Under the guise of highlighting alleged “human rights” abuses in the United States, a new report set to be released soon by the Chinese Communist Party aims to completely redefine the very concept of rights.
This is extremely dangerous.
Of course, the irony of having the most murderous dictatorship in all of human history accuse the freest nation in human history of being a serial human rights abuser is off the charts. Literally, no government in world history has slaughtered as many people as the CCP over its decades in power. And no government in human history has protected key freedoms of as many people as the American experiment.
Naturally, the upcoming CCP report, expected to be released shortly after the U.S. government releases its own human rights report on China, has been almost universally ridiculed or ignored in the West. But it is no laughing matter. Ignore the hypocrisy for now, if you must. But there is a very real threat to genuine human rights buried in the report that goes far beyond semantics.
The real problem is global. Unfortunately, the CCP-backed campaign to replace in people’s minds real rights with government-granted privileges has allies in high places around the world—and even in America, at some of the nation’s most prestigious “educational” institutions and in the halls of government. At the forefront are the CCP’s allies around the world and its operatives in the United Nations.
Phony Concerns
At the top of the CCP’s list of supposed “human rights” concerns about the United States last year was the government’s alleged failure to sufficiently protect people from the CCP virus unleashed on the world by the CCP itself. Yes, seriously.Citing the high death toll from the pandemic and America’s advanced medical technology, the regime argued that this proved the U.S. government was “incompetent” and was failing in its duty to protect the alleged “human right” to “health.”
“In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc around the world, posing a major threat to human security,” says a preview of the 15,000-Chinese-character report offered by CCP propaganda organs. “It went out of control in the United States following the government’s reckless response.”
Of course, the CCP is very familiar with the U.S. Constitution, whereby people and states retain most powers for themselves while granting a few limited authorities to their agent known as the federal government. And under that Constitution, as the CCP knows very well, the federal government doesn’t have totalitarian CCP-style powers to fight the virus with tyranny.
Instead, the Constitution protects God-given rights from infringement by the federal government by limiting federal power.
Ironically, though, even the states that used the most vicious and draconian policies to “fight” the CCP virus—think California and New York, among others—had similar or worse outcomes than states such as Florida and South Dakota that didn’t weaponize the virus against individual freedoms.
In other words, protecting real rights is perfectly compatible—and almost always associated with—better health and economic outcomes.
In its upcoming report, pre-release previews show that the CCP also faulted the Trump administration for “bullying international organizations” and “promoting isolation and unilateralism” in the face of the pandemic. That’s a reference to President Donald Trump’s decision to stop funding and supporting the CCP-backed leader of the disgraced World Health Organization (WHO), which helped Beijing peddle its lies about the CCP virus.
How ending funding for a CCP mouthpiece in a United Nations bureaucracy was a violation of human rights isn’t immediately clear.
Another alleged human rights abuse in the United States: People of African heritage were more likely to be killed by police than those of European heritage. The report ignored the obvious explanations well known to researchers—black Americans are far more likely to be involved in the criminal justice system, in part due to the larger number of fatherless homes—and presented the data point without context as proof of widespread racism among U.S. law enforcement.
Real Violations by CCP
Meanwhile, the irony of having the CCP suggest that American government officials are “racist” in their alleged violations of human rights defies belief. Just this month, the Montreal-based Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights and the D.C.-based Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy concluded that the CCP is currently engaged in a genocide against the minority Uyghur ethnic group in Western China.The Dutch Parliament also passed a motion last month finding that the treatment of the Uyghur minority in China constitutes a “genocide.”
Now that is real racism and a real human-rights violation!
In discussing the report, “research fellow” Lu Xiang at the CCP’s Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, widely cited in CCP media, even compared Western concerns about the ongoing Uyghur genocide in western China to lies by National Socialist (Nazi) Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels.
With no apparent sense of irony, the upcoming CCP report goes on to cite “money in politics” as a supposed human rights violation.
Of course, in free countries, citizens are allowed to participate in the political process by supporting candidates or issues of their choice, whether that be with their money, their time, their media outlets, or their speech.
The real violation of real rights, obviously, is that the CCP regime does not allow its victims to participate in politics or govern themselves by choosing their own leaders.
Now that is a real human rights violation.
At a media briefing on the subject, a spokesman for the CCP’s foreign ministry blasted America’s record.
“We hope the U.S. will abandon double standards, and face up to serious human rights issues such as racism and violent law enforcement, and take concrete measures to protect human rights,” the spokesman said.
Like any successful propaganda effort, the CCP attack on America’s “human rights” situation does contain some elements of truth.
In fact, during the pandemic, governors, and mayors—especially Democrats in blue states—ruthlessly trampled on the constitutionally guaranteed human rights of citizens. But that isn’t what the CCP report means.
In previous years, the CCP also made its agenda clear in its “reports” on alleged “human rights” violations in the United States.
For example, a similar report released in 2012 pointed to “violations such as the view that the U.S. government exercises lax firearm possession control, causing rampant gun ownership.”
Despite numerous polls showing overwhelming public support for the constitutionally guaranteed right to keep and bear arms, the CCP report even argued that U.S. authorities were ignoring the “complaints of the U.S. people” and “multiple protests” supposedly demanding that “the government strictly control the private possession of arms.”
This year, the CCP report is again expected to demonize the Second Amendment for supposedly producing “gun violence.”
The argument, though, is absurd—especially as the United States has a lower murder rate than most of the world, and gun-rights have always been regarded in America as the ultimate protection for all other rights, including those that the CCP refuses to acknowledge even exist.
