I have believed since the early 1970s that there is no such thing as Human Rights, and no self-respecting human should expect them. It is, let’s face it, typical of Homo sapiens to award himself inalienable rights: one tedious species (only in existence on one tiny speck of the Universe because a random meteor killed all the dinosaurs) deserves rights? What tosh.
I don’t mean by this that the mass slaughter of Jews, the mentally ill, Greeks, Turks, Ibos, Sikhs, Catholics and Russian dissidents is fine and dandy. I just find it odd that a species capable of doing such things in the first place thinks it deserves rights. We deserve to be tarred for our inhuman rites, not awarded human rights.
If we face the facts of history, the idea of any rights – legal, constitutional, democratic, libertarian, suffrage, privacy or whatever – are so much guff put down on paper by pompous ideologues and useful idiots. As Rome, Napoleon, the American South, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Islam, Blair and Obama have proved endlessly, it looks binding and good-hearted on paper: but that’s all it ever is: hot air converted into holy assertion through the medium of ink.
None of it amounts to a hill of beans if some powerful jackass decides it’s getting in the way. And that is pretty much what Washington, London, NATO, Putin, Israelis, Islamists, Brussels, the US State Department, MI6, Wall Street, the G20 and Wolfgang Schäuble have decided. Nothing – but nothing – is allowed to get in the way of their agendas.
The faster we realise our ‘rights’ are not just undeserved but also worthless, the faster we will wake up to the need to defend ourselves. If you read the now defunct Constitution of the USSR, you will see that all individual rights are guaranteed. You will also find the same in the US Constitution, and the Lisbon Treaty. You will even find it in England’s original Magna Carta. But all of them are flagrantly ignored 24/7/365.
Ergo, as long as humans are in charge of protecting human rights, those rights are without value. And as I wrote at the outset, the whole idea reflects nothing more than childish egomania in the first place.
Rather, the thing we need to tackle is our species’ unerringly clinical ability to get almost 100% of everything wrong.
Some recent examples include….
Undermining fathers
Money destruction
Supra-nationalism
The Euro
ClubMed austerity
Giving John McCain a passport
Finding Rebekah Brooks Not Guilty
Electing Tony Abbott Australian PM
Discovering Australia
Ignoring our élitist tribal nature
Dividing up Africa
Allowing Simon Cowell to live
This represents a small but nevertheless significant selection from the Human Hall of Howlers.
I think that, until we can stop getting almost everything wrong, we should dismiss the idea of giving ourselves rights.
The Slog 