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On December 9, 2021, US President Joe Biden spoke with representatives of more than 100 countries at the Virtual Democracy Summit held at the White House in Washington, DC. (Photo: Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images)
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Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It was so successful that the United States of America has become a monster, in which the stains, diseases and inhumanity of Europe have grown to an alarming degree. ~Franz Fanon
International Human Rights Day is December 10. On this day in 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was promulgated as the first in a series of conventions, treaties and legal interpretations that would constitute the post-war human rights framework.
However, since the creation of the United Nations by the San Francisco Convention in 1945, the history of the struggle that produced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights can only be described as controversial. It is impossible to cover all the history here. What is important, however, is that the historiography of black activism regarded black activists as central participants in the UN process and debate from 1945 to 1951. It can be said that the controversial ideological features surrounding the concept of human rights are still playing out today.
If human rights are to have any connection with the oppressed, it must be "decolonized" and given meaning by the oppressed.
The understanding of the composition of human rights reflects the ideological polarization that began to reappear between the Soviet Union and the United States and its allies after the war. According to the United States and Western European powers, human rights are civil and political rights, including economic, social, and cultural rights (ESCR)—such as the rights to health care, housing, food, education, leisure, and language and cultural practices—just have ambition. Therefore, the difference between these two approaches lies in the West and individual-based civil and political rights, and the East in support of collective ESCR.
From the narrow view of marginalizing ESCR but supporting political rights, US President Joe Biden used Human Rights Day to promote the obscene notion that the United States and the colonial countries of Western Europe are to some extent defenders of "human rights."
The idea that Western colonial/capitalist countries are defenders of human rights appears to many people in the colonized South to be either a delusion or an assertion that they are not humans in the eyes of the West. For the colonized and racialized people burned to death, tortured, and murdered by these human rights defenders, it is understandable that no matter what human rights should be, they do not include the racialized and colonized people in the world.
However, the fiction of Western societies’ commitment to human rights still exists in colonial metropolises. However, today, after 40 years of onslaught of neoliberal counter-revolution that started in the global south in 1973 and then turned to the northern economies, the cruel contradictions of capitalist accumulation meant that capitalism was not withdrawn until the 1970s in the post-war years.
The Covid pandemic has exacerbated the global economic crisis of neoliberal capitalism, exposing the ethical, moral, and political contradictions in the framework of freedom and human rights. The large-scale economic displacement, hunger, unemployment, and unnecessary deaths in the American population, as well as the disproportionate prevalence and hospitalization rates of non-white workers and poor people in the United States, have never been condemned as violations of human rights.
Although the liberal human rights framework reluctantly recognized ESCRs in its founding documents, in practice, liberal capitalist countries are not balanced in providing ESCR protection. However, the United States has been the most successful in separating the concepts of basic ESCRs—such as the right to health, the right to food, the right to housing, the right to education, an acceptable material and cultural level, leisure, and true life-long means. Social security-comes from the democratic discourse about what constitutes the responsibility of the state and the interests and rights that the state should safeguard in order to be considered legal.
Therefore, just like Obama's assertion that the war is only a war when American military personnel die, American policymakers, the media, and the public will not apply a human rights perspective to national and private capitalist policies. In other words, Covid has not committed human rights violations because it is certain that whatever happens in the United States will not be defined as a human rights violation.
This absolute transformation and alternation of reality is precisely how the United States can continue to claim to be a human rights defender and escape punishment, at least for the American public.
However, the dangerous contradictions of liberal human rights do not stop at the level of domestic policies.
From the fact that human rights such as voting rights, speech rights, and assembly rights are just ideological positions of civil and political rights, and the false premise that human rights are natural, objective, and politically neutral, the liberal framework has been further developed. In the 1990s, the neoliberals weaponized it as an ideological tool, rationalizing naked imperialist intervention.
The dangerous contradictions of liberal human rights do not stop at the domestic policy level.
Humanitarian interventionism (war) and the "responsibility to protect" have become contemporary expressions of the "white burden" to save the indigenous people of the global South from the autocratic rulers. This insidious, white supremacist structure then shifts from its liberal foundation to left-wing circles and left-wing discourse. Left-wing forces provide ideological cover for imperialist intervention. Therefore, it is difficult to oppose attacks on non-European global southern countries. .
