Western Powers Have Exposed Human Rights and International Human Rights as a Sham

Western Powers Have Exposed Human Rights and International Human Rights as a Sham

What is Needed is a new framework – a Non-Western, People(s)-Centered Human Rights Framework

For Immediate Release

Media Contact
press@blackallianceforpeace.com
(202) 643-1136

December 10, designated as International Human Rights Day has become a hackney, disingenuous ritual in which the United States and European imperialist powers, the main violators of human rights globally over the last five hundred years, speciously proclaim their commitment to human rights and what they define as “freedom” while simultaneously and continuously subverting democracy, starving, torturing, burning, raping, and imprisoning human beings around the world.

Baraka Obama referred to the United States as an “exceptional nation,” and it is. Exceptional as the nation responsible for engendering more egregious human suffering than any other nation or empire in human history. Yet, leaders of the United States, in their psychotic delusions, believe that the brutal history of U.S. conquest, slavery, subversion, wars, and racist violence visited on its own citizens, and countless peoples world-wide, somehow would not be noticed. But it was noticed, because U.S. policies have harmed so many around the world. So, with quiet bemusement around the world people would listen to the surreal declarations by U.S. politicians on their unwavering commitment to human rights and something they called democracy – until the genocide in Gaza, which lifted the veil and changed everything.

The images of Israeli atrocities, in what could only be honestly described as a savage rampage against humanity, has been justified by U.S. lawmakers with the most execrable, racist language that generated nods of agreement from their vile, racist allies in the government and across all institutions of “America,” finally stripped away any semblance of respectability for the white West, while also revealing the moral bankruptcy and hypocrisy that has always been at the core of its civilizational project.

At that moment of degenerate moral convergence, the Western human rights project expired. In its place, quietly but with a fierce determination to transcend the limitations and contradictions of the false universalization of Western human rights, activists and revolutionaries grounded in the Black radical tradition were producing an alternative approach to human rights. A decolonized, and therefore, relevant human rights framework for individuals, collectives, peoples and nations able to envision and work toward a new humanity guided by the highest ethical standards and principles.

“…liberated from the liberal, individual, legalistic, and state-centered apparatus that emerged at the conclusion of World War II as a ‘Western’ human rights regime that became, and continues to be, a conservative weapon for enforcing the geopolitical interests of Western imperialism… rejecting the ideological mystification of a neutral and objective human rights framework, the Project, through educational activities, building transnational cooperative structures and supporting popular struggles, will link oppressed communities, classes and peoples from the Global North and South that are moving toward developing movements committed to national and global anti-capitalist, de-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles for social justice, ecological sustainability, national liberation and authentic self-determination.” (taken from the mission of North-South Project)

The institutional and political systemization of this approach is the mission of BAP’s North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights.

“For those of us fighting from the margins for a new social reality in the U.S. and globally, we declare without apology that it is only through the radical transformation of society based on an alternative set of ethics and social relationships that the full potential of the human rights idea can be realized. For us, the fight for human rights is a life and death struggle with the future of our communities and peoples at stake. It is a fight that we have no other choice but to wage and to win, knowing that we are on the right side of history and in reciprocal solidarity among people around the world who understand that human rights and dignity are not granted but lived.”
(Ajamu Baraka, Project Director)

Therefore, unlike the phony proclamations of the fidelity to human rights led by the nations of the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination, let this December 10 th be the day that the people reclaim the idea of human rights and refashion this idea into a theoretical weapon that completes a new dialectic of revolutionary human rights praxis, for the people and centered by the people.

###