In the 1940s, ordinary young people threw themselves en masse onto beaches raked with machine gun fire, flew into clouds of flak, and died, to stop fascism and totalitarianism. They were imperfect, they committed their own crimes, some were there for hate, some abused and murdered. But most were ordinary people, from ordinary jobs in ordinary towns and suburbs, who agreed to fight so that others would be free to choose their own path.
They wanted to ensure that those who hate wouldn’t dominate.
Imperial powers—the British, French, and Portuguese—remained reluctant to relinquish control of other people’s resources, so yet more bloody wars ensued. The Soviet empire looked to expand, the United States supported coups, while persecutions, child labor, forced marriage, slavery, and apartheid continued. There was no utopia, but such actions were widely condemned. A light was shone on them. That protected many from the grasp of tyrants.
Some Institutional Rot
As large institutions mature, successful career paths within them inevitably require that the institution be put ahead of its “Cause.” A mindset develops within which success of the Cause requires the institution to appear above reproach—the institution comes to represent the Cause, not serve it. Thus the Roman Catholic Church would move pedophile priests rather than expose and condemn them. The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights would cover up the pedophilia of U.N. peacekeepers while exposing that of the Catholic Church. As if the Cause is a sect dependent on the perceived purity of its guru and leader.Protecting the organization in the name of protecting its cause is a trap we readily fall into. The urgency of saving others is subverted by the urgency of saving salaries (homes, holidays, pensions, and children’s education). Two generations after the beaches of Normandy and the rotting corpses in the Dachau train, the sense of urgency on human rights has dimmed. Not perhaps, in the villages of Yemen or in the mines in central Africa, but in the halls of Geneva and New York.
Helping the Helpers
The industry of international human rights pays well. Serving the poor and oppressed requires glossy brochures, meetings, travel, offices, and a growing workforce. This requires money. The traditional “oppressors,” the very wealthy who ran the mines and factories, or made the batteries, phones, and software, needed more positive reputations to grow their businesses.A partnership of mutual benefit has developed over the past two decades, blurring the dichotomy between wealthy oppressors and those whose oppression often enriched them. With public–private partnerships, human rights and humanitarianism became a fashion statement, allowing corporations and their celebrities to demonstrate that inequality can be veiled with empathy.
Celebrities and the super-wealthy standing together on the Davos stage or in photo-ops with struggling villagers have become a touchstone for saving the poor. Removed from the hype, they’re totally incongruous. Glitter and puddles with brown children providing social sanitation for the World Economic Forum and its adherents, somehow melding equity with institutional greed. Battling for peoples’ self-determination has become less marketable than siding with the corporate powers that have plans to fix them. Davos is a better stage than Dhaka.
Selling the Children of the Pandemic
Then came 2020 and two weeks to flatten the curve. The removal of the rights of billions through lockdowns, the removal of education, the enforcement of poverty and servanthood, and the elderly condemned to die alone and lonely. In parallel, the unprecedented increase in wealth of those gurus of Davos, extolling the cleansed cities as they pillaged the savings of those who had inhabited them.The Responsibility We Can’t Delegate to Others
So has the human rights and humanitarian industry always consisted of empty rhetoric? Was it always just a way to earn a living, reflecting the values of its funders? When funded by the taxes of ordinary people, displays of courage, care, and attentiveness were assets. When serving the East India Companies of 2022, the paternalistic rhetoric of colonialism serves better.But the people staffing these institutions also have changed—the principled may have fled and retired, while the weak and compliant have thrived. Perhaps the generation of college graduates that now staff these institutions have grown up in a culture of safety and affluence too divorced from the reality of human suffering, and see their work as part of a global game.
Whatever the reasons, these people can now see the harms that result from the neglect of principles they once espoused. There is a right and a wrong, and the human rights charters developed after World War II, however flawed, were a recognition of these. It isn’t that truth has changed. Rather, those who were entrusted by society to protect its values have abandoned them.
Perhaps the fundamentals of right and wrong should never have been codified, or delegated to specific institutions and the individuals they employ. Truth can’t be encompassed by words alone, nor can it be auctioned to the highest bidder. It should remain a burden on all of society, a price we all must pay, if we’re to keep human malevolence at bay. If we pay others to run up the beaches for us, they will eventually become mercenaries to the highest bidder.
