THere is little more egregious than Marxist Sophism which has broadly infected the Liberal. Arts in the West, not least because they are the default go to discipline for the lower third of the annual intake of students. Do these students even understand that their choices are synominous with 'Dumb Ass' in the eyes of their fellow students.
Academe needs to be completely cleansed of this century old intellectual toxin. The core of Academe has mostly chosen to ignore all this even while they dominate the poiitical aspects. That is a bad mistake.
It does not have to end with their solution regarding real opposition. I prefer to not shoot these intellectual perversions at all. I do think that Mao had this one right. Send all faux intellectuals down to the farm to experince the redeeming effects of agricultural service for at least five years. If they still cannot be trusted, have at it for an additional five years.
It worked to undo Nazism and it serves better than simple unemployment.
CCP Seeks to Redefine ‘Human Rights’ in Attack on America
March 19, 2021 Updated: March 20, 2021
Reenactment of one of the torture methods employed by the CCP officials to coerce Falun Gong practitioners to renounce their faith. (Courtesy of Minghui.org)
https://www.theepochtimes.com/ccp-seeks-to-redefine-human-rights-in-attack-on-america_3741298.html
Commentary
Under the guise of highlighting alleged “human-rights” abuses in the United States, a new report set to be released soon by the Communist Party of China aims to completely redefine the very concept of rights. This is extremely dangerous.
Of course, the irony of having the most murderous dictatorship in all of human history accuse the freest nation in human history of being a serial human-rights abuser is off the charts. Literally no government in world history has ever slaughtered as many people as the CCP over its decades in power. And no government in human history has protected key freedoms of as many people as the American experiment.
Naturally, the upcoming CCP report, expected to be released shortly after the U.S. government releases its own human-rights report on China, has been almost universally ridiculed or ignored in the West. But it is no laughing matter. Ignore the hypocrisy for now, if you must. But there is a very real threat to genuine human rights buried in the report that goes far beyond semantics.
The real problem is global. Unfortunately, the CCP-backed campaign to replace in people’s minds real rights with government-granted privileges has allies in high places around the world—and even in America, at some of the nation’s most prestigious “educational” institutions and in the halls of government. At the forefront are the CCP’s allies around the world and its operatives in the United Nations.
The CCP attack on America, titled “The Report on Human Rights Violations in the United States in 2020,” is the latest version of an annual screed by the regime’s State Council Information Office. It was launched as a response to U.S. criticism of the CCP’s record. Each year, the CCP gets more and more unhinged in its criticism of the United States.
Phony Concerns
At the top of the CCP’s list of supposed “human rights” concerns about the United States last year was the government’s alleged failure to sufficiently protect people from the CCP virus unleashed on the world by the CCP itself. Yes, seriously.
Citing the high death toll from the pandemic and America’s advanced medical technology, the regime argued that this proved the U.S. government was “incompetent” and was failing in its duty to protect the alleged “human right” to “health.”
“In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc around the world, posing a major threat to human security,” said a preview of the 15,000-Chinese-character report offered in CCP propaganda organs. “It went out of control in the United States following the government’s reckless response.”
Of course, the CCP is very familiar with America’s Constitution, whereby people and states retain most powers for themselves while granting a few limited authorities to their agent known as the federal government. And under that Constitution, as the CCP knows very well, the federal government does not have totalitarian CCP-style powers to fight the virus with tyranny.
Instead, the Constitution protects God-given rights from infringement by the federal government by limiting federal power.
Ironically, though, even the states that used the most vicious and draconian policies to “fight” the CCP virus—think California and New York, among others—had similar or worse outcomes than states such as Florida and South Dakota that did not weaponize the virus against individual freedoms.
In other words, protecting real rights is perfectly compatible—and almost always associated with—better health and economic outcomes.
In its upcoming report, pre-release previews show that the CCP also faulted the Trump administration for “bullying international organizations” and “promoting isolation and unilateralism” in the face of the pandemic. That is a reference to President Trump’s decision to stop funding and supporting the CCP-backed leader of the disgraced World Health Organization (WHO), which helped Beijing peddle its lies about the CCP virus.
How ending funding for a CCP mouthpiece in a UN bureaucracy was a violation of human rights was not immediately clear.
Another alleged human-rights abuse in the United States: People of African heritage were more likely to be killed by police than those of European heritage. The report ignored the obvious explanations well known to researchers—black Americans are far more likely to be involved in the criminal justice system, in part due to the larger number of fatherless homes—and presented the data point without context as proof of widespread racism among American law enforcement.
This is a basic logical fallacy that a well-educated elementary student should be able to detect. In reality, studies and surveys show that America is among the least racist societies on the planet. Studies also show that American police officers are actually less likely to shoot black suspects than white suspects.
