Even though the "good guys," very properly and universally, denounce the United Nations for the evil that it is, many of the same folk buy into the same UN's UDHR as though it is some kind of moral good.  They seem unaware of the contradiction.  [For a fuller discussion, see Do Not Support the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Parts One and Two).]

The problem arises from fundamental mistakes repeated over and over.  One example comes from what some state as the rationale for their support of the UDHR:  (1) It is the best thing we have today, even if flawed; and, (2) most people are familiar with the UDHR.  Implied is (3), there is nothing else available.  Thus, many of the "good guys" see the UDHR as really benign.

First off, the UDHR is NOT the "best thing" available on the subject--BECAUSE of its flaws.  The second and third examples group into one rejoinder coming under the correct definition and meaning of "rights," as articulated by our Founders and the thinkers of the Enlightenment.  Also, those original formulations are still the best thing around. Today's world of lousy education, anti-education, and the ignoring of rational principles allow the UDHR to skate along under the radar.

"Rights" must be correctly used and not be allowed contamination from bogus, or counterfeit, "rights" which are so common today. [See What Is a "Right" Anyway?] So, notions like "human rights" trip off the tongues and keyboards of really good people, who seem oblivious to how such "innocent seeming" buzz-words are being used to substitute collectivized "rights" for the real ones. "Human rights" is to "rights" as "social justice" is to "justice," and to get a sense of the darkness of "human rights," recall the history and behavior of one of their foremost advocates and true believers, Jimmy Carter.

Our Founders and the scholars of the Enlightenment referred to rights as the "Rights of Man."  By that, they meant the fundamental rights all humans have as a result of their birth and existence.  At that time, there were none of the contemporary bogus rights, just the "divine right of kings." 

There are only four fundamental rights:  Life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. 

Beyond the fundamental rights, there are derived rights and, farther away yet, granted rights. Derived rights come from the four fundamental rights, and the fullest example of these are the Bill of Rights amending the original Constitution of the United States of America.  For example, the Second Amendment derives from the rights to life and property.  Granted rights cover all the rest including such items as legal deeds, etc.  Proper derived and granted rights will not violate fundamental rights.

The critical feature of true rights is that they are actions, specifically freedoms of action.  Such freedoms come solely from the requirements of human nature for every person to survive and to flourish. To live, one has the most fundamental right, the right to life.  This right requires being free to do what is required to support one's life.  "Being free" is the next fundamental right, the right to liberty.  The right to property recognizes that people to live must acquire, use, and dispose of all sorts of material items in order to feed, clothe, shelter themselves, as well as  to flourish. Finally, to sustain his soul (his consciousness) as his purpose for living, a person needs the freedom of action to pursue happiness.  Mother Nature sets these terms for surviving and thriving, and these necessitate the freedoms of action.

Rights impose only one requirement on each of us.  That requirement is for each of us not to violate the rights of any others of us.  The only way that anyone can violate the rights of anyone is to use physical force to seize someone's property, to curtain someone's liberty, or even to take someone's life.

Humans form governments and legally concentrate the use of force in those governments to protect these freedoms.  In turn, rights-based governments extend protection of rights to all of its citizens.  Here is where the UDHR does the "grand switcheroo" by inserting bogus rights in with the others:

Bogus rights want you and everyone else to think that rights are not actions but are material provisions.  Instead of rights to life, liberty, and property needed to support oneself, bogus rights declare that money, materiel, and services must be provided to some, if not all, as a governmental grant or source of rights.  Bogus rights offer "entitlements."  Someone or some institution, like a government, says that some, if not all citizens, are entitled to the money, materiel, and services needed for their support and thriving.  (This is the hidden meaning of "human rights.")

This switch is evil, and here is why. 

It is evil because it means that some humans must be tapped to supply other humans. In the less malignant governments, monies are taken from citizens through taxation, under threat of physical force (laws), for those monies to be "redistributed" to others.  You have no say-so over having your money taken or where and how it is used.  In more malignant states, everything is seized directly and given to fellow thugs, gangs, or groups.  By any "whitewashing" name, both are theft, and this is the core truth to all claims of "rights" as entitlements.

Here are the bogus rights of the UDHR, by paragraph number and content:

• 22:  “right to social security’, “economic, social and cultural rights”
• 23:  “protection against unemployment; everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.”
• 24:  “periodic holidays with pay”
• 25:  “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”
• 26:  “right to education” and “Education shall be free.”  Education “shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.”

