Human Rights: The White Man’s Burden

It’s just the new ‘white man’s burden’, except gayer, feminized, and even carried out by colored people

by Indrajit Samarajiva 

Every time I hear someone within White Empire talk about human rights I throw up a little. All the vaunted talk about human rights and democracy serves the same purpose as Christianity and civilization did. They’re cynically exploited to attack people in the South and take our shit.

Westerners will use human rights to say that Iraq needs to be attacked, Libya needs to be attacked, Syria needs its oil stolen, Cuba needs to be besieged, Iran needs to be besieged, and so and so on. It’s touching that white people’s tender sensibilities so perfectly coincide with their military industrial complex. It’s touching us in the private parts in the South. It’s wrong.

Victor Gillam, “The White Man’s Burden (Apologies to Rudyard Kipling),” originally published in Judge magazine, April 1, 1899. Source: The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. [ Credit: www.e-flux.com]

It’s not just the hypocrisy of counties with the largest prison populations (the US) and the world’s deadliest border (the EU) lecturing other people. It’s the air cover these lectures give to bombs. It’s the generally logic of collective punishment of entire populations for their own good. It’s the same old ‘white man’s burden’, now with imperial women and black people getting in on the fun.

All of the western news about human rights is just advertising for the theft and war. It makes western consumers think there’s some morality to a capital colonialism (that doesn’t really benefit them) just as the idea of Christendom made them think there was some morality to colonial joint-stock that didn’t really benefit them either. A western government is sincere about human rights in the same way that Nestle is sincere about human health. They’re fucking not. It’s all just advertising to make money. And the people that believe in it are suckers.

The fact is that the greatest violations of human rights are carried out in the name of human rights, just as the greatest violations of Christ were carried out in his names. The White Empire just changed capitals (to America) and state religions (to this secular bullshit) and carried on making carrion of the South.

‘Human rights abuser’ is just the latest word for ‘savage’, used to the same effect. To take our shit, and feel good about it. To feel like you’re doing us a favor. And you’re not. To the consumer population of the Empire it’s just more advertising, and to the corporations actually running the place, it’s more profit. Countries that dare protect their natural resources or try to industrialize can be conveniently demonized in the corporate press, couped by the dark web of NGOs and ‘democracy foundations’, and get bombs dropped on them via Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.

Bigger countries like China that actually exceed the White Empire in the human right to make a living and not die in a plague get demonized up to the point of starting a new Cold War. The Imperial press—fresh of demonizing Muslims for decades—suddenly feigns an interest in Chinese Muslims of all things, and people fucking believe it. They repeat it in cocktail conversations. They’re delusional and drunk. People that have probably had relatives die of COVID-19 are told that China’s COVID policy is a failure, despite saving millions of lives there and abroad.

Perhaps the advertising between news programs doesn’t work, but the news does. The news itself is owned by capital, advertising capital, and quite capably justifies all of capital’s predations against people western consumers have never heard of. They lap it up, ignoring capital’s ongoing predations against them, even in the face of coughing, dying, and obviously declining lifestyles.

‘Human rights’ is just a new shibboleth for White Supremacy. A way of feeling better than that the colored south. Hell, colored people from the South can even become White and start enforcing white supremacy themselves. An African-American is head of the US Defense Department, bombing Africa. What a win. An Indian-Brit is the unelected Prime Minister of the UK, representing his real homeland of Goldman Sachs. Whiteness has always been a fluid category (the Irish-origin Joe Biden wouldn’t have been considered white just over a century ago). The true purpose of the hierarchy is not the primacy of color but the primacy of capital. And that hierarchy continues, just with different advertising.

The truth about human rights in other places is shut the fuck up. After causing millions of deaths and tens of millions displaced in a fight for ‘western values’ in the Middle East, after sanctions (white word for sieges) impoverishing entire population for generations, and especially after the ongoing baggage of colonialism that makes these lecturing countries completely morally suspect in the first place, after this run-on sentence and more, well-meaning white people need to just shut the fuck up and sit the rest of this century out.

Whether you talk about human rights or democracy or civilization or Christ is immaterial. The actions of your governments are the same old theft, exploitation, and murder. All the reasons for these predations are meaningless. It’s new whine in old bottles. White (and aspiring whites) need to look at the actual actions done in the name of their ‘values’, the actual profits they deliver to a few elites, and stop getting distracted by the empty words of advertising.

If you want to coup, sanction, or overthrow any governments, start with your own, the greatest human rights violators in the world. If you have an opinion about human rights in some other country, understand that you’re not standing in solidarity with us. You’re a useful idiot for your corporate media and corporate media, just a patsy in the capital colonialism that goes on and on. So please spare us the lectures about human rights. It’s just the latest idea y’all use to dehumanize us and take our stuff, and feel good about yourself. You should feel like I feel. Sick to your stomachs.

Courtesy: indica.medium.com

Indrajit Samarajiva is a blogger and entrepreneur. He studied Cognitive Science at McGill University in Montreal, Canada and attended school in Columbus, Ohio, USA. He lives in Colombo, Sri Lanka.