Monthly Archives: November 2018

Tyranny against Humanity: Human Rights and Global Politics

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Mahboob A. Khawaja, PhD.

 

The tyranny of human rights violations – planned and alleged goes unabated across the globe. Late American historian Howard Zinn must have sensed the human cries against the Nature and called “Tyranny is tyranny.” Nobody seems to care for the dried-ink paper written words and meanings of the UNO human rights declarations or respect for human dignity in crisis and conflicts. “Hell on Earth”, called the UN Secretary General seeing the insanity of bombings on 400,000 civilians entrapped at Eastern Ghouta (Syria) several months earlier. Millions perished while the UN Security Council debated the chemical attacks on the innocent civilians across many war zones.  Thousands and thousands of innocent victims of the wars and ethnic cleansing are fleeing from imminent death and destruction to relatively peaceful West European countries. For decades, hopes of peace have been dashed away by death and despair across the Middle East. The international institutionalized systems of governance were supposed to protect the innocent victims from the scourge of wars and provide protection to civilians in conflict zones.  Not so, the UN has become a voice of spectators mainly occupied with public debates and services not conflict management and peacemaking but settling displaced people in camps to be operated by the NGO’s.  A new outlook of dysfunctional global systems of governance. In a sense, global institutions are failing to respond to the humanitarian crises or to prioritize conflict prevention or peacemaking. The abstract words of Magna Carta, The UNO Charter, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other wishful ideals of the universal protection of human rights – all appear blindfolded to the pains and sufferings of the forcibly displaced people across Syria, Iraq, China, Afghanistan, Yemen, Palestine and many other lands. The global human moral values are at crossroads without questioning the insane political behavior towards the refugees camping on divided national borders in many European countries. Recently, Angela Merkel and Immanuel Macron on the First World War ceremonies reminded the EU nations, how catastrophic was the nationalism that instigated the Two WW.  European history tells that the doctrine of nationalism repudiates the notion that human life and well being is sacred. The UN Charter was the embodiment of guaranteed security to protect the rights of the people from the “scourge of war.”

Human Rights Violations and the Raging Wild Fires

The Humanity and Nature are interconnected. To know the Nature of things is to know oneself. The global understanding of human rights violation appears detached from the media sensational coverage and inner thoughts of human minds seen on the screen. The truth and facts of life often presented as fantasy because they could unfold human cruelty against the ruling elite. But the real experience if shared by first hand-observers could send an electric jolt to a living human consciousness.

Laws are supposedly known, self-defining, unambiguous and clear statements for tangible actions. Otherwise, there cannot be a dictum of law and order. Or is it a presumptuous elucidation of lost human history that consumed millions and millions during the 2WW?  Time is living, not dead and we must learn to defy the failed human logic of wars for peace. Do the UN laws really protect the human rights in real world crises? With an inquiring inner eye of the human spirit common across all societies, the UNO has no power or logical force to use and hold the aggressors accountable for the crimes. It is an impregnable truth shared by all knowledge-based scholars. Over the decades with political obsessions and inacceptable realm of reason, the powerful states continue to victimize the political opponents or those who have varied identities of ethnicity, belief, language and racial outlook. As an integral part of human civilizations, we are at great loss to be disconnected with the norms of respect and honor for equal rights and dignity. Recently, the raging wild fires in California attracted immediate attention because of uncontrolled sensation and the nature of human property losses caused by the wild fires. All concerned appeared at edge –day and night to control or extinguish the wild fires and to safeguard the affected masses. The consequences of the wild fire are imagined with intensity and utmost care. Have you ever seen a similar approach given to the planned and deliberate violation of human rights and killings of the innocent civilians caught in bombings and chemical warfare in the Middle East or elsewhere? Is it a question of thought or strategic priority or urgency to do the best in unusual situations of conflicts?  Are we just becoming a non-living statistic in the record of causalities?

Tragic Tensions of Time and History bring Rohinga and Uyghur Victims under Global Focus

“The Syrian government has routinely used banned cluster munitions and barrel bombs across Syria to inflict terrible harm and suffering on civilians. Now, they have started duplicating these horrific tactics in Idlib and we don’t have any reason to believe that they will stop.”  Amnesty International, 9/14/2018.

Tyranny of human rights violation and forcible displacement of civilians is fast spreading across the globe.  Corresponding tragedies experienced by the people – the human body and souls are crushed by deliberate violence, massacres, rapes and forcible eviction in Myanmar (Burma), China, Syria and other critical situations.  All authoritarian leaders enjoin an erotic ambition to rule and remain in power even if they have to dehumanize all the population. The resulting degeneration and destructiveness goes on for decades. This aggressive instinct should have been challenged and stopped even by force if not by reason by other affluent global leaders and members of the UNSC. Alas, their psychological conscience feels no sense of guilt for the on-going crimes against the humanity. Time and history are not on the side of tyrant egoistic rulers –soon they will be floating like scum on the torrent of time.

