Anti-Jihadists Writers Go Pogo

There is a big problem among the "good guys," one escaping their attention. "Good guys" are those who publish anti-jihadist books, websites, and blogs, and they range from those who are well-known to those barely known.  They do damned good work overall.

The big problem is that a lot of the good guys support the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations. 

Even though the "good guys," very properly and universally, denounce the United Nations for the evil that it is, many of the same folk buy into the same UN's UDHR as though it is some kind of moral good.  They seem unaware of the contradiction.  [For a fuller discussion, see Do Not Support the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Parts One and Two).]

The problem arises from fundamental mistakes repeated over and over.  One example comes from what some state as the rationale for their support of the UDHR:  (1) It is the best thing we have today, even if flawed; and, (2) most people are familiar with the UDHR.  Implied is (3), there is nothing else available.  Thus, many of the "good guys" see the UDHR as really benign.

First off, the UDHR is NOT the "best thing" available on the subject--BECAUSE of its flaws.  The second and third examples group into one rejoinder coming under the correct definition and meaning of "rights," as articulated by our Founders and the thinkers of the Enlightenment.  Also, those original formulations are still the best thing around. Today's world of lousy education, anti-education, and the ignoring of rational principles allow the UDHR to skate along under the radar.

"Rights" must be correctly used and not be allowed contamination from bogus, or counterfeit, "rights" which are so common today. [See What Is a "Right" Anyway?] So, notions like "human rights" trip off the tongues and keyboards of really good people, who seem oblivious to how such "innocent seeming" buzz-words are being used to substitute collectivized "rights" for the real ones. "Human rights" is to "rights" as "social justice" is to "justice," and to get a sense of the darkness of "human rights," recall the history and behavior of one of their foremost advocates and true believers, Jimmy Carter.

Our Founders and the scholars of the Enlightenment referred to rights as the "Rights of Man."  By that, they meant the fundamental rights all humans have as a result of their birth and existence.  At that time, there were none of the contemporary bogus rights, just the "divine right of kings." 

There are only four fundamental rights:  Life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. 

Beyond the fundamental rights, there are derived rights and, farther away yet, granted rights. Derived rights come from the four fundamental rights, and the fullest example of these are the Bill of Rights amending the original Constitution of the United States of America.  For example, the Second Amendment derives from the rights to life and property.  Granted rights cover all the rest including such items as legal deeds, etc.  Proper derived and granted rights will not violate fundamental rights.

The critical feature of true rights is that they are actions, specifically freedoms of action.  Such freedoms come solely from the requirements of human nature for every person to survive and to flourish. To live, one has the most fundamental right, the right to life.  This right requires being free to do what is required to support one's life.  "Being free" is the next fundamental right, the right to liberty.  The right to property recognizes that people to live must acquire, use, and dispose of all sorts of material items in order to feed, clothe, shelter themselves, as well as  to flourish. Finally, to sustain his soul (his consciousness) as his purpose for living, a person needs the freedom of action to pursue happiness.  Mother Nature sets these terms for surviving and thriving, and these necessitate the freedoms of action.

Rights impose only one requirement on each of us.  That requirement is for each of us not to violate the rights of any others of us.  The only way that anyone can violate the rights of anyone is to use physical force to seize someone's property, to curtain someone's liberty, or even to take someone's life.

Humans form governments and legally concentrate the use of force in those governments to protect these freedoms.  In turn, rights-based governments extend protection of rights to all of its citizens.  Here is where the UDHR does the "grand switcheroo" by inserting bogus rights in with the others:

Bogus rights want you and everyone else to think that rights are not actions but are material provisions.  Instead of rights to life, liberty, and property needed to support oneself, bogus rights declare that money, materiel, and services must be provided to some, if not all, as a governmental grant or source of rights.  Bogus rights offer "entitlements."  Someone or some institution, like a government, says that some, if not all citizens, are entitled to the money, materiel, and services needed for their support and thriving.  (This is the hidden meaning of "human rights.")

This switch is evil, and here is why. 

It is evil because it means that some humans must be tapped to supply other humans. In the less malignant governments, monies are taken from citizens through taxation, under threat of physical force (laws), for those monies to be "redistributed" to others.  You have no say-so over having your money taken or where and how it is used.  In more malignant states, everything is seized directly and given to fellow thugs, gangs, or groups.  By any "whitewashing" name, both are theft, and this is the core truth to all claims of "rights" as entitlements.

Here are the bogus rights of the UDHR, by paragraph number and content:

• 22:  “right to social security’, “economic, social and cultural rights”
• 23:  “protection against unemployment; everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.”
• 24:  “periodic holidays with pay”
• 25:  “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”
• 26:  “right to education” and “Education shall be free.”  Education “shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.”

 
If you look at the entire UDHR, you will see that the UN smuggles in devastating bogus rights along with more or less correct rights [It is a poorly formulated and written document].  Similar to Gresham's Law, which states that bad money drives out good, bogus rights erode and eventually replace correct rights. The replacement begins subtly but moves inexorably if not challenged and rejected by good people.

True rights sanction actions but never bestow money, goods, and services.  A true right regarding education, for example, merely says that one must be free to take personal actions in order to obtain education, meaning to earn it.  Conversely, bogus rights tell people that education is due them by right.  The same applies to health care, food, housing, social security, and so on.  True rights sanction the freedoms of action to earn these, but bogus rights say you need not earn because you are "entitled" to them.

