On this day, December 10th, seventy years ago the United Nations General Assembly approved, with no dissenting votes, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The UDHR remains the most relevant human rights document in history. It is always the way with humans, it seems, unfortunately, that they make changes and accommodations only in the wake of an unspeakable tragedy that could well have been foreseen. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York City in March, 1911 is an excellent example. It took the grisly deaths of 146 people in that disaster to alert New Yorkers and Americans to the cost of letting capitalist enterprises go mostly unregulated. It took the horrors of World War Two to awaken scholarship, leadership, and diplomacy to the urgency of human rights.
The UN had a predecessor, the League of Nations. Much like the UN, the League of Nations was charged with actively working to avert another terrible war like the Great War, World War One. When World War Two began, it was undeniable that the League had failed. One of the prominent reasons that we are given for the failure was that the United States, the most economically and industrially advanced nation in the world, never joined the League. But in the muddled history of the League of Nations there were oversights and neglect aplenty. It can be credibly argued that the racist political culture of the industrialized “First World” (to use a late-twentieth century term) made the task of the League of Nations ultimately unachievable. The technologically advanced world was embracing a bigoted and self-serving cultural worldview, and this fact crippled peacemaking. Peace had to be maintained on a fundamental principle of equality of peoples, and this the racist American president, Woodrow Wilson, could not abide. It is a historical fact that the Japanese expressly asked that an unambiguous declaration of racial equality be placed into the official text of the Peace of Versailles in 1919. This Wilson dismissed. Racism would not be renounced. World War Two was inevitable so long as humankind was resolutely attached to racist ideas; and the Nazis founded their politics on the most obscenely racist presuppositions.
When the U.N. was conceived during World War Two, it was to have two mandates, security and development. But several prominent writers and scholars alleged this wasn’t enough; the new international organization needed to affirm fundamental ideological principles of equality. This was achieved in the addition of a third mandate, embodied in two familiar words: human rights.
But they needed a general framework with which to proceed. The U.N. immediately established the Commission on Human Rights, and President Truman selected Eleanor Roosevelt as the right person to represent the United States on the Commission. The Commission took straightaway to the job of drafting an “international declaration” of principles.
The document, it was decided, would be termed universal, because the principles therein would promote not political (referenced in the word “international”, containing “nation” therein – a political term) but philosophical values.
Human rights exist, and perhaps always will exist, in ideational constructions. They have no purely material existence. They are extremely important nonetheless – as they are supposed to obviate the next world war, among other things. Human rights are the backbone of the future humans aspire to: extant, free, humane, honorable, consistent. But human rights do not yield direct and measurable benefits; our intelligence apprehends their usefulness, and there is no accounting for those things that come merely apparent to the intellect. And they have no ability to propel themselves; human beings must always function as agents of their promotion.
But how?
The completest story of how and why human rights must be promoted would require several volumes and several thousand pages, vastly beyond the scope of this writing. Nonetheless, it is useful here to point out that there will always be a few crucial institutions and cultural establishments in the maintenance and furtherance of human rights. And among these, most assuredly, is a free press.
Whenever a people set upon the establishment of a true democracy, they at once task themselves with the widespread dissemination of knowledge and information. If people are to, in a sense, “govern themselves,” as democracy presupposes, it is perfectly logical that they should proceed thus knowledgeably. And for this, all within the scope of the inchoate project must perforce rely, bereft dissent, grumble or qualm, on a “Fourth Estate”.
Historically, the self-governance of democracy has a political arch-goal: freedom. And for the people to be optimally free, they must have optimal access to accurate, relevant, viable information. This is not so easy as it seems, as it is then necessary for the press to be unfettered also, and it is here we find the devil’s details. What if the newspaper publishers were bribed or blackmailed? What if the “news” had a decided political agenda, and this overwhelmed its interest in bringing to its readers facts above all? What if the media organization was on the take, receiving money from a wealthy patron that wanted his or her values and interests advanced? Also, a sovereign king might have his own press, and then one’s relatively petty “truth” will have to deal with a much louder tyrant voice. A king also has armies and henchmen, and during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries kings used their obliged adjuncts, heralds and partisans to dispatch thousands of political enemies and presumed enemies. And anything hazarding at being a vocal free press was fated with the feeling of being star crossed. Vocal dissidents and critics were routinely hounded, and sometimes they were publicly tortured and executed. Henry VIII of England is believed to have presided over an abandoned tyrant state that dispatched 70,000 of its subjects during his reign, and not all of them mass murderers. The British press of the seventeenth century was entirely unfree.
