Human Rights
“We are people who believe in the worth of every human being,” Elizabeth Warren said the other day, and I wondered for a moment what life would be like if that were true.
The more crucial question, however, is: How can we make it true?
Warren had just returned from McAllen, Texas, where she visited an “immigration processing center” — a place where desperate human beings are stirred into the border bureaucracy and separated into categories — immigrants, refugees, criminals — and where children, including babies, are torn from their parents’ arms, possibly forever.
In a recent article titled ‘Challenges for Resolving Complex Conflicts’, I pointed out four conflict configurations that are paid little attention by conflict theorists.
In this article, I would like to discuss a fifth conflict configuration that is effectively ignored by conflict theorists (and virtually everyone else). This conflict is undoubtedly the most fundamental conflict in human society, because it generates all of the violence humans perpetrate and experience, and yet it is utterly invisible to almost everyone.
I have previously described this conflict as ‘the adult war on children’. It is indeed humanity’s ‘dirty little secret’.
Let me illustrate and explain the nature and extent of this secret war. And what we can do about it.
I don’t blame all of the planet’s ills on the Republican Party, but I find hope in the possibility that it’s on the verge of collapse.
I’m not talking politics here. I’m talking deep vision of humanity: a sense of who we are and how we impact Planet Earth and all its occupants. A smallness of mind has a chokehold on American political power and awareness. Maybe what I mean is that it has control over the money.
“The money just isn’t there” — to provide universal healthcare, to create environmental sustainability . . . to ensure that everyone has clean drinking water. I could name dozens more “nice ideas” that are financial impossibilities, relegated to the trash bin of wishful thinking. We all could.
But “the money,” whatever that actually is, remains quietly, unquestionably present to maintain a suicidal status quo of expanding war, prisons, border “protection” and, of course, environmental exploitation.
Is it simply human stupidity that’s at the center of such irony?
Israeli elites failed in their support of terrorists in Syria and were
unable to bring down a resurgent Iran (just look at rising science citation
index for Iran and compare it to Arab countries!). This failure was o be
compensated with by massacres in Gaza: murdering 125 protestors at the
borders; injuring thousands; testing new weapons on a captive poipulation;
bombing Gaza's remaining infrastructure; and attacking and seizing boats
carrying students and injured people trying to leave Gaza to Cyprus [what
is the excuse here?]. The latest victim of this Israeli onslaugt was a 21
year old paramedic Razan Al-Najjar killed while aiding injured peaceful
protesters. She was a beautiful inspiring girl. I am haunted by the
side-by-side pictures one of her smiling in her white uniform next to it a
picture of her grieving mother. Imagine this your family!
The Yemen and Gaza genocides thus continue while Trump and his
administration play with the media on their on again off again meeting with
the North Korean leader. A simple resolution at the UN Security Council to
I would like to tell you something about human depravity and illustrate just how widespread it is among those we often regard as ‘responsible’. I am going to use the Democratic Republic of the Congo as my example.
As I illustrate and explain what has happened to the Congo and its people during the past 500 years, I invite you to consider my essential point: Human depravity has no limit unless people like you (hopefully) and me take some responsibility for ending it. Depravity, barbarity and violent exploitation will not end otherwise because major international organizations (such as the UN), national governments and corporations all benefit from it and are almost invariably led by individuals too cowardly to act on the truth.
The Congo
Prior to 1482, the area of central Africa now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo was part of the Kingdom of the Kongo. It was populated by some of the greatest civilizations in human history.
Slavery
Such gentle abhorrence! It almost doesn’t seem like racism.
“But they’re also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States, into our modern society. They’re overwhelmingly rural people in the countries they come from — fourth, fifth, sixth grade educations are kind of the norm. They don’t speak English, obviously that’s a big thing. They don’t speak English. They don’t integrate well, they don’t have skills.”
Why bother keeping these words of John Kelly alive? There’s so much bigger news out there than the White House chief of staff’s outpouring of ignorance and pseudo-empathy last week, during an interview on NPR.
“They’re not bad people,” he said. “They’re coming here for a reason. And I sympathize with the reason. But the laws are the laws.”
While many European parliamentarians have been outspoken in their disgust at the “horrific” one-sided atrocity being clearly observed in the Israeli slaughter of Palestinian demonstrators last week, most of their U.S. counterparts appear to have lost their ability to express themselves over the egregious human rights violations being committed by the Israeli Army in Gaza. Sixty-two unarmed Palestinian demonstrators were shot dead and nearly three thousand more were injured by gunfire and tear gas versus no Israelis killed or wounded while a leading Knesset parliamentarian has assured the public that the Army has plenty of bullets left to kill all the Gazans if necessary.
It may almost seem too obvious to mention, but I don’t think that’s why we so seldom mention it. I don’t mean being male, or being mentally disturbed, or having been cruel to women, or living in places like the United States where it’s easy to acquire weapons of war. These and many other factors are very significant and very often discussed, as they should be, when we consider mass killings.