Human Rights: A Nihilist's Perspective.

this is a video about my own
unconventional views on human rights I'm someone who has a formal university degree in political science and my second university degree is in Asian Studies but it's again very much about politics dealing with the politics of Asia including what you could call human rights issues in the history of China Cambodia and elsewhere you can read many am essays online in the past also I was a student of First Nations languages at First Nations University of Canada I studied Korea [ __ ] etc and obviously many political questions connected to indigenous peoples in Canada are expressed in terms of human rights discourse so you could say I have a long career both of studies and of actual work humanitarian work and political engagement linked to human rights and to some extent the questions this the questions of the future of the vegan movement explored on this YouTube channel also are linked to human rights questions if only by way of providing a contrast from time to time this topic comes up now because I just had some very intelligent email from ask yourself ask yourself as the name he uses he's another vegan youtuber and I was really surprised and this is very intelligent email it makes me kind of change my opinion of the guy very often in our interactions with other vegans online we're only judging them on the basis of a couple people either way so when people send me email i think is unintelligent it makes me think they're not very bright and when they send me email that's intelligent i change my opinion of them accordingly then I got intelligent email from this guy ask yourself and he does touch on this issue of my repudiation of human rights my saying kind of dismissive and negative things about human rights discourse as such am i offering a pretty harsh critique of how some vegans just want to extend the human rights discourse to include animals they think that's the simple way to define and address and proceed with animal rights and vegan discourse now you know I can't quite say I'm an opponent of human rights but I made the following laconic remark in my reply to ask yourself I said look you know human rights discourse is like a baseball cap human beings wear this cap so they can tell which team they're on human rights some countries really put on that baseball cap and in international politics and geopolitics and negotiations they really claim strongly to be representing human rights well you know does Japan within Asia does India these are gray areas these are questions that come and go the change from year to year a month a month you know the United States and some countries in Western Europe really wear that baseball cap and represent that team how does Saudi Arabia fit into that picture in Saudi Arabia it's still actively debated whether or not women should have the right to drive a car how does North Korea fit in that picture so it's very clear in terms of real world politics that as I say to some extent human rights is just like a baseball cap that human beings wear so they can tell which team they're on cynically or not and then I raise the question does it really accomplish anything if human beings take off this baseball cap and put it on the head of a dog if we try to extend this mentality this human rights discourse so that it in cue it includes animals or includes some animals right we're putting the Hat on a dog are we putting the Hat on a cockroach are we putting it on a bear a bear in the wild on untamed animals you know so this is my kind of half joking half serious way of indicating you know my own cynicism own doubts both about human rights discourse the utility of it to start with and then how we can extend to animals there is one level on which I think human rights is a completely non problematic legal set of terms that we can use rationally with no difficulty at all in England the last time I was in England anyway I don't think this has changed in England you have the right to drink whiskey in a public park you have the right to drink alcohol and in Canada you do not now if that is a human right or that is a civil right now if you prefer to phrase it that means that a poor homeless person with a beard has the right to sit there and drink whiskey out of a paper bag in a public park and young wealthy people can spread out a picnic blanket and have a bottle of champagne either this is a human right or it's not either it applies to everyone equally or it doesn't and of course if you live in England for a while which I have it a few times my life one time when I was in England this came up on radio on you know call-in radio and once I saw it coming up in the letters to the editor of a newspaper what you often find is that this is the exact opposite of what the public wants what the public wants is to take away the right to drink alcohol from homeless men with beards or men who just might look like they're homeless sitting in the park with their bag of whiskey and nevertheless to retain that right for live concerts maybe there's a rock concert selling beer or alcohol or for wealthy young people who spread out a picnic blanket and are well dressed and drink champagne while they're in the park right so this is one level on which human rights discourse I think unfolds absolutely no problem it's much easier for me to talk about this and what my own position is on human rights today than it was when I was say 20 to 23 years old I can remember struggling to articulate what my position was and the reason is this in politics there's a difference between the problem itself the problem the particular organization the problem with particular concept and the problem of public perception being perhaps very poorly matched to the reality of what it is we're discussing now I'm sorry a somewhat