Switzerland, with some of the highest gun-ownership rates on Earth, also has among the lowest murder rates. Meanwhile, nations such as Venezuela and Mexico, where private gun ownership has long been virtually illegal, have among the highest murder and crime rates on the planet.
The Threat: Real Rights Versus Fake Rights
The real danger of the CCP report isn’t that Americans will suddenly read the document and revolt against their supposedly oppressive government. Nor is there a serious risk that the CCP’s hypocrisy would be taken seriously, though the regime’s talking points and the “woke” mob’s ramblings are increasingly difficult to differentiate.Rather, the danger is that the CCP screed is just the tip of the iceberg in a global campaign to completely redefine the very concept of rights—not as God-given, but as government-granted.
Indeed, the regime in communist China and its totalitarian allies around the world use “human rights” as a pretext to control the lives and restrict the liberties of their victims.
For instance, under the guise of a “human right” to a government-controlled education, tyrants indoctrinate children with lies and prohibit alternatives.
Under the guise of a “human right” to government-provided “health care,” tyrants hijack control of medical systems and restrict individual freedom, making their victims completely dependent on their abusers.
Under the guise of a “human right” to a “decent standard of living,” tyrants seize control of whole economies—and the people who make up the economy.
These are all known as “positive rights,” and they all purport to require that the government do something to you or for you at the expense of others that you couldn’t ethically do on your own.
As an example, you could never go rob your neighbor and claim you needed his money for your college or your health care. But if you have a “positive right” to college or health care, government can be authorized to go take your neighbor’s wealth to spend on you.
Importantly, because they depend on government, all of these “positive rights” can also be revoked by government on a whim, using flimsy pretexts.
Obviously, this is an extremely dangerous view of “human rights.”
By contrast, the traditional American and Christian concept of rights rooted in the Bible and Western traditions couldn’t be more different.
Perhaps the most significant difference is that these genuine human rights are unalienable. Think freedom of speech, freedom to own property, the right to worship God according to the dictates of one’s conscience, the right to protect one’s family and property, and so on.
These are all “negative” rights, in that they entail freedom from abuses, coercion, and more. Just like you can protect your property from a robber, you can delegate authority to a sheriff to help you protect your property.
As America’s Founding Fathers declared in the Declaration of Independence, individuals are “endowed by their Creator” with these “unalienable rights.” That means these rights exist independent of government.
Because government didn’t and doesn’t grant these rights, it has no legitimate authority to revoke or restrict them.
Instead, the government’s role is limited to the protection of these God-given rights from infringement. The Declaration of Independence even argues that this is the very reason governments are instituted.
“Among the natural rights of the Colonists are these: First, a right to life; Secondly, to liberty; Thirdly, to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can,” he wrote.
He also argued that the “Rights of the Colonists as Christians” could be “best understood by reading and carefully studying the institutes of the great Law Giver and Head of the Christian Church, which are to be found clearly written and promulgated in the New Testament.”
Unfortunately, the U.N. and many of its member governments (and even a growing segment of influential voices in America) come down firmly on the side of the CCP’s perverse view of rights, rather than the American and Christian view.
The U.N. view is extremely dangerous, and the global body frequently echoes CCP-style talking points about free speech or gun rights in America supposedly being a “violation” of human rights.
But this isn’t new. In Article 29 of the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the global body even claims that “these rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.”
That would be the equivalent of having a First Amendment that prohibited using one’s free speech or freedom of assembly or right to petition in order to criticize Congress. It is self-evidently absurd.
As if to highlight the absurdity of its own position, on Feb. 22, the U.N. “Human Rights Council” gave a platform to CCP State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, marking the first time that a CCP leader addressed the increasingly discredited U.N. body. Incredibly, the regime was elected to serve another term on the disgraced U.N. body last year.
“Increasing people’s sense of gains, happiness and security is the fundamental pursuit of human rights as well as the ultimate goal of national governance,” Wang declared at the 46th session of the U.N. body, claiming to support “peace, development, equity, justice, democracy and freedom.”
Wang, who claimed the CCP operates “the most representative democracy,” also suggested that a slight increase in the Chinese people’s standard of living in recent years is evidence of the regime’s devotion to human rights.
What Next?
If the effort to redefine rights is successful—and it’s already making great progress—true human rights could be lost forever, written out of the history books.Such a development would leave the people of the world at the mercy of oftentimes brutal governments subscribing to the CCP-backed grotesque perversion of rights that literally flips the concept on its head.
Instead of having a duty to protect the God-given, unalienable rights of the individual, tyrants everywhere would be empowered to oppress and abuse their victims in the name of “human rights.”
Increasingly, like the CCP, governments and international outfits are already peddling the notion that gun rights and self-defense aren’t rights, but violations of rights. Similarly, even free speech is now being painted as a violation of people’s supposed “human right” not to be offended.
With help from corrupted education systems and dictator-dominated international organizations, a major transformation is already happening around the world and even in America—especially in the minds of younger generations.
Millions of children now are being conditioned to demand their supposed “right” to tax-funded college, health care, abortion, and transgender surgeries, while, at the same time, demanding censorship and draconian curbs on religious liberty in the name of “human rights.”
This is a recipe for catastrophe. If it continues, the next generation of Americans may look at the CCP’s silly reports and actually take them seriously.
It’s time to fight back on the battlefield that matters: the essence and definition of human rights. The genocidal CCP must not be allowed to win.
The surest way to do that is by Americans returning to a true understanding of rights—God-given and unalienable—as enumerated in the nation’s founding documents.
