Global Research, Topic: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights at 70: Time to De-Colonize Human Rights!

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Link: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights at 70: Time to De-Colonize Human Rights! - Global ResearchGlobal Research   by Ajamu Baraka

Excerpt:

"The Atlantic Charter served as the basis for the Declaration of the United Nations, in January 1942 by twenty-six nations then at war and subsequently by twenty-one other nations. The Declaration endorsed the Atlantic Charter and expressed the conviction that complete victory over their enemies is essential to defend life, liberty, independence and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands.

Finally, many of the colonial subjects believed the principles of the war and the fight against racism and white dominance in Europe would allow all that were still colonized and denied national democratic rights to assume a new status as full human beings and exercise national rights just like white Europeans.

However, Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the British and U.S. leaders made it clear that the principles in the Atlantic Charter did not apply to colonial subjects in colonial territories but only to those nations in Europe under the “Nazi yoke.”.

What happened to the human rights idea?

Samuel Huntington was clear in Clash of Civilizations:

“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do."


So, when the interests of maintaining the Pan-European colonial/capitalist project, which is fundamentally grounded in systematic violence, clashed with respect for the “inherent dignity of all members of the human family” and their human rights and fundamental freedoms, those high-sounding liberal principles were sacrificed at the altar of realpolitik. In fact, they were not actually sacrificed. Because as we have witnessed, those liberal principles were never meant to apply to non-Europeans colonial subjects..."

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