Self-Service Human Rights

Bush & Co. have semi-successfully sold the idea that America invaded Iraq so that the Iraqi people could enjoy “Freedom”. Yes, it was just one of many ad hoc excuses, but it’s one that most of his well-meaning opponents are loathe to challenge (excepting via an occasional accusation of hypocrisy). Years ago, some people intimated that possibly - possibly - the Iraqis themselves would need to be responsible for their own fate. Today, this argument is made exclusively with regard to “security”; not human rights or freedom or any other beneficent condition of modernity.

When we look out at the horrors of the world, the violent repression of human rights, why do we inevitably feel that (a) we can change it all and make it better, and/or (b) it’s all our fault? Yes, we have trade relations with monarchical governments that are less than kind to their own citizens. Yes, we subsidize regimes that are barbaric, criminal and cruel. The truth is that we can make some progress and that it is somewhat our fault, but not enough to make a tinker’s damn worth of a difference. Pity and/or force-of-arms are both essentially powerless against the systematic degradation of the humanity of other people. (Equally powerless are the amoral consequences of “open markets”).

Buried in the obscurity of their many books, essays and speeches, “leftist radicals” like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky have repeatedly exhorted us to remember that none of the freedoms that we or our countrymen currently enjoy were bestowed upon us by an enlightened Constitution or the munificent governance of the body politic. The signature battles for liberty in America (civil rights, universal suffrage, labor, gay rights, abortion, censorship, etc.) were all achieved through the relentless struggle of those for whom the struggle mattered most: the oppressed themselves. No country memorializes the gifts bequeathed by foreign powers. People (collectively and individually) celebrate the success of their own conquests and rebellions – usually those which are most responsible for the outright seizure of their current felicity.

Some thoughts on the animating characteristics of rebellion:

What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion. A slave who has taken orders all his life suddenly decides that he cannot obey some new command. What does he mean by saying “no”?

He means, for example, that “this has been going on too long,” “up to this point yes, beyond it no,” “you are going to far,” or, again, “there is a limit beyond which you shall not go.” In other words, he affirms the existence of a borderline. The same concept is to be found in the rebel’s feeling that the other person “is exaggerating,” that he is exerting his authority beyond a limit where he begins to infringe upon the rights of others. Thus the movement of rebellion is founded simultaneously on the categorical rejection of an intrusion that is considered intolerable and on the confused conviction of an absolute right which, in the rebel’s mind, is more precisely the impression that he “has the right to...” Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that, somewhere and somehow, one is right.

[…]

Before he rebelled, the slave accepted all the demands made upon him. […] He accepted them patiently, though he may have protested inwardly, but in that he remained silent he was more concerned with his own immediate interests than as yet aware of his own rights. But with loss of patience – with impatience – a reaction begins which can extend to everything that he previously accepted, and which is almost always retroactive. The very moment the slave refuses to obey the humiliating orders of his master, he simultaneously rejects the condition of slavery. The act of rebellion carries him far beyond the point he had reached by simply refusing. He exceeds the bounds that he fixed for his antagonist, and now demands to be treated as an equal. [...] Having up to now been willing to compromise, the slave suddenly adopts (“because this is how it must be...”) an attitude of All or Nothing. With rebellion, awareness is born.

Sounds to me like something worthy of celebrating. However, a self-interested outsider will always fail to inspire a substantive and successful rebellion. We can admire John Brown (and I do), or funnel money into the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (and I don’t), but the midwife of liberty resides exclusively in the soul of the oppressed.

In the days following the revelation of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib, jokes circulated that the prison was simply continuing as it always had, only “under new management”. The awful truth is that, without substantive internal rebellion, this will be the case for the entire godforsaken region.

No, we’re not bloodthirsty tyrants. We’re decent people. But America is not in Iraq to spread Freedom. We’re there to manage, administer, and assume control.

By the way, this is cool: Graffiti from Pompeii.