 
If you look at the entire UDHR, you will see that the UN smuggles in devastating bogus rights along with more or less correct rights [It is a poorly formulated and written document].  Similar to Gresham's Law, which states that bad money drives out good, bogus rights erode and eventually replace correct rights. The replacement begins subtly but moves inexorably if not challenged and rejected by good people.

True rights sanction actions but never bestow money, goods, and services.  A true right regarding education, for example, merely says that one must be free to take personal actions in order to obtain education, meaning to earn it.  Conversely, bogus rights tell people that education is due them by right.  The same applies to health care, food, housing, social security, and so on.  True rights sanction the freedoms of action to earn these, but bogus rights say you need not earn because you are "entitled" to them.

Think about this.  If monies, goods, and services must be provided, who does the providing? Where do they come from?  Only other people can provide any of these things, so the answer is that they come from other people.  If one is entitled to money, goods, and services by (bogus) right, what are the means providing the "entitlements"?  Other people "have," and the basic principle is to take under threat of the use of physical force to grant guarantees of redistributed money, goods, and services.  Those who resist soon discover the meaning of the threat of physical force.

Just try not paying your income taxes to see what this means.

 
The step from implied physical threat to actual is a very short one indeed, and governments and gangs jump to physical force very quickly.

So, here comes the government--supposed the legal repository of physical force to protect the rights of its citizens--guaranteeing bogus rights.  It takes under threat or seizure, and it redistributes using arbitrary, non-objective criteria.  True rights are forced to yield to bogus rights. Bad rights always drive out true rights.

The bogus rights of the UDHR undercut any good done by the more or less correct rights in all of the rest of the UDHR because they establish the principle that some people must be forced to provide, to support, and to labor for other people.  Note "Must be forced."  Another term for that is "slavery."  Whether it exists in fact is really a matter of time and circumstance because the enabling principle has already been established principle and only awaits use by those who crave power.

Incidentally, the Islamic declaration of human rights that so many anti-jihadists rail against as being so bad, compared to the UDHR, is actually no worse than the UDHR.  It differs from the UDHR only in some details, but not in fundamental principles.  In fact, the Islamic version is more consistent than the UDHR.  Both are rotten--for the same reasons.

My bottom line request to all anti-jihadist authors, websiters, and bloggers:  Never endorse the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations as long as it proclaims any deadly, contradictory, bogus "rights"--in the name of Life, Liberty, Property, and the Pursuit of Happiness.  None of us fighting this good fight can undercut our cause by emulating in any way the famous quip by Pogo:  We have met the enemy, and he is us.

If ideas are important in your war of ideas, you must go for them.  You must immerse yourself in them.  You must go as far as you can in "length, width, breadth, and time" searching for and employing ideas.  If you want to win, you use reason as the referee for all ideas to help you select the best.

An essential element of your commitment to ideas must be your dedication to knowing and defining your enemy.  You learn his history, how he operates today, and--above all--how he thinks, not just what he thinks.

For every bullet or bomb you use on this enemy, you must employ as many ideas as you can, in as many ways as you can.  You must extensively employ psy-ops and phil-ops.  Psy-ops undercut your enemy's will to fight.  Phil-ops work to replace the bad, dominant ideas of your enemy with yours.  You must use print, internet, radio, CDs and DVDs, television, music, movies, documentaries, books, newspapers, and every medium to antagonize your enemy's ideas.  You must "out-idea 'em" relentlessly--your goal is complete surrender a.s.a.p. of your enemy.

You also run all forms of fifth column operations against your enemy inside his territory.  You assist resistance movements that support your ends.

It all starts by you considering ideas to be supremely important.

The GWBush administration and GWBush do not fight the war of ideas with ideas--because: not a one of them believes ideas are of any importance.  GWB has not a clue what ideas are or how and why to use them.  Bush "idea-less-ness" is the supreme factor causing our failures in the Middle East.

Like all pragmatists, Bush is a "practical" man.  "Practical" people take action; they have little use for ideas, which they consider to be "pointy-headed."  Bush is an intellectual "Babbitt."  As a result, America is making a lethal downpayment on a century of abject misery.  Bush's pragmatism has turned our enemy into a tar baby.

