One of Bill Buckley's sillier contentions in asking what President Bush "means" by his inaugural address was how, as the president declared, "there can be no human rights without human liberty."
I had an answer eighteen months ago: "No offering of abridged rights can substitute representative parity, nor can anything good come from a man indefinitely bereft of his natural right to free will."
Whittling a man's worth down to whatever scraps his government throws him is an insult to his Divinely willed determination — and ours, as well. At least the oppressed aren't utterly destitute, goes the rationalization. But "rights" here and there still amount to villenage if a man cannot choose how and by whom he is governed. In not directly challenging this before America made a moral compromise to its own detriment — a concession that the president would have us now take back. The Hudson Institute's Anne Bayefsky has more:
The notion of human rights as "indivisible and interdependent and interrelated" was an excuse to trump civil and political rights, or liberty, by a range of claims — some real, some imagined. The list of human rights now includes, for example, the right to be free of toxic waste.Over the years, the opponents of liberty have given their project many noble-sounding titles. They claim they are championing "national sovereignty," "non-interference" in domestic jurisdiction, "cooperation" (instead of serious consequences for poor human-rights records), "non-selectivity" (to avoid identification of particular egregious abuses), and "human duties" owed to governments.
The only justification for a foreign nation's partial freedom is its place in transition towards full civil and political liberties, those resembling our own. If we can be satisfied when an undeserving prisoner has at least bread and water, we risk becoming kind-hearted accessories to his captivity.