awkward phrasing I don't know any you know cute way to you know put a bow on that but the distinction of talking about here we can use the Catholic Church as an example the distinction here is between criticizing the Catholic Church for what it's actually done wrong perhaps crimes against humanity perhaps human rights violations for example in the Canadian context I may complain about Catholic Church and their role in genocide in the destruction of native peoples cultures languages etc I may complain about specific doctrines the Catholic Church teaches you know I don't actually believe in prayer I think that when you pray you're talking to yourself and you're just pretending to talk to your imaginary friend who created the universe so you know there are various ways in which I can sighs the thing itself but a lot of our time and energy in politics is not invested in dealing with those problems the problem thing is though there instead dealing with the gap between public perception of the problem and what the problem really is you may be living in a country or just in a social context your own community your own circle of friends you may be living in a context where surrender of people who really sincerely believe in Catholicism who really sincerely believe in the excuses that the Catholic made you think that the Catholic Church makes for itself whether in reference to what Columbus did in 1492 the crimes of you know genocide in colonialism in the past or much more recent crimes from the 1950s to present within Canada you know the Catholic Church has true believers and you can be living in a situation where what you're really wrestling with is not the church not what the church has done not Church policy not Church doctrine not their actions or decisions but you're struggling with the gap between public protect public perception of what the church ought to be what they want the church to be and what it really is in a very large part of what I said felt so frustrated with when I was say 22 23 years old was that I was surrounded by people who really wanted to believe in the United Nations who really wanted to believe in the concept of war for peace who really wanted to believe that human rights was a panacea and I just posed a note the word panacea is horribly overused in english-language newspapers today but in this case it is apt I feel I have to say it a lot of people around me wanted to believe in human rights as a panacea they wanted to believe in human rights as something that would solve all of the political problems in Cambodia if only Cambodia human rights human rights is something that justified the United States military intervention in say Yugoslavia and yet at the same time it seemed to justify the lack of any United States intervention in theatres of war I mean again like wearing the baseball cap I saw human rights being used cynically - you know justify atrocities that were being committed by American allies you know and of course to exaggerate or vilify atrocities that may be better or may be worse in some other country that happens to be you know what American opponents or a country where the United States is willing to criticize them or willing to even carry out military intervention or other punitive actions trade sanctions and and what-have-you I like to do these videos in one take with no script because it has a sort of lively spontaneous quality to it that otherwise might be lacking if this were a dry academic discussion weeding out paragraphs from an essay or that sort of thing and you can tell this video was a spontaneous response to a conversation I had by email so it has that lively feeling to it but it's really interesting for me to watch that first take of this video I just watched it now and now I'm adding in this addendum because I think I completely failed to deliver the message of this video and I fail to deliver it because I was avoiding the B word I didn't want to make this video into a statement upon whether or not I believe in human rights but actually the core issue here really is about belief versus empiricism or I could say belief versus nihilism I came up in political science studying politics let's just say being a person who cares about politics even before I was in university and after I had the university education I came up in politics surrounded by people who would consciously or unconsciously think of human rights as an ideal that justified various actions aspirations interventions decisions and politics they wouldn't even think of it in terms of outcomes they really did think of it as a kind of quasi religious concept and by contrast when I talk to these people it was very very hard for me to communicate with them because I'd asked a question like well have you actually studied what happened with the United Nations intervention in Cambodia and the haven't you no but there was this sense like okay well the United Nations intervene in Cambodia and created human rights where there were no human rights before therefore it's it's a wonderful thing and the empirical attitude is to start off studying Cambodia as a case study or studying Yugoslavia as a case study or starting studying any other intervention on behalf of human rights any other action on behalf of rights not with the assumption that we already know what human rights is and what it means or you look at empirically what happened in Cambodia step by step stage by stage you look at the motivations of the different actors involved and you look at the outcomes intended and unintended consequences and then you step back from that picture once you've got a good understanding of it maybe just one case study like Cambodia maybe a half-dozen case studies Cambodia East Timor Yugoslavia take your pick all over the world and then you step back and say okay that's human