We of the twenty-first century fancy that we live in very different times. And if we ever came upon a modern tyrant who used wanton murder of a reporter or writer as a tool in the furtherance of his illiberal aims, we imagine that we moderns would immediately unite not just in a cacophonous cry of foul, but in a proactive stigmatizing and censuring the doer of the misdeed. All we would need is sufficient evidence that the culprit was indeed guilty of transgressing against not just basic human dignity in the commission of murder, but in the wider insult of offending human freedom.
What is heroism? Cinema will give you the hero in the form of an armed soldier, and poetry in the form of one who perseveres through adversity or works to bring beauty into the world. Myth gives us the hero with gun or sword in hand. Civilization gives us the hero with pad and pen and digital voice recorder. The unheralded hero is the journalist. She and he live and die in the cause of bringing information to us, information necessary to human freedom. Unknowing, we are not free! They act on that fundamental freedom-exalting belief.
Illiberal elements intimidating, attempting to intimidate, assaulting, imprisoning, and murdering journalists is not new. Hundreds of journalists and human rights workers worldwide have been murdered in just the past decade. Human Rights Watch reported in November of 2016 that in the first nine months of that year 38 journalists were murdered, and that in the previous year (2015) 72 journalists were murdered. In many spheres of journalistic endeavor, the dangerousness of your work generally corresponds to its usefulness to ordinary citizens, to its revelation of every sort of truth, even those truths unflattering or debasing to gun toters, oppression advocates, violence advocates and/or the moneyed and powerful.
I have, for weighty reasons, avoided the news for most of the last two years. Still, a lot of news inevitably seeps into us, and in the last three weeks of October I was drawn to dozens of online articles about Jamal Khashoggi and his October 2, 2018 murder inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul Turkey. Khashoggi was an exiled political dissident, and he was obviously murdered for his courageously outspoken journalism.
In late 2018, the American president is met with a political problem. The United States has substantial interest in maintaining a strong political ally in an especially strife-ridden region of the world – Saudi Arabia – but that ally, in its leadership (unintentionally, but actually), revealed to the world that it was not above savage premeditated political murder.
The American president’s first response to the story was to discount media reportage. He expressed extreme doubts that the Saudis were guilty of anything (Non-idiocy would be careful about guessing whether the Saudis had committed murder or not. The non-idiot would just say “I certainly hope…,” or something such.) As it became apparent that the Saudis – high level persons, to be sure – had indeed murdered the journalist, the American president openly stated to reporters that he was “not interested” in considering the cancellation of huge Saudi arms purchases, including tanks and high-tech aircraft, with a total purchase price of over $100 billion.
That is certainly an enormous sum of money! But the president’s partisans will immediately cling to the realpolitik reasonableness of the president’s admission and completely and deliberately ignore the question of whether the president needed to make such a candid public admission (that the Saudis would get away with murder because of U.S. financial interests).
For any statement to be credited fully worthy, the whole writing or utterance must satisfy at least three requirements (and not necessarily of equal weight). Firstly, it must impart the truth. Secondly, it can claim usefulness because it is positive. Thirdly, it must be appropriate or necessary to the situation in which it appears or is spoken.
It is this last requirement to which the present writing is focused. Is it really appropriate for a leader to make publicly clear that wanton crimes can be, and will be, overlooked if sufficient financial benefits are (essentially) to be weighed against those crimes?
We must know, as we are well informed, that literally all presidents and all members of Congress must guard what they say publicly. When they newly arrive at their positions in Congress, senators and representatives are briefed about policies, procedures and protocols regarding what is to be divulged to journalists and what isn’t. They are told to downplay the extraordinary puissance of the American military, often by changing the subject or deflecting questions that maintain on the “American military might” concept. They are told this because, although the puissance claims are true and positive (from American perspectives), they fall short of that third requisite of justifiability; braggadocio or tantamount braggadocio does not serve long-term American interests. The United States wants both to be the most militarily formidable in the world and also to not draw the avoidable ire of peoples and nations around the world, peoples and political leaders that would might predictably feel resentful about appearing so relatively puny in comparison.
