The US Shouldn't Be Such a Hypocrite About Human Rights
by John Lawrence, June 18, 2018
The US is always taking a holier-than-thou attitude about human rights with respect to other nations. The concept of human rights evidently does not include freedom from being killed or injured in war or having your real estate destroyed if you are a non-combatant. Hundreds of thousands have been killed in Iraq and other Middle East countries because of the illegal war that President George W Bush got us into there. Did those Iraqis that were killed or injured or that lost loved ones have their human rights violated? Evidently not, according to the narrow US definition. But the US doesn't hesitate to criticize other nations if they kill their own citizens. For instance, Assad in Syria is said to be despicable because he bombed his own citizens. Didn't President Lincoln kill his own citizens in the American Civil War. Of course he did - in massive numbers. It was a war of attrition.
Now the US is involved in a massive humanitarian crisis in Yemen in which children are being starved and contracting cholera in huge numbers. Don't tell me this is not a human rights violation of the highest magnitude. We are supplying the weapons to the Saudis who are killing and starving civilians, men, women and children, without mercy. Don't they have human rights? It makes the fact of separating children from their parents at the border a minor crime against humanity in comparison.
So maybe Putin had a few journalists killed. Of course there is no proof, but even assuming he's culpable, what's a few journalists compared to hundreds of thousands of civilians including wedding parties killed by the US? Is it the fact that they are not US citizens but the journalists were Russian citizens that makes the difference? I don't think so. A death is a death. An injury is an injury. The same applies to Kim Jong Un. If killing his brother makes him a pariah, is the killing of hundreds of thousands by the US in the Middle East OK because it was done as an act of war? Because they were collateral damage? A life is a life. A death is a death. Not too many world leaders do not have blood on their hands.
The US has been involved in the overthrow of legitimate governments and bloody coups all over the world like in Iran in 1953 when the US ousted Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and installed the brutal Shah. The democratically elected Allende in Chile was ousted by Pinochet in 1973 aided and abetted by the CIA which was complicit in Pinochet's "human rights violations." There are many more similar situations in world history so the US should not take a holier-than-thou attitude and lecture other countries about human rights violations. Human rights, as Shakespeare's Hamlet said, are honored more in the breach than in the observance.
Like Nixon said "If the President does it, it is not a crime." I guess if the US does it, it is not a crime either or a human rights violation even when greater numbers of victims are involved.
