human rights. ...and by "humans" i mean me!

marius says "most people don’t understand what democracy and tolerance is about. they just don’t get the basics" - and i've been meaning to say something about this as well, as i've run into some very disturbing and frustrating manifestations of bigotry lately.

and i'm not (just) talking about the very obvious.

first, there was the person who "supports the equal rights of each individual under the law" while "innocently" spewing all kinds of racist, xenophobic hate speech (which is ok, you see, because it's totally substantiated by the sins of many people who of course just happen to be of a certain race, nationality, etc.). this person separates "european human rights" - which apparently treat individuals as part of collectivities and are linked to socialism (but also to fascism) - from "american human rights" (or "rights of the HUMAN") - which put "the individual" first and foremost and are linked to old-style liberalism/conservatorism, aka libertarianism. all the while, the recurring point of this person's discourse is that everything would be fine if only there weren't those "leftists" and "anti-discrimination activists" who in fighting for special rights for groups of people are actually the ones who are discriminating against "individuals." this discourse seems to confuse people so much. it relies very heavily on the manipulation of labels and semantics, but of course what it "forgets" to specify, every time, is what this term "individual" really means (the core of the discourse, when you take away all the smoke screens it sets up, is that the "individuals" that it claims to revolve around include only some people - those who just happen to have full rights already).

but that's precisely the whole point of human rights - they're supposed to be rights for everyone no matter who they are (no exceptions, no random scapegoating), and the reality of this world is that not everyone has equal rights yet so they must be fought for by somebody, somehow. otherwise things will just stay the same ("power concedes nothing without demand..."). it's always amazing to me how the "libertarian"/"rights of individuals above all" discourses manage to confuse this very basic point.

and then, there was the guy who argued: "gay people can't get married and that means that they don't have the same rights? not true. actually, it's like this: if you're any guy who wants to get married, you can get married to a woman just like i did, and be equal with me. i can't get married to a guy, either, so you see we are equal." [real-life commentary to an article that mentions the struggle to legalize gay marriage in romania.] in other words, all people in the world can have equal rights already - as long as they are all the same. (it makes sense.) so women, people of color, lgbt people, stop complaining! all you need to do is be men, white, straight ... and you too will be "equal" and have your "individual rights" guaranteed and - if need be - defended. but be careful: if you are different and choose to recognize and wallow in this difference, then demanding your rights becomes fighting for special rights. and we can't have that, especially when coincidentally these "special rights" often get in the way of the "individual rights" of those who aren't different.

which is precisely what the "HUMAN rights" person was saying, too.

these people's point, make no mistake about it, is that they want to support and preserve the rights of people who already have full rights, power, privilege, clout, and so on. at the bottom of it all is the fact that their sole concern is that those privileges might be curtailed (they always go on rants against "positive discrimination," mention "threats" and "attacks on individual liberties," blame everything that is wrong with society on certain groups of people etc. etc.).

the main problem here is this self-centeredness-as-politics, which covers up a willingness to tolerate and even promote bigotry and discrimination with talk about "the rights of the individual." that's why "anti-discrimination" and "special rights" are key words in these discourses - the former gets to the bottom of the issue and must be vilified while the latter was created to better confuse the issue and must be promoted. and this self-centeredness, in a nutshell, is what's so fucking wrong with libertarianism (and to a certain extent even with what some people really understand by anarchism) - although having said that and used those labels, maybe this and this will provide the needed background and nuance.

the major worry for me, in general and in particular these days, is that such vehement anti-"anti-discrimination" talk and rationalized bigotry and normalized hate speech work to set the stage for tolerance of outright fascist views (fascism being "a political doctrine that depends on a division of the population between those who receive recognition and rights as full citizens and others who are deprived of rights and a voice because they are perceived as the source of evil destroying and corrupting the unity of the nation" - the source of this definition is here). i personally think that though the "libertarian conservative" discourse is not identical to extreme right/religious fundamentalist discourse, the intersection between all of them is precisely at the "individuals who matter vs. individuals who don't count" level. and in terms of concrete results of these discourses, the issue at hand is that people who tolerate fascist views from their peers and who come to tolerate or even embrace these ideas (for whatever reason) are guaranteed to say nothing or otherwise enable their governments to impose these views as official policies, which is then fascism, pure and simple.

just the other day, as i was thinking about this, i ran into an adbusters article titled "is right wing america becoming fascist?," and i think the following points are worth quoting in this context:

But then, most people barely understand what fascism really is.

One of the abiding misconceptions about fascism on both right and left sides of the political aisle is the notion that it can be reduced to a core set of ideological principles, much like communism or anarchism. This is why so many people reach for easy dictionary definitions when trying to deal with it.

As Robert O. Paxton has demonstrated authoritatively in his 2004 book, The Anatomy of Fascism, the mutative nature of fascism makes such definitions nearly impossible, and almost invariably off the mark.

Probably the closest we’ve come to a singular definition is Oxford scholar Roger Griffin’s “palingenetic ultranationalist populism” (“palingenesis” referring to the centrality of the myth of a Phoenix-like national rebirth from ashes), a definition which represents the traits that remain constant in fascism through all the stages of its development. Paxton himself has noted a similar constant, namely, the fascist insistence that it alone represents the authentic identity of the nation in which it arises. He also describes fascism as “right-wing totalitarian rule imposed by popular acclaim.”

Because fascism is more a political pathology than a single, readily identifiable principle, Paxton (and others like Stanley Payne and Umberto Eco) has come up with a descriptive explanation of the phenomenon. Fascism, he writes, is fuelled by nine “mobilizing passions” that on their own seem innocuous enough, even readily familiar, part of the traditional American political hurly-burly. But taken in combination, they become something lethal.

Of these nine “passions,” fully five of them accurately describe real traits of American movement conservatives:
· the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether universal or individual, and the subordination of the individual to it;
· the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment which justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against the group’s enemies, both internal and external;
· dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effect of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;
· the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;
· the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason.

There are other lesser, more stylistic similarities to fascism that have reared their head among American conservatives as well:
· A propensity to view the weak with contempt; to associate weakness with femininity; and to excoriate the feminine and glorify the masculine. “Girlie men” was only the tip of the rhetorical iceberg in this regard.
· A fondness for depicting their enemies and their opposition as objects fit for elimination. In some cases, they are described as animals – typically either vermin or vicious killers. A secondary, but much more common, version of this is to identify them with the nation’s enemies.
· A resulting eliminationist rhetoric advocating the utter exclusion of entire blocs of the electorate, especially immigrants and the gay and lesbian community, as well as, on an even broader scale, liberals generically.

While these similarities show that the American conservative movement has become, in its basic architecture, a kind of precursor to fascism, some important elements are still missing:
· Its agenda, under the guise of representing mainstream conservatism, is not openly revolutionary.
· While increasingly a one-party state, it is not yet a dictatorship.
· It does not yet rely on physical violence and campaigns of gross intimidation to obtain power and suppress opposition.
· American democracy has not yet reached the genuine stage of crisis required for full-blown fascism to take root.

i think it's useful to put it all into perspective, and also to retain some hope that things could improve if only we don't let them continue in the present vein. read the whole article, and see also "japan's lurch to the right" and "we are the torturers: the global erosion of human rights" from the same issue of adbusters magazine. then there was "stick your neck out, america!" (americans, for the most part, are blissfully unaware of our own power -- even as the claws of fascism creep steadily closer.) and the older "top 10 signs of the impending u.s. police state" (from secret detention centers to warrantless wiretapping, bush and co. give free rein to their totalitarian impulses.) on alternet - again, some very useful reading!

and for some basics of despotism vs democracy read this older post.