All American presidents must guard what they say. All must be careful not to impart those values and intentions and agendas that reveal fissures within Western democratic alliances. Such would embolden American enemies, which is not what the United States wants, of course.
And even a president with little or no respect for basic human rights, like the current American president, knows well that he has to put on a convincing show of concern whenever the subject is an horrific tragedy, a mass murder, extermination of political enemies, and/or genocide. Even a president who does not comprehend the importance of human rights, one well versed in the lusciousness of ego-balm limelight, gets the importance of the show.
The American president made clear in front of several news reporters in mid-October that he did not intend to harshly criticize high ranking Saudi officials for the Jamal Khashoggi murder. His unguarded verbiage revealed that largesse, when substantial, outranks any crimes or rights concerns. Any respectable civilization will never publicly and conspicuously reveal that it plays only for selfish gain, and has no appreciable decency- or integrity-driven political agenda. The president of the United States, in late 2018, revealed to the entire world, in language that cannot be discounted or skirted, that the United States does not stand on a coherent civilizational value foundation, but on the vulgar calculus of shortsighted, self-serving expediency. The United States has thus volunteered to rank itself on a par with Russia and China, each of which quite obviously play the geopolitical game of advantage above all else.
There is the problem of maintaining the semblance of being a “moral leader,” and what that august designation imparts. How is moral leadership established? What are its central elements? How is it sustained?
On 4 December 2018, United States senators were briefed by the CIA in Washington, DC. In the very private meeting, the CIA revealed many classified details about the Khashoggi murder and about the direct involvement of Muhammad bin Salman, the Saudi prince who has been given extensive authority over Saudi government actions and policies. The CIA is completely convinced that bin Salman directed the murder, and after the briefing U.S. senators too were completely convinced.
When we are familiar with a person, we abbreviate the name. Robert becomes “Bob”, Alexander becomes “Alex” or “Al”. The Saudi Prince is commonly referred to by his three initials: “MBS”. The Prince wields uncommon authority in a state that is uncommonly illiberal. When an authoritarian demands something, it must be obeyed. Often non-obedient behavior is met with harsh punishment, sometimes even imprisonment, torture and murder. Not only is the authoritarian obeyed, but in such political arrangements it is absolutely required that every major undertaking get the authoritarian to at least sign off. A well planned, concerted and premeditated effort of no less than fifteen, as members of an assassination team, to fly into another nation and conduct a murder has to be considered a major undertaking. All murders might be considered “major”, but even when one is well-practiced in ordering the murder of dissidents, he, the ruling prince will likely do it with only a few hireling assassins doing the deed, and it would be done on Saudi soil, or in the territory of a failed state, such as Yemen or Somalia. The murder of Jamal Khashoggi meets the standard of “major” in literally every authoritarian context. Fifteen guys working supposedly for some staffer or deputy of the prince, and on such a homicidal mission as this, is certainly major! MBS surely approved it. He says, quite predictably really, that he knew nothing about the operation. Knowing this Prince very well by now, we can thus further shorten his name; we can begin calling him simply BS.
We forcefully blame the CIA when they fail, as they did in the months preceding the September 11 attacks, but can the CIA be allowed to be insightful? To be informed? To be smart? (Recall that we expect their intelligence to deliver us from the dastardliness of terrorism.)
The United States has arrived to modern history with a certain sort of liberal political ethic. This rather unique and wealthy nation has had an uneasy and inconsistent history with respect to rights and political freedom. Like all nations, the United States has ‘friends’, and political friendships need to be maintained, often for very complex and longstanding economic, geopolitical and realpolitik reasons. The United States is historically compelled, for example, to support (in a fundamental sense) the state of Israel, even though some Israeli government policies and actions may seem heavy handed and “dangerous”. Therefore, the United States’ president has sometimes over the past half-century given what we might call ‘lip service’ to the American want of a more cautious and multilateral Israel. When, in the 1980s, Israel began building Jewish settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the American president expressed his disagreement with that policy. There is always an importance in a country putting on a public show of diplomatic goodwill, decency and compassion.
Similarly, the United States has maintained a strong “ally” relationship with Saudi Arabia, which follow a starkly different political structure. Modern Western understandings of basic human rights are often completely ignored by the Saudi government, and many journalists have been imprisoned for openly criticizing that government.
