A daily reading of the news indicates that human rights is everywhere. How is it that a concept that is barely 80 years old embodied in a phrase that few had heard of 40 years ago has so broadly proliferated?
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations in 1948, and as Columbia University historian, Samuel Moyn, has documented, remained on the back burner of international concern until the mid-1970s. That changed when President Jimmy Carter announced that human rights was to be the centerpiece of American foreign policy.
But Carter did not initiate the launching of human rights into global consciousness. That took place a few years earlier with the convergence of two historic events. The first was the conclusion of the war in Vietnam.
The war in Vietnam was protracted agony, most of all for combatants and victims, but also for the American public at large. Fifty-eight thousand Americans were killed and more than a million Vietnamese, including multitudes of civilians, lost their lives. The war was the first brought into American living rooms in living color and in real time. Repeatedly Lyndon Johnson would address the American public with the refrain “the light is at the end of the tunnel,” an end which, as it seemed, would never arrive. Hundreds of American soldiers returned each week in body bags to Dover Air Force Base and were unloaded in view of the media. But perhaps most graphic was the use of napalm and other anti-personnel weapons, many of which found innocent civilians as their victims. Who of that era can forget the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of the emaciated Vietnamese girl screaming in agony as she ran down the street having just been struck by napalm.
From the beginning of the Cold War until Vietnam there was no independent human rights policy. Human rights was subsumed under the American policy of containing Soviet Communism. By working to contain Soviet expansion (and the War in Vietnam was the high water mark of containment policy) we were ipso facto protecting human rights.
Vietnam was so brutal and so destructive of human life that it was no longer possible to make the claim that containment of communism equated to human rights protection, and so an independent human right policy was aborning.
The second historic event which nurtured human rights was the surprising outcome of the Helsinki Accords. The so-called “Third Basket” of the USSR-US treaty detailed the West’s official recognition of Russia’s hegemony over Eastern Europe in exchange for a Russian pledge to respect human rights, including political rights.
The prevailing assumption was that the Soviets got the better of the deal in that no one expected the Soviet Union to live up to its end of the bargain. But what Helsinki did was to spur a homegrown dissident movement among the Soviet intelligentsia, Andrei Sakharov being the most prominent among them. The refuseniks used their government’s stated commitment to the provisions of Helsinki to organize for basic freedoms. It was an extraordinarily courageous move given the ruthlessness of the repression exacted by the Soviet State. But it joined Western sympathizers to those inside Russia around the common cause of human rights.
It was this initiative, together with the harsh realities of Vietnam, that brought human rights into the forefront of political activism. And since then the world has not been quite the same.
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joe chuman 