SOLUTIONS? THIS IS PRIMARILY THE ROLE OF THE HR-BASED APPROACH.

[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader shares with you some more of my HR ‘iron laws’ and asks more relevant activists’ human rights questions. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Note: You can easily translate the Readers to many languages, Use the app deepl.com and it is done instantaneously. It takes seconds to download the app into your computer or phone and translations are of high quality.

-What good is a man who spent all his time philosophizing without ever disturbing anyone? (Diogenes the Cynic about Plato)

-When you are tired, learn to rest, not to quit. (Banksy)

1. It is fitting for me to start off this Reader with another set of my iron laws born and collected from years of experience as an activist:

  • Human rights activists are not moved by ambition, by a sense of moral duty; they throw themselves into adventures without measuring the risks or looking back, because to remain paralyzed in the place society holds for them is much worse. (Isabel Allende, The Sum of Our Days)
  • There are those among us who fight all their adult lives; those are the essential and indispensable ones (in the struggle for human rights). (Bertolt Brecht)
  • But to be working on the same human rights (HR) issues is not the same as being together working in concert on them. (Luis Weinstein)
  • The old that protest today are the young that protested yesterday and the young who protest today will continue protesting when they are old. (Alberto Portugheis)
  • Activist groups will always go downhill when they lose focus and lax-off on staying on their main causes (John Le Carre, Smiley’s People)
  • Yes: In adversity, hope is the only thing that is lost. (graffiti)
  • And beware: The fact that a man dies for a cause does not make that cause right. (Oscar Wilde)
  • Seated intellectuals do not advance our cause; they do not go as far as an activist that keeps walking. (Michel Audiard) and
  • The list of intellectuals at the service of the ruling powers is as long as a weekend without soccer. Venality helps, narcissism and arrogance too. There are those who have no convictions: only interests or political indifference.

2. And then, there are additional lingering questions for us human rights activists:

  • Are we drowning in information, while starving for wisdom? (E.O. Wilson)
  • If the answer is yes, does it mean that the main challenge for us is to attract attention, however we can?
  • Are we really putting together the right information at the right time, thinking critically about it and making important choices wisely?
  • How much of this do fellow activists do? Are they so worried about what they oppose that they have little time left to attend to that that they are to propose? (Rabbi Marshall Meyer) and
  • Are we generating strategies to increase the number, frequency and continuity of innovative actions that are (necessarily) disruptive? (GREDS) i.e., are you helping organize and mobilize claim holders to channel their accumulated grievances to demand solutions?

3. Finally, there are a couple of points I would like you to further ponder:

  • I understand that en route to victory one must make tactical alliances so as to join forces. But such alliances will only work if activists come to the table from a position of power. Any alliances built from a position of weakness ultimately leads to subordinate the interest of claim holders to those of minority groups that hold the power.  (Sergio Rodriguez G.) Synergy generates power; it makes us bigger than the sum of our parts! (United Edge)
  • Just joining the chorus of the established rhetoric does nothing to strengthen our activist voices. (David Legge)
  • Magnifying their collective voices is how claim holders assert their dignity. Key will therefore be the resonance activists’ proposals receive from the choir of claim holders, i.e., the sound-box in their communities.
  • Change happens slowly at first. People do not just cut off the king’s head. For years and even decades they gossip about him, imagine him naked and ridiculous, demote him from deity to fallible mortal (with a head, which can be cut). Beware: paying too much attention to the loud stuff disregarding focusing on where the incubation is brewing. Incubation is where radical ideas are born. (Gal Beckerman)
  • Activists ought to follow Confucius’ advice: “Say something and I will forget it; teach me something and I will remember it; make me participate in something and I will learn”.
  • When, as activists, we advocate for HR, we are free to disobey the authorities without consequence. Our ancestors seem to have assumed this freedom, but we have completely forgotten it. (Giulio Ongaro)
  • But this freedom does not mean irresponsibility. Human rights activists must put truth above lies, courage above conformity. (Vaclav Havel, Redevelopment)
  • As HR activists, we further have no right to overturn people’s lives replacing it with a theoretical concept. We cannot impose everything that is in our mind since we risk ending up not improving claim holders’ lives, but manipulating them. [I recommend adaptability, humility, respect for human rights standards, for life, respect for its diversity, its unpredictability, its mystery. The purpose of our mission is not to force on the people our private utopias that not even we have the capacity to carry out at present]. (Vaclav Havel, from his play Redevelopment)

Bottom line

4. Those of us activists who will have to find viable post-pandemic and post-war HR solutions will be like the guests arriving at the end of a party –we will only be able to wash the dirty dishes. We will see that countries rendered poor are up to their necks in debt, in good part because countries rendered rich have doled out tens of billions of dollars in a non-productive (war mongering) way. That is why we should not wait until 2023. From right now on, it is imperative to monitor what kind of decisions are being made today by political leaders and to oppose those decisions that increase the dirty dishes. (Yuval Harari)

5. Lights, camera, activism…! (Open Global Rights)

Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City

Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com

All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com 

Postscript/Marginalia

-Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. (falsely attributed to the composer Gustav Mahler)

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