What’s different?
Circumstances now are very different. Previously, with literally all American presidents, regardless of political ideology, egregious rights curtailments and transgression were afforded mere lip service by the American administration – by a president’s press secretary, a State Department spokesperson, or by the American president himself. When an assassination or murder takes place under the auspices of an allied government somewhere in the world, the American president appears before reporters and TV cameras to express his “outrage” and “disgust”, just as when a terrible transportation tragedy or natural disaster occurs the president express his condolences.
The American president might have, utilizing something vaguely resembling the prudence of all his predecessors, expressed his ‘concern’ over the missing journalist in the days when his fate was yet unproved, circa October 5th. But several of his comments in mid-October inanely directly referenced the considerable Saudi purchases of sophisticated American weaponry in the last two years. Apparently the total recent purchases amount to over $100 billion.
But there is a vast difference between the elemental fact that something is true and the notion that you, as president of the United States, must publicly reference that deeply compromising truth. One does not equate to the requirement of the other; the United States may indeed want and “need” to maintain unaltered relations with the Saudi government, but that does not necessitate incautious divulgences to the press! Administration policy and press statements have always been two very different things, and the American president’s press secretary has to be the most skillful sophist and rhetorician imaginable, especially when her boss is this 45th president. The words out of the president’s mouth too need to be careful not to show one’s political cards (calculations). Yes, you may feel the absolute need to maintain good relations with the Saudis, but you (being very intelligent and prudent) must put on a show of “concern” for the cameras. You may end up doing little or nothing, but your words are unambiguously condemning of the killing.
People everywhere will tell you that they do not want to be treated violently. But, when this is our want, it is not to the full exclusion of other interests. We also want to be free of the taint of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is both unflattering and socially and politically destructive; to behave as a transpicuous hypocrite is to diminish the authority and respect you might otherwise have wielded. Therefore, in our interest to not be treated violently, most of us intend to advocate for the (general) nonviolent treatment of others too.
This leaves a sort of political hole which necessity must fill. The hole is in the abandonment of the resort to violence as a political expedient. The hole is well-filled, again generally, by consistent and intent and skillful language.
U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham is a Republican supporter of the president, used language effectually on December 4, right after the lengthy CIA briefing. Graham expressed no doubt at all that bin Salman was responsible for Khashoggi’s murder. And, before many news reporters and live news cameras, he stated that not acting to make a clear statement, by concrete actions, in rebuke of the Saudi prince’s action in ordering the murder, would be, in the long term, more damaging to the United States. Not acting would severely damage the moral authority of the United States. The matter was so clear to the intelligence that Senator Graham, a staunch conservative, expresses precisely what this ultra-liberal blogger believes: the U.S. raison d’etre is and must be different from ordinary, unfailingly advantage-sniffing nations, and when the United States stands not on principle but on expediency and advantage, it has effectively abdicated all its moral authority. American authority is bygone, defunct. (What do you recall from your many years, reader? – What is ever regained that has been flushed from the porcelain repository? What can you recall?)
But the American president has already made clear that moral authority is not something he intends to wield.
In such a world of abdicated leadership, is it not worth asking important moral and etiological questions? Let us ask this relevant question: When the two most economically powerful nations in the world, the two with the largest economies, show that they do not care significantly about human rights and human dignity, that such values are minuscule weighed against economic gain and short-term advantage, what is the real difference between a political alliance with your country and the United States and a political alliance with Communist China? In a world so much about convenience and ease, destitute of transcendent good and honor, it very well might be then that a single dollar of difference makes your new (unfree, dissolute) champion.
There have been many episodes in history where a nation sought greater monetary gain or political clout, but that “gain” proved to be ill-advised. disaster ensued. As an illustration, we might look at the political and economic dynamic that sustained slavery in the western hemisphere in much of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thousands of Europeans and European Americans became much richer financially for their involvement in the nefarious trade. They gained in the short term, but ghastly horrors awaited. Dollars are useful. But so too is Jack Daniels whiskey useful. Civilizational purpose and direction must far exceed the merely “useful”. Jack Daniels does not and has never equated to lasting viability.
With all we know about nukes and wildly inventive technology, human folly, political shortsightedness, expediency, fatuity, and error, is the appreciably dollar-worshipping world the one that is most likely to survive the challenges of the twenty-first century?