Hate to say that and sound like a tankie but the human rights framework does have a bias. The human rights court has the reputation to mainly work in Africa and overlook the violations done by the west. Which doesn’t annulate human rights violations by authoritarian states of cause but it’s good to be aware of this baggage
True. At the minimum, it’s a good way of agitation. Telling a stranger “housing is a human right” for example will pull more people into your movement than telling them “rights are a bourgeois concept and written law (as opposed to community mediation) will never be just but always reproduce existing hierarchies”
Absolutely true but the problem is that this just fundamentally isn’t a rebuttal to accusations of human rights abuses by countries tankies support. Those still happened and defending them is just as bad as nationalistic chuds who think the US or Israel did nothing wrong.
So at best it’s whataboutism, which might be at least slightly valid if leftists refused to criticize western powers. But, y’know, we are one of the main groups that does that…
I guess I wanted to dialectically both reject and embrace human rights and failed on the second part. One tankie argument I get is that it’s more revolutionary to criticize your own government than others but I never got why not both. While rejecting Russia’s war of aggression, I focus my activism on my government’s climate politics and racist police and foreign policy well knowing that Russia and the US are both worse in these regards.
Hate to say that and sound like a tankie but the human rights framework does have a bias. The human rights court has the reputation to mainly work in Africa and overlook the violations done by the west. Which doesn’t annulate human rights violations by authoritarian states of cause but it’s good to be aware of this baggage
When most leftists say ‘human rights’ though, they mean the general concept, not international institutions.
True. At the minimum, it’s a good way of agitation. Telling a stranger “housing is a human right” for example will pull more people into your movement than telling them “rights are a bourgeois concept and written law (as opposed to community mediation) will never be just but always reproduce existing hierarchies”
Absolutely true but the problem is that this just fundamentally isn’t a rebuttal to accusations of human rights abuses by countries tankies support. Those still happened and defending them is just as bad as nationalistic chuds who think the US or Israel did nothing wrong.
So at best it’s whataboutism, which might be at least slightly valid if leftists refused to criticize western powers. But, y’know, we are one of the main groups that does that…
I guess I wanted to dialectically both reject and embrace human rights and failed on the second part. One tankie argument I get is that it’s more revolutionary to criticize your own government than others but I never got why not both. While rejecting Russia’s war of aggression, I focus my activism on my government’s climate politics and racist police and foreign policy well knowing that Russia and the US are both worse in these regards.