02 Jun The humanity of human rights

I’ve been having difficulty writing lately, and so i have been reading like mad. But i have a bone – a big splintery bone – to pick. Until a few days ago, i was unable to really put a finger on it. Here goes:

Why, in all that is written on biopolitics, law, human rights, citizenship, ethics, and morality, does everyone refer back to the Holocaust? Let me be clear before i continue – the Holocaust was devastatingly horrific. It is absolutely and unequivocally a terrifyingly plain event of the depths of the potential madness of all people. And i certainly am not trying to play the Which-Genocide-Was-The-Worst game. But why is that the moment, the event, against which our current understanding of beingness is tied to?

Costas Douzinas, i think, put it best, when he says, “Humanity started committing crimes against itself in the 1930s when the Germans, this philosophical embodiment of humanity, acted atrociously against its own” (74: Human Rights and Empire: The political philosophy of cosmopolitanism). Crimes against humanity is born. But what of slave trade? What of forced labor in the Congo, of indentured servitude, of rape as a weapon of war? Of the mass displacements and genocides of indigenous populations? I have had more than one student who has insisted that these kinds of violence are “human nature.” Others, still, point to the fact that in “Africa – Africans were enslaving each other” – as though their gross generalization of an entire continent begins to undermine any critical thought about slavery (on the plus side, i have had fare more students who have insisted that the offending student was quite simply wrong).

I have struggled to work through it on my own terms even as i read others’ work. I recognize that it is so close – in time and place (space) – that it holds a strong place in the minds of western intellectuals. But as Hamad Dabashi asks, Can non-Europeans Think? Yes, yes, he says, the question of euro-centrism is blasé, but, “[t]he question is rather the manner in which non-European thinking can reach self-consciousness and evident universality, not at the cost of whatever European philosophers may think of themselves for the world at large, but for the purpose of offering alternative (complementary or contradictory) visions of reality more rooted in the lived experiences of people in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America – counties and climes once under the spell of the thing that calls itself “the West” but happily no more.” But in the exclusion of other horrific crimes against humanity (as they began to be called after WWII) — the kind of which the Euro-American sensibility does not see itself — in grappling with notions of ‘human rights’ there is, when moving across space, a disjuncture – one that posits the human rights bringer as saviour against the uncivilized / barbaric Other. Thus, Douzinas points out, “[t]hese were crimes by humanity but not against humanity. We shed tears for these out of superiority and charity rather than out of shared history, community, or humanity” (74). Today, the horrible and atrocious, the inhumane and the unacceptable acts are perpetrated by the Evil Other – both against Us and the Other.

In 2001, an Observer columnist stated:

UNICEF reported last week that 100,000 more children will die during this winter…if bombing of the country continues…One hundred thousand more deaths if bombing goes on. A greater good squandered if it ceases … The only truly humanitarian outcome for Afghanistan’s starving now requires the downfall of the Taliban government (qtd. in Chandler, 51: From Kosovo to Kabul).

In this calculous, 100,000 children of Afghanistan did not amount to humanity – they were outside of humanity, their lives not worth living but rather, of ending in the name of an imagined, appropriately liberal democratic future living. And as Katharyne Mitchell has pointed out, “…to truly understand … how contemporary genocide and camps remain legitimate within liberal democratic regimes, as well as to understand how sovereign states discriminate between an ‘authentic’ life and a life lacking political value, we need to theorize biological constructions of difference and their connections to citizenship” (2006, 98) – and i would argue, to human rights. “Wars,” Foucault told us in 1978, “are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital” (HoS, 137).

The naturalness of rights, the natural right, of the most basic of rights, is still, today, dependent on a pre-Holocaust definition of humanity, and so it is that i struggle to understand why the Holocaust, itself, stands in as a marker of a changed sensibility of humanity.