tim's experiment

Well I suppose someone has to keep jumping on this error or we shall see it all the time. Spectacularly erroneous piece about human rights in Pravda last week.

It was perched rather insecurely on a speech by a failed Canadian politician to a conference in Latvia. Why this gentleman was elevated to the status of a spokesman for “the West” I am not sure. He said, apparently, that Russia and China represented the biggest strategic and moral challenge to the Western democracies. I would have thought this was rather obvious. These are big countries, heavily armed, pursuing a social model which is different from the democratic one. This is not good enough for Alex Lo, though, who believes that Russia and China are just being picked on because  “the West”, or that part of it for which Canadian  nonentities speak, “needs an enemy to maintain its own ideology”.

Mr Lo went on to wonder whether China could not “try to achieve freedom and betterment for its citizens by striking out on its own path?” This rather avoids the question whether freedom and betterment are actually the main priorities of an insecure collective dictatorship, but the worst is still to come. Freedom, said Mr Lo, comes in many guises: social, political, economic, moral and religious. He then expressed willingness to give up “the purely formal right to vote” in return for freedom from hunger and the freedom “to dream of a better future”.

Now let us see what is going on here. Human rights do indeed come in many guises. They are, however, generally considered to come in a hierarchy: some are more important than others, because they are a necessary prerequisite to enjoying any rights at all. The right to life, for example, is the most important and fundamental freedom because without it you are dead and freedom from hunger or freedom to dream are no longer any use to you. Now people who criticise the absence of human rights in China are not complaining that there are no elections. Still less are they complaining that China does not follow the lines of “Western democracy”. Democracy comes in many forms and people who would like to see a democratic China would be quite happy if the Chinese model turned out to follow those of the Phillipines, Japan or India, which are not Western at all. The basic complaint about human rights in China is that the citizens do not enjoy even the most basic ones. They may be killed, tortured or imprisoned without trial by, or with the active connivance of, the state.

Note an interesting point here. If Mr Lo wishes to exchange the right to vote for the right to dream there is a certain symmetry there. He gives up something; he gets something. If, on the other hand, he abandons the fundamental rights to life, to a fair trial, or not to be tortured, then he sacrifices nothing of his own, because as an overpaid columnist on a pro-China Hong Kong newspaper these things are unlikely to happen to him. He is prepared to trade other people’s suffering for a better life for himself.

We must at this point concede that in recent years the protection of fundamental human rigthts, even in countries which can reasonably claim to have invented them, has wilted. Murder by drone, for example, is a clear violation of the right to a trial of the intended victim, and the right to life of the “collateral damage”, the current euphemism for dead innocents. Water-boarding and other mistreatment of terrorist suspects is clearly torture and clearly wrong. Jailing people on suspicion for a period (as in the UK) or indefinitely (as in Guantanamo) is an obvious violation.

Governments everywhere are very good at thinking of reasons for curtailing their citizens’ rights. They do not need newspaper columnists to do it for them. This is why the right to vote is not “purely formal”. If you have a vote you can turf the bastards out. And if not, not.