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October 15, 2009

The Economist's James Miles Misses It on Human Rights

Miles: Need to fix “climate change can’t be interrupted by human rights”

 

 

On Monday, the China correspondent for The Economist, James Miles, took some time to talk by phone with Jim Falk, President of the Dallas-Ft. Worth World Affairs Council (of which I am a member). Those of us who are members were invited to take part by listening to the streaming interview on our computers and were also invited to send in questions through a chat-room-like window.

 

During the hour-long interview, topics ranged from anthropogenic climate change, which received the bulk of the time allotted, the economy – a close second –and human rights, which was relegated to the status of also-ran inglorious-mention status.

 

The fact that human rights has become an all-but forgotten virtue – nevertheless one most in need of immediate action – is naturally not an exclusive fault of Mr. Miles, though his statements during the interview were probably among the most egregious and reprehensible I’ve heard so far.

 

The United Nations has become infamous over the past decade about moving in the same direction as Mr. Miles, who should know better. It has spent countless more man hours and millions more in dollars chasing the highly controversial and increasingly repudiated meme of man-made global warming while refusing time and again to address the horrific plight of people around the world suffering unspeakably at the direct hand of other people.

 

I have also been a witness to this willful ignorance. During a visit to a United Nations Association event at the UN in April of 2008, where human rights was given sickeningly short shrift in favor of radical environmentalism and engaging in partisan and unproductive bashing of the Bush administration.  In her publication, “A Guilt Beyond Crime”,  Julia Pettengill discusses at length not only the consequences of ignoring human rights violations and, in particular, genocide, she also cites numerous experts from both sides of the political isle who point out both lost and future opportunities to prevent and eliminate it.1 You would think with all of her work and the work of countless other NGOs and people around the world that the UN and the internationalist community (of which I include myself) would do something to make it a top priority.

 

This remains far from being the case. In point of fact, beyond the expected United Nations Security Council resistance one expects to find from self-serving human rights violators Russia and China, the real reason nothing has heretofore been adequately done is that those with a conscience have done very little. And this takes us back to Mr. Miles, who during his interview not only downplayed the importance of human rights around the world and in China specifically, his chilling quotes left no question about the disregard he seems to hold for them altogether.

 

During the interview, not only did Mr. Miles state that “China’s authoritarianism helps America and the world…”, a point that taken alone could be discussed, along with its moral implications and a talk about the need for America to return to its moral roots. But a more worrisome, revealing juxtaposition came to fore that many human rights campaigners suspected in general existed among some global warming advocates. It was given voice in the interview with Jim Falk when Mr. Miles stated that we can’t let “climate change…be interrupted by human rights”. Interrupted? I am sure I was not the only one picking himself up off the floor after this horrendous statement.

 

So then, where exactly does this take us?  It is of course not the first time someone has put human rights behind some “greater” momentary cause. Indeed, if we look back through the history of the past century this is precisely how Mao Tse Tung managed to exterminate the better part of a hundred million people. 2 The cause of Communist control of China was more important than a “few people” here or there.  This rationale was also used by countless others during the 20th Century, including Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, the Imperial Japanese, and many of the leaders of the Hutus in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide that killed several hundred thousand men, women, and children with axes, guns, fire, and machetes, the horrors of which are noted in Philip Gourevitch’s tragic bestselling account. 3

 

But it also gives the excuse China needs today to continue abusing its people with impunity, as well as exporting that abuse around the world, as they have in Africa, and most tragically, in the Sudan. If, in the Sudan, the poster-child for the tragic consequences of ongoing genocide where China continues to export arms, support the regime, and block Security Council and other resolutions and action aimed at stopping that genocide, little or no attention is being paid to human rights, then certainly what we might conceive of as less egregious examples of abuse will go ignored altogether. And the current international mindset is solely to blame.

 

Miles goes on to admit that he believes “authoritarianism is not a stable [system]”, but if that is the case – and we know that it is – then what other horrors are Mr. Miles and so many of his countless other blind followers of climate change reactionism at all costs await a people currently suffering unimaginable indignities and injustices in the clutches of a brutal, barbaric, and illegitimate regime?

 

While I can understand the temptation Mr. Miles must face to watch his words about China in order to keep in its good graces (as Bill Gertz has noted and CNN has learned, China tends to translate its displeasure over unfavorable reporting into restricted access)4, there still exists the moral obligation of every reporter – every human being – to remember what this is all about in the end: someone’s mother, someone’s daughter, father, son, uncle, lover, friend taken away in the dark of night by violent men, never to be seen again; organs harvested, torture, rape, forced confessions, dreams wiped from the face of the earth.

 

There needs to be a sea change in the international community without question. While being good stewards of our natural resources is fundamental, it loses all meaning if in so doing we trample asunder the child, the student, the everyman simply trying to live and with the freedom to make the best choices possible in the process. When one encounters such human rights flat-earthers one can’t help but wonder: when it comes to forgetting, how long is never?

 

 

 

 

 

1 Julia Pettengill is an Associate Fellow with the Henry Jackson Society, with whom I had the opportunity to work on occasion and who spoke at one of the events Henry Jackson Society hosted during my internship there.

 

2  Courtois, Stéphane. (1997). The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press (English).

 

3  Gourevitch, Philip. (1998). We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families. New York: Picador.

 

4 Gertz, Bill. (2000). The China Threat: How the People's Republic Targets America. Washington, D.C.: Regnery.

Posted by Martin at October 15, 2009 09:59 PM

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