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Celebrating 70 Years of "Human Rights"?

“ Above all, we note the fact that the so-called rights of man, the droits de l’homme as distinct from the droits du citoyen , are nothing but the rights of a member of civil society – i.e., the rights of egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community ... This fact becomes still more puzzling when we see that the political emancipators go so far as to reduce citizenship, and the political community , to a mere means for maintaining these so-called rights of man, that, therefore, the citoyen is declared to be the servant of egoistic homme , that the sphere in which man acts as a communal being is degraded to a level below the sphere in which he acts as a partial being, and that, finally, it is not man as citoyen , but man as bourgeois who is considered to be the essential and true man.” — K. M.
"Revolutionary" practices in Tunisia
I have just finished reading The Man Who Loved Dogs by Leonardo Padura, in its English translation. It is a great novel. I wish I could read it in Spanish.

Imperialist Apologia

From the archive An unabashed mobilisation of ancient colonial binaries, with Russian imperialism cast as the guardian of secular, modern, liberal civilization against a barbarian ISIS.  Its author has stated the upshot  of this perspective quite explicitly: “kill them all”. Or, to put it another way, exterminate the brutes. One is reminded of peak Hitchens, and of the traditions of imperialist apologia that he more or less deliberately evoked. And one is impressed by how deep this goes in parts of the left. Of course, Russian imperialism is not defending secular liberalism; that’s not how imperialism works. And its targets are demonstrably much broader than ISIS. Of course, the Assad dictatorship is much more steeped in blood than ISIS at this point. The colonial unconscious, even if it has no history, should be placed in historical context. In the aftermath of the Great Indian Rebellion in 1857, in which the British press reported (usually invented and embellished) atrociti
The ghosts of Christmas present Christmas is always a time of heightened emotion in Britain. The airwaves are filled with pop songs specially composed for the festive period and the same irritating tunes are endlessly looped in supermarkets and department stores. Short of total isolation there is no escape from the Christmas vortex. Families get together again and work colleagues get drunk at office parties as the country winds down until the New Year. It is a time for relaxation and excessive eating and drinking. However, as happiness is on the order of the day and enjoyment is in great demand such heightened expectations also produce their opposite, as the lonely, the excluded, and the poorest are confronted by the stark contrast between hype and reality.  At London’s busiest shopping intersection in Oxford Circus, Danny, a former Speakers’ Corner regular wields a megaphone. He stands self-confident and righteously appeals to the bustling mass of passers-by not to buy any Chris
Some good arguments, but "liberalism in theory" itself has to be questioned. "In theory, modern liberalism is a set of ideas about human freedom, markets, and representative government. In practice, or so it now seems to me, it has largely become a political affect, and a quintessentially conservative one at that: a set of reflexes common to those with a Panglossian faith in capitalist markets and the institutions that attempt to sustain them amid our flailing global order. In theory, it is an ideology of progress. In practice, it has become the secular theology of the status quo; the mechanism through which the gilded buccaneers of  Silicon Valley , Wall Street, and multinational capital rationalize hierarchy and exploitation while fostering resignation and polite deference among those they seek to rule." Liberalism in Theory and Practice