Fight Hate With Rights
26 November 2017
I wanted to alert you to a campaign RightsInfo has been running called #FightHateWithRights.
It’s about fighting the rise of extremism by standing up for human rights. Because social breakdown and even genocide don’t happen overnight – they are the result of the steady denial of rights over months or years. By protecting human rights, we also protect against the small cuts to liberty which can lead to far worse.
You can see all of the videos and resources here.
I have posted some of the key video content below the break, including a film featuring three genocide survivors spanning 70 years, a film featuring Professor Philippe Sands and a short video where I sum up the points of the campaign.
The main film:
Philippe Sands
The message
You can fight for human rights causes around the globe by signing petitions and letters! http://www.activistonthego.net/human-rights
I haven’t found the UK state’s courts in the UK and the ECtHR to be sincere about defending individuals’ Convention rights from assaults upon them on the part of the UK. I haven’t found the nominally liberal media remotely interested in reporting unsuccessful litigation to remedy human rights breaches, or to criticise the judiciary for failing the common man. Not even RightsInfo, which is a small-scale news source run by lawyers I believe. I haven’t found the main political parties interested in what is happening on the ground either.
Hitler came to power to some extent because he appeared to be heeding the cries of the poor for justice, which the decadent, bourgeois political class weren’t heeding. Many a tyrant is sucked into power by the power vacuum left when a regime of self-interested hypocrites is deflated. The more the hypocrites try to entrench their own privilege, suppressing and name-calling any new political movements, the more difficult they make it for any good guys outside the main parties to displace them, and the more horrid and dishonest become the only people who might be capable of getting rid of them, taking whole nations out of the frying pan and into the fire in the process.
Likewise, one might say, Robert Mugabe came to power, because Ian Smith made the African fight to get rid of his regime, bringing to the fore not democrats, who could not resist the UDI regime, but warriors, who do not often make good peacetime politicians.
Today’s political class mainly pay empty lip service to human rights. Whenever the common man tries to enforce his own human rights against the state, in our courts or in Strasbourg, he soon discovers this. Sadly, a few of those thus disillusioned may join “extremist” groups, i.e. not main political parties. Later, historians will analyse what went wrong, as they always do. They will again blame in part those whom the latest nasties overthrew, for the rise of those nasties in the first place, because those whom the nasties overthrew had left the underclass with no other hope than the false hope of the hate-mongering demagogues who swept to power because, at the time, anything seemed better, to enough disillusioned simple folk, than the corrupt status quo.
Those who say that history tends to repeat itself, have a point.
http://JohnAllman.UK
Reblogged this on Standing up for Rights and commented:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.