cropped up over the past half-century that trumpet “human rights” and encourage bureaucrats to interfere in every nation’s domestic affairs. Also unsurprisingly, this interference has spread beyond obviously oppressive practices such as torture or genocide, and has begun prying into the most innocent of customs, even purely private conduct, whose only fault is non-conformity with prevailing elite opinion. Very few dare to question this state of affairs, which we must do if we wish to preserve our identity as an independent and sovereign people. At bottom, the cant of “human rights” is nothing more than a pernicious hoax.
First, human rights are far too precious and plentiful ever to be codified. As America’s Founders understood, any attempt to enumerate rights misplaces the burden onto the individual to prove what he is entitled to do, when it should be the government’s burden to prove what it is empowered to do. Our Bill of Rights faced strong resistance for this very reason, and even when adopted, it carried the reminder in the Ninth Amendment that the enumeration of rights must not be perceived as exhaustive. Modern treaties and resolutions purporting to list our rights lack any such saving grace and are a transparent ruse to entice us into selling ourselves short by accepting a fixed, finite bill of goods. Moreover, these modern instruments name a few paltry prohibitions on governmental power, fostering the deadly assumption that governments may do anything not prohibited. A more worthwhile endeavor might devote itself to listing the few things that governments can do, thus assuring that any power not listed may not be exercised. But the political class has no interest in any such undertaking, preferring instead to hammer out the few behaviors that we as individuals may indulge in, meanwhile congratulating itself as caring and compassionate. The very fact that governments, who pose the greatest threat to our rights, are collaborating to outline those rights should send chills down our spines.
But this is only the tip of the iceberg. A look beneath the popular verbiage reveals that the content of these “human rights” treaties has little to do with securing individual freedom, and much more to do with subduing the individual under a fashionable form of leftism that calls for the redistribution of wealth and the silencing of unpopular viewpoints. Thus far, the United States has mounted at least some resistance to these fraudulent enterprises, either by refusing to ratify them or by adopting reservations that render them toothless upon ratification. Nonetheless, a great deal of “human rights” runoff has seeped into our domestic legal system and those of several other countries, and the drumbeat continues for the United States to discard its lingering objections once and for all.
For a taste of what qualifies as a “human rights” violation in modern parlance, consider the plight of Alphonse de Valk, a Canadian priest who dared to express opposition to homosexuality and to homosexual literature promulgated in elementary schools. An offended soul filed a complaint with the Alberta “Human Rights Tribunal,” which then ordered the priest to pay a fine; to issue an apology to the person who had filed the complaint; and to refrain from uttering similar opinions in the future. This blatant assault on religious freedom and freedom of speech is not unusual, and if we take a look at some of the most prominent “human rights” instruments in the world today, we discover just how scarce an honest conception of liberty is in the world today.
This may sound confusing because no sane person would oppose human rights, and I certainly do not. Humans have rights. What we are dealing with, though, is the artificial and government-supplied definition of that term, which naturally is conducive to government power. As a result, the official term "human rights" poses perhaps the greatest threat to actual human rights.
I discussed this at length in something I wrote a few years ago. The chapter is too lengthy to re-print in one shot, so I will give a first installment here and follow up in later posts.
THE HUMAN RIGHTS HOAX
The appealing phrase “human rights” has taken root in the public consciousness as an unquestioned good, assuming its exalted place next to “civil rights,” “equality,” and “democracy.” What all of these slogans bear in common – apart from their effectiveness at shutting down rational debate – is that governments monopolize their definition and implementation, thereby fusing idealism with statism and advancing central control more speedily than otherwise possible. “Human rights” is a shibboleth that has proved especially handy in this regard because it delivers a pre-packaged (though nebulous) set of notions to every private citizen worldwide and encourages him to chisel away at his own nation’s institutions from within, thereby complementing the efforts of globalists from without. In so doing, “human rights” rips apart international law as a humble system prescribing the rights and duties of nations, beckoning us to rush into the arms of a supranational legal order that will dictate our rights and duties as individuals. Unsurprisingly, several treaties and U.N. declarations have cropped up over the past half-century that trumpet “human rights” and encourage bureaucrats to interfere in every nation’s domestic affairs. Also unsurprisingly, this interference has spread beyond obviously oppressive practices such as torture or genocide, and has begun prying into the most innocent of customs, even purely private conduct, whose only fault is non-conformity with prevailing elite opinion. Very few dare to question this state of affairs, which we must do if we wish to preserve our identity as an independent and sovereign people. At bottom, the cant of “human rights” is nothing more than a pernicious hoax.
First, human rights are far too precious and plentiful ever to be codified. As America’s Founders understood, any attempt to enumerate rights misplaces the burden onto the individual to prove what he is entitled to do, when it should be the government’s burden to prove what it is empowered to do. Our Bill of Rights faced strong resistance for this very reason, and even when adopted, it carried the reminder in the Ninth Amendment that the enumeration of rights must not be perceived as exhaustive. Modern treaties and resolutions purporting to list our rights lack any such saving grace and are a transparent ruse to entice us into selling ourselves short by accepting a fixed, finite bill of goods. Moreover, these modern instruments name a few paltry prohibitions on governmental power, fostering the deadly assumption that governments may do anything not prohibited. A more worthwhile endeavor might devote itself to listing the few things that governments can do, thus assuring that any power not listed may not be exercised. But the political class has no interest in any such undertaking, preferring instead to hammer out the few behaviors that we as individuals may indulge in, meanwhile congratulating itself as caring and compassionate. The very fact that governments, who pose the greatest threat to our rights, are collaborating to outline those rights should send chills down our spines.
But this is only the tip of the iceberg. A look beneath the popular verbiage reveals that the content of these “human rights” treaties has little to do with securing individual freedom, and much more to do with subduing the individual under a fashionable form of leftism that calls for the redistribution of wealth and the silencing of unpopular viewpoints. Thus far, the United States has mounted at least some resistance to these fraudulent enterprises, either by refusing to ratify them or by adopting reservations that render them toothless upon ratification. Nonetheless, a great deal of “human rights” runoff has seeped into our domestic legal system and those of several other countries, and the drumbeat continues for the United States to discard its lingering objections once and for all.
For a taste of what qualifies as a “human rights” violation in modern parlance, consider the plight of Alphonse de Valk, a Canadian priest who dared to express opposition to homosexuality and to homosexual literature promulgated in elementary schools. An offended soul filed a complaint with the Alberta “Human Rights Tribunal,” which then ordered the priest to pay a fine; to issue an apology to the person who had filed the complaint; and to refrain from uttering similar opinions in the future. This blatant assault on religious freedom and freedom of speech is not unusual, and if we take a look at some of the most prominent “human rights” instruments in the world today, we discover just how scarce an honest conception of liberty is in the world today.
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