Hugh Fitzgerald in a recent Jihad Watch/Dhimmi Watch addressed this administration's pitiful cerebration.  Here are some excerpts:

Fitzgerald: We need a return on this fantastic investment

What has been the effect on weakening the Camp of Islam and Jihad by spending this $880 billion in Iraq, and how else might it have been spent to weaken that Camp?

[...]

And suppose some of the rest had been spent on propaganda, broadcasting akin to Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, not to tell Muslims how much we like and respect them, nor how well-off Muslims are in our country, but rather to tell other Infidels about Jihad News around the globe (the kind of thing one finds gathered at Jihad Watch every day, but on a much larger scale, disseminated hither and yon).

 

Or what if the American government had also beamed into Muslim countries the voices of Wafa Sultan and Ali Sina and Ibn Warraq and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, both in English and whatever other languages they choose to broadcast in, about their own "spiritual journey" out of Islam? What if there were, on these satellite channels beamed into Dar al-Islam, discussions by scientists on what is necessary for the development of science -- the free and skeptical inquiry so discouraged, even punished, in Islam? What if there were figurative artists and sculptors and art historians discussing their art, and the lack of such means of expression in Islam? What if archaeologists came on to discuss how the civilizations of the Near East were rediscovered not by the Muslims, but by such Westerners as the Assyriologist Austen Henry Layard, and Leonard Woolley at Ur, and a succession of Egyptologists -- Champollion, Lepsius, Howard Carter -- from everywhere but Egypt itself?

But there is no propaganda campaign. There is no large-scale effort, or even a small-scale effort, or even the hint of serious imposition of taxes by the American government on gasoline and on oil, to do as much damage to OPEC, and to raise the price of oil and gasoline as much as possible, thereby to encourage conservation and new technologies and new sources of energy.

No.

There is only the idiotic squandering of men, money, and matériel, on and on and on, world without end, in Iraq, to bring "freedom" to "ordinary moms and dads" in the Muslim Middle East, and somehow to make of Iraq a unified state, instead of what we should be wanting, which is to create a permanent fault line between Shi'a and Sunni running north and west of Baghdad, a line that the Sunnis will never acquiesce in.

Oh, it's a policy all right. It's Boots on the Ground. It's soldiers, taught never to question but only to execute. It's destruction of morale, military (at least among the soldiers who can think for themselves, can take in the nature of Islam, and of Iraq, and of Iraqis) and civilian (ditto). It's not the way to combat, it does nothing to halt, the instruments of Jihad that really count: Da'wa, demographic conquest, and the money weapon.

It's a policy begun by those who did not know about Islam and about Iraq, and still refuse to learn. It makes no sense.

[...]

 

Could any future administration rival the incompetence of the Bush Administration?  If Bush were impeached, would Cheney be any better?  Who knows?  Either he keeps himself buttoned up or others do, so we are left only with incomplete presumptions, assumptions, and guesses about the quality of his thinking, although the clues suggest the buttoned down mind of the "neocon."

However, there are a number of Democrats who would easily step into Bushness without making a ripple:  Pelosi, Reid, and all of the declared aspirants for the 2008 presidency.    Don't look to the Republicans for any hope, either.

Had Bush highly respected ideas, the chances are that we would have had only bases in Afghanistan and no bin Laden, al Zawahiri, or Taliban long before now.  Sure, Afghanistan would still be a cesspool, but who cares?  Until they unshackle their minds from Islam, they will always be floaters in the cesspool.  Saddam might have been toppled, if need be.  We certainly would not have become an occupation force fighting in cement shoes.  Iran as an Islamic or any other kind of threat most certainly would be history, and Syria would be "convalescing."  The Saudis would have undergone epiphany and permanent change from having their diapers and fan belts scared off their heads.  And, best of all, the "war on terror" would have reduced jihadis from a major threat to a minor one.  We could have done all of this on our own, without any coalition and without any interference from entities such as the UN, EU, Russia, and China.

"Pie-in-the-sky" on my part?  No, and not any "Polyanna-ishness" either.  Why I so strongly believe this comes from my knowledge of our power.  We have all the strength needed to take all actions needed.  We have not the will at the "leadership" level because we completely disregard the power of ideas at that leadership level.  At that level, both civilian and military, agendas substitute for thinking.  Thus, they cripple our military with self-defeating rules of engagement.  Agenda thinking produces moral uncertainty and vice versa.

To paraphrase an old expression, "You can lead a "leader" to necessity, but you cannot make him think."  On the other hand, if he does start thinking, kiss the enemy "good-bye."