Real Violations by CCP
Meanwhile, the irony of having the CCP suggest that American government officials are “racist” in their alleged violations of human rights defies belief. Just this month, the Montreal-based Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights and the D.C.-based Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy concluded that the CCP is currently engaged in a genocide against the minority Uyghur ethnic group in Western China.
“China, as a state, is committing acts of genocide against the Uyghurs with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the group as such, as exemplified by state-orchestrated mass internment, forced birth prevention and campaigns of eradication,” explained principal report author Yonah Diamond, who serves as legal counsel for the Raoul Wallenberg Centre.
The Dutch Parliament also passed a motion last month finding that the treatment of the Uyghur minority in China constitutes a “genocide.”
Now that is real racism and a real human-rights violation!
In discussing the report, “research fellow” Lü Xiang at the CCP’s Chinese Academy of Social Sciences widely cited in CCP media even compared Western concerns about the ongoing Uyghur genocide in western China to lies by National Socialist (Nazi) Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels.
With no apparent sense of irony, the upcoming CCP report goes on to cite “money in politics” as a supposed human-rights violation.
Of course, in free countries, citizens are allowed to participate in the political process by supporting candidates or issues of their choice, whether that be with their money, their time, their media outlets, or their speech.
The real violation of real rights, obviously, is that the CCP regime does not allow its victims to participate in politics or govern themselves by choosing their own leaders.
Now that is a real human-rights violation.
At a media briefing on the subject, a spokesman for the CCP’s “Foreign Ministry” blasted America’s record. “We hope the U.S. will abandon double standards, and face up to serious human rights issues such as racism and violent law enforcement, and take concrete measures to protect human rights,” the spokesman said.
Like any successful propaganda effort, the CCP attack on America’s “human rights” situation does contain some elements of truth.
In fact, during the pandemic, governors and mayors—especially Democrats in blue states—ruthlessly trampled on the constitutionally guaranteed human rights of citizens. But that is not what the CCP report means.
In previous years, the CCP also made its agenda clear in its “reports” on alleged “human rights” violations in the United States.
For example, a similar report released in 2012 pointed to “violations such as the view that the United States government “exercises lax firearm possession control, causing rampant gun ownership.”
Despite numerous polls showing overwhelming public support for the constitutionally guaranteed right to keep and bear arms, the CCP report even argued that U.S. authorities were ignoring the “complaints of the U.S. people” and “multiple protests” supposedly demanding that “the government strictly control the private possession of arms.”
This year, the CCP report is again expected to demonize the Second Amendment for supposedly producing “gun violence.”
The argument, though, is absurd—especially as America has a lower murder rate than most of the world, and gun-rights have always been regarded in America is the ultimate protection for all other rights, including those that the CCP refuses to acknowledge even exist.
Switzerland, with some of the highest gun-ownership rates on Earth, also has among the lowest murder rates. Meanwhile, nations like Venezuela and Mexico, where private gun ownership has long been virtually illegal, have among the highest murder and crime rates on the planet.
The real violation of human rights is the CCP’s total denial of its victims’ right to keep and bear arms. But then again, dictatorships and tyrants never trust their victims with weapons.
The Threat: Real Rights Versus Fake Rights
The real danger of the CCP report is not that Americans will suddenly read the document and revolt against their supposedly oppressive government.
Nor is there a serious risk that the CCP’s hypocrisy would be taken seriously, though the regime’s talking points and the “woke” mob’s ramblings are increasingly difficult to differentiate.
Rather, the danger is that the CCP screed is just the tip of the iceberg in a global campaign to completely redefine the very concept of rights—not as God-given, but as government-granted.
Indeed, the regime in communist China and its totalitarian allies around the world use “human rights” as a pretext to control the lives and restrict the liberties of their victims.
For instance, under the guise of a “human right” to a government-controlled education, tyrants indoctrinate children with lies and prohibit alternatives.
Under the guise of a “human right” to government-provided “health care,” tyrants hijack control of medical systems and restrict individual freedom, making their victims completely dependent on their abusers.
Under the guise of a “human right” to a “decent standard of living,” tyrants seize control of whole economies—and the people who make up the economy.
These are all known as “positive rights,” and they all purport to require that the government do something to you or for you at the expense of others that you could not ethically do on your own.
As an example, you could never go rob your neighbor and claim you needed his money for your college or your health care. But if you have a “positive right” to college or health care, government can be authorized to go take your neighbor’s wealth to spend on you.
Importantly, because they depend on government, all of these “positive rights” can also be revoked by government on a whim using flimsy pretexts.
