Human Rights And Propaganda

Tomorrow is a Day of Long Knives for the US at the UN Human Rights Council.  The Obama administration, in an overly deep genuflection before the alter of international institutions, turned in a twenty-nine page document constituting the Universal Periodic Review of human rights in the US.  In turn, a consortium of human rights advocacy groups headed by Human Rights Watch whipped out a four hundred page indictment of the US as a very grave violator of human rights.

On Friday, the speakers list in the Human Rights corral is oversubscribed by countries such as Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and China.  Each is licking its metaphorical lips as it gets ready to get in its licks against Uncle Sam and the legions of human rights abusers currently running the slaughter house of liberty and justice known as the USA.  For its part, the Obama administration has sent a thirty person delegation which it has been said, "will welcome all useful comments" but will actually serve as the designated flak catcher.

We the People are justifiably proud of our record in human rights.  Not only have we been zealous, some would say too zealous, in pursuit of guaranteeing human, civil, and political rights to all resident within our borders, we are quite willing to acknowledge that perfection has not yet been reached.  We should be equally proud of our political traditions--including one honored very much only in the breech by those countries so eager to tear a strip off our collective hind end.  That particular tradition is freedom of expression which leads to white hot debate over contentious issues of rights such as a woman's right to control her own reproductive destiny or of two people of the same sex to enjoy a status equal in all respects to heterosexual marriage or just what constitutes pornography.  Or what our immigration policy should be.  The list goes on and on.

The citizens and residents of very, very few countries have the basic right to live in a social and political environment of free for all expression.  The citizens and residents of very, very few countries understand that the consequences of the almost-anything-goes approach practiced in the US does, must, lead to social and political dynamics which are difficult to understand from the outside.  As the media treatment in so many European media outlets made clear in their coverage of the recently concluded midterm elections, our methods of politics and expression seem not only disordered but dangerously chaotic when viewed from more staid, that is, more repressed venues.

It is the wide chasm separating the American approach to defining and solving collective problems from the methods employed in other states which makes the upcoming slice-and-dice session in Geneva more than a routine exercise in anti-Americanism.  The countries already signed up on the Let's-Bash-The-US list for tomorrow are intent on inflicting a propaganda defeat on the US.  The governments of Cuba, Iran, China, and the others understand that simple, simplistic attacks on the US are easy to understand throughout the world while the realities of American political and social discourse and practice are totally opaque to all but the most sophisticated and widely experienced (and not even all of those).

An example: Iran intends to excoriate the US, or more accurately, some American states, for having executed less than fifty people in the past year.  The Iranians will portray the US not only as barbaric for its judicial killing fields but as a hypocrite for its criticism of other countries.  There is no doubt but the Iranian delegation will not mention that Iran is second only to China in the number of executions or that Iran, unlike China but like other Muslim majority states, allows death by stoning for some crimes, most notably adultery.

Cuba intends to take the US to task for its immigration policies--using the Obama administration's characterization of the current system as "broken" as well as the four hundred page indictment referenced above as proof beyond rebuttal that the US is xenophobic, racist, and given to violating the presumed human rights of illegal immigrants beyond count.  This from a country which has used force to prevent its citizens from leaving the Island Paradise Of Workers And Peasants.

Other states will aver that the pervasive racism of We the People condemns all people of color to perpetual poverty, systemic discrimination, and a fast track passage to prison.  These states will take sections of the human rights consortium's four hundred page diatribe as well as words from the Obama administration review to substantiate the attack.  No one will mention that the US has made massive strides toward eliminating the effects of past prejudice--often to the pronounced disadvantage of white males.  Nor will it be mentioned that these strides were taken by We the People organically without any guidance from the "international community."

It goes almost without mention that none of those casting stones at Uncle Sam live in fragile glass houses.  In the weird world of the UN Human Rights Council, those who sin most get to cast the first stone.

The problem, the danger, comes not from the fact that We the People cannot withstand baseless and evil criticism for nonexistent sins, but rather from the high likelihood that the malicious, malignant charges will be read and believed, heard and heeded in areas of the world where the interests of the US are both in play and at stake.  The charges mouthed in Geneva will be repeated and magnified in most, if not all, the Arab-Muslim world.  The same will happen in the three amigos of the Bolivarian Revolution.  And, no surprise here, in China and Russia.

Whether from simple naivete or over subscription to an ideology celebrating the moral supremacy of international institutions, the Obama administration made a grave mistake by agreeing not only to join the Human Rights Council but to engage in the Universal Periodic Review process.  No rational person well oriented in time and place could assume that any useful outcome would ensue.  This hypothetical rational person could only conclude that the US handed a public diplomacy victory to hostile states.

In a completely unnecessary move, the Obama administration has compromised the status of the US in areas of the world where the key component of the war with advocates of violent political Islam is underway.  The key component is, of course, the conflict of perceptions and images in the minds of the millions who have not yet firmly chosen a side.

In a basic way, the struggle for survival and supremacy between the US and other civilized states and the practitioners of violent political Islam focuses on the minds of the uncommitted majority.  That's right, it is counterinsurgency writ large.  It is in the short and long-term interest of the US to mobilize support from the uncommitted majority of Muslims so as, at the least, to deny their support to the perpetrators of jihad.  It is not that the US wants or should want the majority of the world's Muslims to embrace our set of world views but, it is necessary that the same minds be convinced to add their voices to the struggle against the advocates of violent political Islam.

Consider in this context what a great victory it would be for the civilized states if a crowd of angry Muslims took to the street in one or another Muslim majority state to demand their government suppress quickly and resolutely Muslims who killed or terrorized Christian fellow citizens.  The day that happens somewhere--Egypt, Iraq, Indonesia--the West could begin to breathe easily.  Muslims would be publicly and vocally denouncing Muslims who crossed the line separating acceptable religion from unacceptable political action.

To achieve this end, it is not necessary (nor possible) to convince Muslims that we are the last, best hope of humankind.  It is essential that we do not aid those hostile to us in branding the US as a violator of human rights, as a foul den of abusive inequity.  The Day of Long Knives tomorrow does nothing to aid in achieving this essential.

The president and his "team" deserve a severe down check for having made such a major strategic blunder as the execution of a Universal Periodic Review.  It was not an exercise in transparency or an illustration of our willingness to subject ourselves to the scrutiny of the world.  It was a gesture of self-mutilation.  A giving of an easy win to our mortal enemies.