The liberal leftist forces in the West do not recognize the influence of white supremacy, because it is reasonable that the white supremacist elites in the West are concerned about the questionable position of human rights and democracy in these countries.
They did not realize that the “authoritarian” rulers to be removed were usually trying to boycott the country completely ruled by the United States and its European allies. From Cuba, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Iran to North Korea and Venezuela, subversion, direct military intervention, proxy wars, and sanctions have all been deployed to "save" people from oppressive rulers. It doesn’t matter whether tens of thousands of people died from wars and sanctions that deprived the population of medication. Western whites decided with their privileges and a safe capital thousands of miles away. These losses are acceptable collateral damage to safeguard democracy and "human rights." .
Necessary conditions for decolonization of human rights
Oppressed people, regardless of their formal education level, have the ability to understand and explain the world around them, see the world as it is, and take action to change the world. ~Ailabek
This cynical ideological manipulation of freedom and human rights is why so many people in the world refuse to use this framework. However, from WEB Dubois and Claudia Jones to Malcolm X and Black Panthers to today’s Mississippi Workers’ Human Rights Center, the radical black movement still constitutes a key element of the struggle that Africans are fighting in the human rights vocabulary. Used by Africans in the United States Are terms such as human rights wrong, or are we operating under a different framework?
I believe that from the moment black activists first clarified their human rights position in 1945, the necessity to eliminate the racial oppression and exploitation of American and European colonialism was a prerequisite for the realization of human rights. We operate from a different framework: I mark It is the framework of the "People-centered Human Rights (PCHR) Framework".
The assumptions of the PCHRs framework are simple and straightforward. If human rights are to have any connection with the oppressed, it must be "decolonized" and given meaning by the oppressed.
What is human-centered human rights (PCHR)?
The PCHR framework does not pretend to be apolitical. This is a political project that serves Africans and the colonized working class, farmers, and the oppressed in society.
They are "non-oppressive rights that reflect the highest commitment of universal human dignity and social justice that individuals and collectives define and guarantee for themselves through social struggle."
This definition is a description of the process and ethical framework, rather than being defined as a pre-set list of items representing human rights. This is one of the main differences between Freedom Framework and PCHR. The PCHR approach asserts that human rights must be created from the bottom up.
The PCHR framework rejects the view that human rights are derived only from legal texts negotiated by the state and are as important as some principles represented in certain texts. PCHRs are the product of struggle and are produced from the formation of the people. Unlike the liberal framework that elevates the mysterious concept of natural law (actually bourgeois law) to the basis of abstract rights, the "people" in formation creates an ethical foundation and is the source of PCHR.
This process is open-ended. Based on the needs and desires of the oppressed, it is not only a counter-narrative of capital ideology and cultural hegemony, but also a guide for action. It is based on the assumption that a set of "human rights" can only emerge as part of the process of decolonization and liberation.
The human-centered framework stems from the assumption that the core of human rights violations is that the attack on human dignity originates from the continuous structural relationship of colonial/capitalist oppression. Therefore, the PCHR framework does not pretend to be apolitical. This is a political project that serves Africans and the colonized working class, farmers, and the oppressed in society. It points out the enemies of freedom: Western white supremacists, colonial/capitalist patriarchy.
Therefore, we will not be confused or distracted by Joe Biden's antics at his Democracy Summit, nor will we be surprised that the weak reforms of the "rebuild better" legislation are weakened and then emptied of content. The bourgeoisie is clear and serious about their ongoing class war.
This is why we must be clearer and firmer. Our lives and the planet depend on whether we can defeat the pan-European white supremacist colonial/capitalist patriarchy, who would rather destroy the world than surrender power.
Therefore, failure is not an option.
Only through this victory can true freedom and human dignity be realized. With PCHR, we have ideological weapons. A weapon of understanding that conceives, centralizes, and legitimizes that only through social revolution can human rights be realized.
Ajamu Baraka is the vice presidential candidate of the 2016 Green Party candidate. He is the editor and special columnist of Black Agenda Report, as well as a special columnist of Counterpunch magazine. His latest publications include reports on Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence (Counterpunch Books, 2014), Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA (HarperCollins, 2014) and Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amilcar Cabral (CODESRIA, 2013) contribution. You can reach him at www.AjamuBaraka.com
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