Human Rights Are Not the Problem

I continue here my discussion of the issue of human rights which I started on the previous post Is There Something Wrong with Human Rights?, so I take it from where I left.

As in my previous article, I will concentrate on the arguments found on Islam versus Europe (henceforth IVE) because, as far as I know, that blog is the only Counterjihad voice to have attempted a systematic attack on human rights.

Throughout this piece I'll refer to human rights using the singular pronoun "it" because the reference is to the concept.

Interestingly, during our discussion IVE says that it advocates only two principles: democracy narrowly intended as majority rule, and nationalism. But later on it reveals that it also supports free speech. What is that if not a classical human right? When somebody says that he believes in free speech, what he means is that he believes in the "right to" free speech: it would not have any sense otherwise.

IVE talks about strategy and asks for a strategy, which is obviously a complex issue that IVE oversimplifies.

IVE doesn't really have a strategy. What it has is an aspiration, doing away with human rights, but doesn't know how to do it: a strategy would require to spell out how to achieve that.

That human rights is a false enemy you can see from a simple example.

Let's take freedom of religion, a typical example of human rights. Let's look at Cameron/Clegg's plan in the UK to force the Christian clergy to go against their religious principles and marry "gays" in church. If the British PM and deputy PM really believed in the right of people to act in accordance with their religious beliefs, they would not do that.

Much more difficult is to justify a "right" of homosexuals to use the services of an established Church in a way that contradicts the tenets of that Church.

Here you can see that the elites don't necessarily believe in human rights, they just use it arbitrarily to favour whomever, for non-human-rights ideological reasons, they like (in this case, homosexuals) when their interests (not rights, but desires) conflict with those of others who don't enjoy their favour (in this case the Christian clergy).

Human rights is just a tool they use because it's there and it's handy, but if they were deprived of it they would find another means.

The real problem is in the ideology of the elites, human rights is just a paper tiger and a false target.

IVE might say that human rights serves well any of the elites' unfair agenda because of its plasticity but, as I explained in Is There Something Wrong with Human Rights?, all legal and ethical principles, all laws need to be balanced against each other, so anything else they could use would have the same ambiguity and the same effect desired by them.

It's a case of appropriation. The current PC, pro-Islam elites have appropriated human rights for themselves and used it for their own agenda and purposes. We must take this principle back and show that it's been distorted and how it can be returned to its original, restricted, better defined meaning.

Many of the constantly-claimed “rights” are actually not rights at all, they are privileges. The definition of “right” these days has become so broad that what people really mean when they say they have a right to something is simply that they have a need or desire for something, as you can see when debt-burdened governments have to cut spending and people say they have a “right” to those benefits or services that are being cut or closed, even down to local libraries. Here's an example of this use of the term:

I believe in our community and its right to our library.

Basically, anything that anybody wants gives rise to a “right”, but this is simply a misnomer of the real concept. It is not difficult to show that these are misinterpretations.

It goes back to my original idea that the principle of human rights is in this predicament because it’s wrongly applied. The distinction between negative rights (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) and positive rights, which we could call for short the never-ending proliferation of “entitlements”, pointed out by Gates of Vienna and vederso of EJBron, is fundamental.

That's the goal of our strategy on human rights. As for the means, this is a good, old-fashioned battle to truly, not just superficially, get public opinion on our side and for power through democratic elections, as it would be anyway, human rights or not.

These are the scenarios, if we concentrated on abolishing human rights:

Outcome 1) We succeed in getting rid of human rights. To achieve that we must have garnered so much power that human rights would no longer represent a problem anyway because, as I explained, the problem is just how the current elites apply and use this principle.

Outcome 2) We don't succeed and we've wasted precious time and resources in fighting a false enemy.

In summary, the real enemy are the ideology and goals of the present elites, not human rights, which is only the means they use to implement that ideology and achieve those goals and would be easily replaced to the same effect.

In the next posts I'll deal with other examples cited by IVE in support of its position.