Think about this.  If monies, goods, and services must be provided, who does the providing? Where do they come from?  Only other people can provide any of these things, so the answer is that they come from other people.  If one is entitled to money, goods, and services by (bogus) right, what are the means providing the "entitlements"?  Other people "have," and the basic principle is to take under threat of the use of physical force to grant guarantees of redistributed money, goods, and services.  Those who resist soon discover the meaning of the threat of physical force.

Just try not paying your income taxes to see what this means.

 
The step from implied physical threat to actual is a very short one indeed, and governments and gangs jump to physical force very quickly.

So, here comes the government--supposed the legal repository of physical force to protect the rights of its citizens--guaranteeing bogus rights.  It takes under threat or seizure, and it redistributes using arbitrary, non-objective criteria.  True rights are forced to yield to bogus rights. Bad rights always drive out true rights.

The bogus rights of the UDHR undercut any good done by the more or less correct rights in all of the rest of the UDHR because they establish the principle that some people must be forced to provide, to support, and to labor for other people.  Note "Must be forced."  Another term for that is "slavery."  Whether it exists in fact is really a matter of time and circumstance because the enabling principle has already been established principle and only awaits use by those who crave power.

Incidentally, the Islamic declaration of human rights that so many anti-jihadists rail against as being so bad, compared to the UDHR, is actually no worse than the UDHR.  It differs from the UDHR only in some details, but not in fundamental principles.  In fact, the Islamic version is more consistent than the UDHR.  Both are rotten--for the same reasons.

My bottom line request to all anti-jihadist authors, websiters, and bloggers:  Never endorse the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations as long as it proclaims any deadly, contradictory, bogus "rights"--in the name of Life, Liberty, Property, and the Pursuit of Happiness.  None of us fighting this good fight can undercut our cause by emulating in any way the famous quip by Pogo:  We have met the enemy, and he is us.

Comments

[Chris]

This essay will get readers thinking. I admit that I had never really focused on the UDHR "entitlements" of articles 22 through 26 until reading your essay.

Your conclusion that someone must pay for these entitlements is correct. I also agree that, in the extreme, anti-liberal force must be used to extract funds to support those entitlements. From a narrow perspective, this is blatantly unfair. Why should I pay taxes so "welfare families" can have food and housing which they did not earn?
Why not just say every man, woman and child for himself?

But here's the rub: A social system based on the "survival of the fittest" will always be a divided society and one filled with injustice. Anyone who has gone through a temporary financial crisis (illness, catastrophic loss, loss of employment)knows how quickly ones status can go from affluence to dire need. We all need a safety net sometime in our lives -- and I would even go so far to say that safety net is a "human right" in a modern society.

Without some basic universal education the opportunities of "liberty" would never be available to all. Without some restrains on work days and hours, there would, indeed, be slavery in a "survival of the fittest" society.

I think we should all reflect on the lessons that can be drawn from the African-American situation in the U.S. For 100 years the majority of them lived as second-class citizens and were denied equal rights. The "great society" legislation changed that, but many African-Americans stayed on the public dole for generations (much to the dismay of taxpayers). Today, however, we are seeing young African-Americans finally realizing and taking advantage of the economic and social opportunities our society provides. Welfare rolls are dropping, and more and more African-Americans are prospering.

The challenge for governments is to balance "entitlements" with responsibilities. The entitlements should be temporary means to a more equal, fully-productive society and not ends in themselves. We should never allow the non-productive elements of our society bleed the productive elements with no end in sight.

The advantage of the UDHR is that all nations have, in theory, endorsed it as members of the UN. Societies which have tried to apply it seem to enjoy more liberty than those which have ignored it.

[GM]

Chris,

Thank you for a very thoughtful set of comments. I want to acknowledge your comments now. However, there is so much meat in them that I will make a separate blog to address the issues you have raised.

You have provided an excellent opportunity to get into ramifications that I left out of the original in order to keep the length shorter than longer and to minimize confusions. However, the subject of "rights" always draws certain questions, and they deserve thoughtful answers.

Responding soon as a blog,

gm

[Eleanor]

George -Everytime I hear the words "social justice" I am reminded of Islam. Remember that "social justice" is the Muslim world is known only as "justice," where there is no such thing as "mercy."

If Islam comes to rule our shores, our rights will only be those things allowed by the dictatorship of Islam and with such "justice," our rights and freedoms will be out the window in a flash.

[Eleanor]

George -Everytime I hear the words "social justice" I am reminded of Islam. Remember that "social justice" in the Muslim world is known only as "justice," where there is no such thing as "mercy."

If Islam comes to rule our shores, our rights will only be those things allowed by the dictatorship of Islam and with such "justice," our rights and freedoms will be out the window in a flash.

[GM]

Eleanor,

It took me a long time to decode "social justice," to understand all the true evil smuggled in by a term chosen to seem benign. I got much more into "social justice" in a subsequent blog More on "Anti-Jihadists Go Pogo": Social Justice Is No Defense (http://sixthcolumn.typepad.com/sixth_column/2007/05/from_comments_o.html). There is no such thing in reality as "social justice," but there is justice, and that is what we must never let be taken from us.