Obviously, this is an extremely dangerous view of “human rights.”
By contrast, the traditional American and Christian concept of rights rooted in the Bible and Western traditions could not be more different.
Perhaps the most significant difference is that these genuine human rights are unalienable. Think freedom of speech, freedom to own property, the right to worship God according to the dictates of one’s conscience, the right to protect one’s family and property, and so on.
These are all “negative” rights, in that they entail freedom from abuses, coercion, and so on. Just like you can protect your property from a robber, you can delegate authority to a sheriff to help you protect your property.
As America’s Founding Fathers declared in the Declaration of Independence, individuals are “endowed by their Creator” with these “unalienable rights.” That means these rights exist independent of government.
Because government did not and does not grant the rights, it has no legitimate authority to revoke or restrict them.
Instead, the government’s role is limited to the protection of these God-given rights from infringement. The Declaration even argues that this is the very reason governments are instituted.
The timeless words and principles in the Declaration of Independence echoed statements made years earlier on the subject by Sam Adams, widely known as the “Father of the American Revolution.” In the first letter circulated by his Committees of Correspondence in 1772, Adams laid out his case.
“Among the natural rights of the Colonists are these: First, a right to life; Secondly, to liberty; Thirdly, to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can,” he wrote.
He also argued that the “Rights of the Colonists as Christians” could be “best understood by reading and carefully studying the institutes of the great Law Giver and Head of the Christian Church, which are to be found clearly written and promulgated in the New Testament.”
Unfortunately, the UN and many of its member governments (and even a growing segment of influential voices in America) come down firmly on the side of the CCP’s perverse view of rights, rather than the American and Christian view.
The UN view is extremely dangerous, and the global body frequently echoes CCP-style talking points about free speech or gun rights in America supposedly being a “violation” of human rights.
But this is not new. In Article 29 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the global body even claims that, “These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.”
That would be the equivalent of having a First Amendment that prohibited using one’s free speech or freedom of assembly or right to petition in order to criticize Congress. It is self-evidently absurd.
As if to highlight the absurdity of its own position, on Feb. 22, the UN “Human Rights Council” gave a platform to the CCP “State Councilor and Foreign Minister” Wang Yi, marking the first time that a CCP leader addressed the increasingly discredited UN body. Incredibly, the regime was elected to serve another term on the disgraced UN body last year.
“Increasing people’s sense of gains, happiness and security is the fundamental pursuit of human rights as well as the ultimate goal of national governance,” Wang declared at the 46th session of the UN body, claiming to support “peace, development, equity, justice, democracy and freedom.”
Wang, who claimed the CCP operated “the most representative democracy,” also suggested that a slight increase in the Chinese people’s standard of living in recent years was evidence of the regime’s devotion to human rights.
Most incredibly, perhaps, Wang described Beijing’s murderous scheming in Xinjiang and Tibet as “shining examples of China’s human rights progress.” Yes, seriously: Apparently genocide is a “shining example” of “human rights,” at least in the CCP understanding of the term.
“The Chinese government attaches high importance to the promotion and protection of human rights,” Wang told the regime’s propaganda megaphone Xinhua “News” Agency, which according to whistleblowers doubles as an intelligence-gathering front.
Other brutal dictatorships on the UN Human Rights Council echo those preposterous claims on a regular basis.
What Next?
If the effort to redefine rights is successful—and it is already making great progress—true human rights could be lost forever, written out of the history books.
Such a development would leave the people of the world at the mercy of oftentimes brutal governments subscribing to the CCP-backed grotesque perversion of rights that literally flips the concept on its head.
Instead of having a duty to protect the God-given, unalienable rights of the individual, tyrants everywhere would be empowered to oppress and abuse their victims in the name of “human rights.”
Increasingly, like the CCP, governments and international outfits are already peddling the notion that gun rights and self-defense are not rights, but violations of rights. Similarly, even free speech is now being painted as a violation of people’s supposed “human right” not to be offended.
With help from corrupted education systems and dictator-dominated international organizations, a major transformation is already happening around the world and even in America—especially in the minds of younger generations.
Right now, millions of children are being conditioned to demand their supposed “right” to tax-funded college, health care, abortion, and transgender surgeries, while at the same time demanding censorship and draconian curbs on religious liberty in the name of “human rights.”
This is a recipe for catastrophe. If it continues, the next generation of Americans may look at the CCP’s silly reports and actually take them seriously.
It is time to fight back on the battlefield that matters: the essence and definition of human rights. The genocidal CCP must not be allowed to win.
The surest way to do that is by Americans returning to a true understanding of rights—God-given and unalienable—as enumerated in the nation’s founding documents.
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