- Much of what has been called liberal activism in the last half century has been merely an accommodation to historical change –to circumstances. It represents a triumph of circumstance over ideology.
- Not too differently, in-the-world-that-liberalism-finally-forged, the world of the welfare state and the transnational corporation, liberalism itself has become politically and intellectually bankrupt. (…is Kerry really so much better than Bush for the world’s human rights cause..?).
The disparity between what liberals say in public and what they do in private is actually the reason why it is so easy for young people to unmask the hypocrisy of their liberal parents.
- For many human rights (HR) activists, the freedom from hunger and disease and from other HR violations is as important as the freedom of expression, but the latter, by itself, is a value devoid of sincerity.
- When we think of the ‘left’ or leftists, we think of people who espouse equality as an absolute and who measure injustice by distribution of wealth. But the ‘right’ and the ‘left’ do not occupy two extremes with a middle made up of liberals. Liberalism is another dimension altogether. It remains empty of standards, committed to everything and, therefore, to nothing.
- We can tell in the greatest detail what liberals are opposed to or simply worried about. But when it comes to the question of what, in positive terms, they stand for, answers are often fuzzy.
- The long march of liberal solutions to social injustice is really devoid of the more fundamental questions about wealth and power and their gross maldistribution.
- One can see a political commitment to the ‘idea-of-upholding-human-rights’ without the same commitment to deal with the concomitant praxis to tackle the deep-rooted social and political problems behind the impunity we encounter when HR are violated .
- Our use of HR education interventions alone can thus be the result of our adherence to a ‘concept of society’ that derives from functionalist social theory. For the functionalists, there are ‘practical-difficulties’ and ‘obstacles-to-desirable-changes’, but fortunately there are also ‘various-services-and/or-facilities’-to-overcome-them. So, in the end, everything will be fine.
- It is incumbent upon us to make governments conscious of HR problems, but at the same time emphasizing that HR education interventions alone do not solve the problems at hand and that the answer is not to be found in small projects or in having a few experts running around.
- Is it fair to say that we keep diagnosing the obvious and giving a prognosis of a tragedy? Why do we keep emphasizing sectoral solutions that deal with what is important and not with what is fundamental? Everything is important. But what is fundamental? Important is the help given to some marginalized groups, but fundamental is the promotion of more permanent structural changes that will avoid those groups being marginalized in the first place.
- We keep projecting tendencies of all what we do not want to be continued. But tendency is not destiny. The destiny is in our hands. When dealing with HR problems, it is important to act on the causes, as well as on the effects. It is useless to take care of those whose rights are violated the most while the root causes of these violations are not solved. The greatest waste in this latter task is time. Time wasted on exhaustive diagnoses for checking easily verifiable tendencies; time wasted on excess methodology. Decisions thus tend to be delayed by a system without any synchronization with the speed of events. We often fail to strike the right balance between theory and practice, academicism and activism.
- All the elements needed to study HR violations in their wider economic and political context are there (i.e. unequal distribution between the various sectors of society, the role of state and private interests and the conflicts between them), but in spite of this, our colleagues continue to discuss matters within a framework of cultural differences and ignorance in the area of rights. Their implicit social model (ideology) does not enable them to handle the complex social and economic phenomena they themselves witness. A classless approach in sociological studies, for the most part, focuses its analysis on the poor, not on the economic system that produces poverty. Thus, not paradoxically, most of the strategies for eradicating that poverty have been directed at the poor themselves, but not at the economic system that produces it. Problems are thus ‘solved’ in an isolated and totally a-political way, because there is still a lack of understanding of what determinants are really important and how they need to be tackled.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org