We must remain connected and vigilant to our obligation to protect the human rights and give life to history. Dr. Fozia Alvi, a physician of Pakistani origin working at University of Calgary (Canada), did just that to help the Rohinga refugees in Bangladesh. Her commitment and dedication saved several hundreds of human life with adequate medical care and humanitarian assistance in the shallowness of man’s cruelty to fellow human beings. Rohinga people are victims of “genocide” described by the UNHR Commission in Geneva. For long, they were targeted victims of ethnic cleansing by the ruling military elite of Burma. Often conflicts bring unity in human diversity. To all civilized people, there is a rational impulse of humanity to help people in pains and anguish of torture and exploitation. In a message, Dr. Alvi along with Yvonne Ridley, a reputable journalist and humanitarian activist from UK (YvonneRidley.org), have joined the collective minds to set-up orphan camps on the border areas of Turkey and Syria. These individuals demonstrate courage and a deep sense of humanity to initiate and organize humanitarian help to the most vulnerable innocent children, men and women in conflict situations – what could not be undertaken by many resourceful organizations and global institutions. The people of Uyghur – a nation in its culture and socio-political identity is under immense tyranny and is being victimized because of their ethnicity, belief and cultural values.  The Amnesty International (9/24/2018) reports that:

An estimated up to one million predominantly Muslim people are held in internment camps in Xinjiang in northwest China Families tell Amnesty of their desperation for news on missing loved ones. China must end its campaign of systematic repression and shed light on the fate of up to one million predominantly Muslim people arbitrarily detained in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR)…..The past year has seen an intensifying government campaign of mass internment, intrusive surveillance, political indoctrination and forced cultural assimilation against the region’s Uighurs,

 

The Need is Urgent for the knowledge-based 21st century humanity to come together and challenge the tyranny and insanity of human rights violation. This challenge must accompany a remedial action – a package of planned accumulated humanitarian assistance to all the refugees, enriched with a sense of moral and intellectual security to protect their rights and to ensure a return to normalcy in human societies.

The voices of reason are loud and clear as One Global Humanity cannot suffer the penalties of tyranny and evil-mongering of the few sadistic warlords.  We the people of the world enjoin focused minds and imagination to articulate a new world of One Humanity, brotherhood and peaceful co-existence amongst all, free of hatred, intrigues tyranny, encroachment and animosity.

(Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in international relations-global security, peace and conflict resolution with keen interests in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and civilizations, and author of several publications including: Global Peace and Conflict Management: Man and Humanity in Search of New Thinking (Germany, 2012); and Global Peace, Security and Conflict Resolution: Approaches to Understand the Current Issues and Future-Making.  (Lambert Academic Publications, Germany, 10/2017).

Has Liberalism Failed US ?

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A thought provoking article by Pankaj Mishra. f.sheikh

iFRANCIS WADE: You have emerged as a prominent critic of empire and its foundations in liberal ideas of freedom and progress. Can you outline how your thinking has evolved, from your early writings on the topic to the present, and describe the major events that either reinforced or altered your position? 

PANKAJ MISHRA: I know from experience that it is very easy for a brown-skinned Indian writer to be caricatured as a knee-jerk anti-American/anti-Westernist/Third-Worldist/angry postcolonial, and it is important then to point out that my understanding of modern imperialism and liberalism — like that of many people with my background — is actually grounded in an experience of Indian political realities.

In my own case, it was a journalistic assignment in Kashmir that advanced my political and intellectual education. I went there in 1999 with many of the prejudices of the liberal Indian “civilizer” — someone who simply assumed that Kashmiri Muslims were much better off being aligned with “secular,” “liberal,” and “democratic” India than with Pakistan because the former was better placed to advance freedom and progress for all its citizens. In other words, India had a civilizing mission: it had to show Kashmir’s overwhelmingly religious Muslims the light of secular reason — by force, if necessary. The brutal realities of India’s military occupation of Kashmir and the blatant falsehoods and deceptions that accompanied it forced me to revisit many of the old critiques of Western imperialism and its rhetoric of progress. When my critical articles on Kashmir — very long; nearly 25,000 words — appeared in 2000 in The Hindu and The New York Review of Books, their most vociferous critics were self-declared Indian liberals who loathed the idea that the supposedly secular and democratic Indian republic, which prided itself on its hard-won freedom from Western imperialism, could itself be a cruel imperialist regime.

Writing about Kashmir was a strange and painfully isolating experience, but an absolutely crucial one. It made me see that, whether you are Indian or American, black, brown, or white, it is best not to get morally intoxicated by words like “secularism” and “liberalism” or to simply assume that you stand on the right side of history after having professed allegiance to certain ideological verities. Rather one should try to perceive the scramble for power, the clash of interests, that these resonant claims to virtue conceal; one should ask who is using words like “secularism” or “liberalism” and for what purposes.