rights that's the reality of what this is okay the United Nations taking over Cambodia writing its laws for the United Nations providing an interim dictatorship government in Cambodia that this is the reality of what we mean when we talk about human rights the reality of the United Nations setting up a series of short-term governments in former Yugoslavia so-called troika government and so on and so forth one after another bizarre history of the government of Iraq even after the United States intervention in Iraq this is what in practice human rights means I've said before that I'm not just a nihilist but identify with the term historical nihilism I describe myself as an historical nihilist and part of that is I could say a willingness to let history teach you what things really mean you know what is communism there's a real sense in which you could never learn that by reading karl marx's communist manifesto there are some ways in which you can't I mean it helps it's certainly part of the study it's part of answering what is communism you will find by reading ideological works like Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto but then look at what actually happened when Lenin had to run for government in elections what happened when communists had elections and what happened afterward when Lenin hunted down and killed the elected representatives in Parliament so that he could take over and rule by a dictatorship because he didn't get from his perspective he didn't get enough votes right what actually hunt happened under Lenin and Stalin and Mao Zedong not just on an executive level not just on an economic level and maybe not just on the level of the peasant experience let's say on all those levels if you just in a careful and concerned way let history show you what communism means I think communism becomes impossible to believe in and as a general rule as a nihilist I think that all things become impossible to believe in what's better than belief is living with a certain kind of rigor doubt and insight and an openness into still learning that you're wrong even when you think you've got a pretty solid grip on the situation and what the concepts mean so that is really the contrast that I failed to get across and that first take of this video is the contrast between someone who has this concept of human rights that they believe in and they then apply it to Cambodia or they apply it to Russia or that apply to Yugoslavia whatever the case may be or Iraq still ongoing and someone who sits back and says ok wait maybe I don't really know what you mean by Human Rights maybe I don't really know what the United States government means by Human Rights what the State Department or the office of the president means by Human Rights I'm gonna sit back I'm gonna look at this case study and I'm gonna learn from the reality of history I'm gonna learn what human rights really meant in the history of Yugoslavia Cambodia Russia China Iraq what have you and then I'm gonna draw my conclusions on this concept on the city ology what its enforcement really entails in terms of both intended and unintended consequences there is a sense in which you can say Lenin never intended for people to starve to death he wasn't a pro starvation ideology but nevertheless when you really understand communism as a concept you know that putting into practice leads to starvation that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between the economic reforms London made a few decisions he made and the starvation of huge numbers of people so when you grow up in that context I mean I really think that when I was a younger man I had a kind of animus against the human rights discourse because I'd seen it so misused both cynically misused and misused in this sense of true believers exaggerating the virtues exaggerating the concept of what human rights really are rights discourse if we can keep it sane and we can keep it down to earth if we can keep it in the same kind of clear limited legal framework with which we discuss whether or not people have the right to drink alcohol in a park whether or not women have the right to drive a car still a struggle in Saudi Arabia it's possible on a date every time I check the news in Saudi Arabia that seems to be pretty close to the top of the news headlines still debating whether or not women should have the right to drive a car and as you can imagine people visit Saudi Arabia from other Muslim majority countries that may be very strictly Muslim but where women have those rights you know so those are questions within the rights discourse that go on and where rights discourse seems to me well enough suited to address them however I also come from a country Canada that you know kind of waved the flag for human rights basically since the end of World War two and yet from my perspective some of the worst atrocities for us as a nation that were responsible for happened after World War two they happened on our watch we know during my parents lifetime this is not ancient history they were carried out against First Nations at the same time that we were preaching human rights to other countries and reproaching other countries for the lack of human rights so you know the holiness that discourse the extent to which that discourse is a failure and as I say just having grown up around people who had expectations of the United Nations the the concept of peace keeping itself of war for peace concepts of human rights and international governance and how this would change the world and solve all our problems fundamentally really panacea like beliefs in human rights it's in that context that have ended up having such a nihilistic view of what human rights are what they aren't basically what questions they pose for us and how rarely it is the human rights offers us any answers