The mendacity and hypocrisy of Indian liberals and even some leftists about Kashmir made me better prepared for the liberal internationalists who helped adorn the Bush administration’s pre-emptive assault on Iraq with the kind of humanitarian rhetoric about freedom, democracy, and progress that we originally heard from European imperialists in the 19th century. It was this experience in Kashmir that eventually led me to examine figures like Niall Ferguson, who tried to persuade Anglo-Americans that the occupation and subjugation of other people’s territory and culture was a wonderful instrument of civilization and that we need more such emancipatory imperialism to bring native peoples in line with the advanced West.

“Liberal modernity,” you’ve argued, “has prepared the ground for its destruction” by unleashing forces that are “uncontrollable.” Have these forces contributed to the resurgence of the right in countries where, thanks to modern liberalism, a premium is placed on the autonomy of the individual?

There are many ways to answer this question, and one’s choice will inevitably be determined by the political context of the day. There is no doubt that the individual freedoms central to liberalism ought to be cherished and protected. The question is how, and by whom? Are many self-declared liberals the best defenders of individual liberties? As it happens, many powerful and influential people who call themselves liberals are mostly interested in advancing their professional ambitions and financial interests while claiming the moral prestige of progressivism for themselves. They are best seen as opportunistic seekers of power, and they exist in India as much as in the United States and in Britain. Bush’s “useful idiots” (Tony Judt’s term) had their counterparts in India, where some liberals chose to see Prime Minister Modi as a great “modernizer.” They are happy to whisper advice to power, and they recoil from the latter only when power rejects or humiliates them — as in the case of Trump and Modi, who have no time for eggheads in general. The dethroned “liberal” then transforms himself into a maquisard of the “resistance” and prepares the ground for a Restoration where he’ll likely be hailed as a great hero. It’s a nice racket, if you can get into it.

As Trumpism and other authoritarianisms become powerful, their liberal critics engage in a kind of moral blackmail based on a spurious history: “Are you against the ‘liberal order’ which guaranteed peace and stability, and other wonderful things for so long?” The obvious answer is that your much-cherished liberal order was the incubator for Trumpism and other authoritarianisms. It made human beings subordinate to the market, replacing social bonds with market relations and sanctifying greed. It propagated an ethos of individual autonomy and personal responsibility, while the exigencies of the market made it impossible for people to save and plan for the future. It burdened people with chronic debt and turned them into gamblers in the stock market. Liberal capitalism was supposed to foster a universal middle class and encourage bourgeois values of sobriety and prudence and democratic virtues of accountability. It achieved the opposite: the creation of a precariat with no clear long-term prospects, dangerously vulnerable to demagogues promising them the moon. Uncontrolled liberalism, in other words, prepares the grounds for its own demise. full article

Socialism or Barbarism

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“A hundred years after her murder, Luxemburg’s most vital insight remains that socialism and democracy are nothing without each other.”

(Interesting article by George Eaton. It is worth reading. It seems welfare states of Europe followed her advice. f. sheikh)

On the evening of 28 October, as they absorbed the election of far-right Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, British leftists declared “socialism or barbarism”. The slogan was assumed by some to be a Corbynite coinage. But it was first popularised more than a century ago in war-ravaged Europe.

In 1915, writing under the pseudonym Junius to evade prosecution, German Marxist leader Rosa Luxemburg warned: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.”

To Luxemburg’s dismay, rather than uniting in opposition to the First World War, Europe’s left-wing parties rallied behind their national governments. “Workers of the world unite in peacetime – but in war slit one another’s throats,” she observed acidly.

Luxemburg and co-leader Karl Liebknecht responded in 1916 by founding the revolutionary Spartacist League (named after Spartacus, the leader of the largest Roman slave rebellion), a breakaway from Germany’s Social Democratic Party.

Stripped of their original context, Luxemburg’s words – “socialism or barbarism” – have been derided by liberals as a false dichotomy. Did Stalinism not prove that some hideous admixture of both could result? If so, Luxemburg can credibly claim to have foreseen the rise of barbarous socialism. Indeed, her life and work demonstrate.

Luxemburg considered herself a citizen of the world, a view she expressed with unsparing force. Writing from prison in 1917 to her Jewish friend, the socialist and feminist Mathilde Wurm, she declared: “What do you want with these special Jewish pains? I feel as close to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations in Putumayo and the blacks of Africa with whose bodies the Europeans play ball… I have no special corner in my heart for the ghetto: I am at home in the entire world.”

But it was to acquire German citizenship – and a place in Europe’s pre-eminent socialist party – that Luxemburg married Gustav Lubeck, the son of a friend, in 1897 (the couple never lived together and divorced five years later).

www.newstatesman.com/culture/observations/2018/11/afterlife-rosa-luxemburg-how-german-marxist-s-influence-endures?fbclid=IwAR3IuJItzF5U5xsVCcJf5Ze0S6sYGge_n5iOonlJeOajgqjKgFBI0D0z3Yc