The Weaponization of Human Rights

The Weaponization of Human Rights

India’s Capitalist “Democracy” Condemns Hundreds of Thousands of Impoverished Farmers to Suicide

China’s Communist “Dictatorship” Lifts 700 Million Chinese Citizens Out Of Poverty: Yet India is Adored by Western Pundits, While China is Demonized and Sanctioned

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“The first human right is the right to life.” Wang Yi, Minister of Foreign Affairs and State Counselor of the People’s Republic of China

Twelve years ago United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, Jomo Kwame Sunderam presented the 2008 “Economic and Social Survey of Asia and the Pacific,” at a press briefing, disclosing, on page 124 the staggering fact that:

“With limited resources, farmers depend on borrowed money to purchase seeds and other inputs to farm their land. A drop in their farm income could lead to indebtedness. In India, for example, the distress in rural areas is reflected in the high number of suicides by farmers: 86,922 during 2001-2005 (Government of India, 2007).”

There was very little – indeed virtually no press coverage or official investigation into this horrifying fact until 2014: in an article by Jonathan Kennedy entitled: “New evidence of suicide epidemic among India’s ‘marginalised’ farmers” he states:

“In 2010, 187,000 Indians killed themselves – one fifth of all global suicides….. Latest statistical research finds strong causal links between areas with the most suicides and areas where impoverished farmers are trying to grow crops that suffer from wild price fluctuations due to India’s relatively recent shift to free market economics.” “It is often forgotten that over 833 million people – almost 70% of the Indian population – still live in rural areas. A large proportion of these rural inhabitants have not benefited from the economic growth of the past twenty years. In fact, liberalization has brought about a crisis in the agricultural sector that has pushed many small-scale cash crops farmers into debt and in many cases to suicide.”

So much for the capitalist paradise Trump promises North Korea’s Socialist leader Kim Jung Un.

On February 22, 2014 Ellen Barry in the New York Times headlined: “After Farmers Commit Suicide, Debts Fall on Families in India,” with impoverished widows called ‘whores.” In June, 2014, AP headlined: “Raped, murdered girls reveal horrific risks for India’s poor”: UNICEF estimates that almost 594 million – nearly 50 percent of India’s population – defecates in the open, with the situation particularly acute in impoverished rural areas such as the Badaun district of Uttar Pradesh….The abduction, gang-rape and lynching of two teenage girls as they went to relieve themselves last Tuesday have added a terrifying new dimension to their daily ordeal.”

Finally, six years later, within the masquerade making possible the blaming of Covid-19 as the cause of despair, the New York Times deliberately confused the facts and stated: “Lockdown Sows Death Among India’s Farmers,” stating:

“India has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. In 2019, a total of 10,281 farmers and farm laborers died by suicide across the country, according to statistics from the National Crime Records Bureau. Taking one’s own life is still a crime in India, and experts have said for years that the actual numbers are far higher because most people fear the stigma of reporting. “

This sparse attention to the horrors suffered by destitute Indians, often ignored even at the United Nations specialized agencies, grossly contrasts with the overwhelming focus on ostensible human rights abuses of which China is accused by the Western media, and within the UN Security Council.

India’s current Prime Minister Modi hails from the political party implicated in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, the great leader of India’s independence from Great Britain. It seems clear that Modi is determined to return India to the Western hands that enslaved her until 1947. Modi is a very obedient servant in pleasing India’s former masters. A brief description of Britain’s genocidal policy toward colonial India is given in Susan Butler’s masterpiece: “Roosevelt and Stalin, Portrait of a Partnership”, (page 327, Knopf edition):

“British rule over India was every bit as brutal as Stalin’s rule over Russia….In November, 1941 Churchill instituted a scorched-earth policy in Bengal that came to be known as the Denial Policy. Soldiers were ordered to seize all the rice they could find: they stripped silos and storehouses, took seed crops…Soldiers also impounded all industrial and pleasure transport, all boats, including Bengali fishermen’s boats, all bicycles, including those used by the population to get to work. Their store of rice gone, denied transport to search for food, Bengalis began starving to death in ever increasing numbers….On October 16, 1942, a cyclone and tidal wave hit Bengal, ruining fields, houses, and the ability of the people to go on with their lives. In the face of this disaster, rice denial continued as British policy…As a result 13 percent of the population of Bengal died of starvation. Because Indians were not permitted to travel abroad and had no access to international telephone or telegraph, and their leaders were in jail, there was no way for Bengalis to make their plight known to the world….After the tidal wave, FDR replaced Johnson with William Phillips, State’s most competent diplomat, as his personal representative. He directed Phillips to push his philosophy ‘favoring freedom for all dependant peoples at the earliest possible date.’ By the time of Phillip’s arrival, late in 1942, Indians in great number, led by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, completely outraged by British high-handedness, had rebelled, and the viceroy had retaliated by killing ten thousand Indians and putting ninety thousand in jail. Twenty-five thousand members of the Congress Party, including Nehru and Gandhi, who were being held incommunicado, remained in jail. Phillip’s request to interview them was denied. Told Nehru, whom he despised, was fasting, Churchill commented ‘We had no objection to his fasting to death..He is a thoroughly evil force, hostile to us in every fiber’…Churchill claimed that the fighting was caused by bad blood between the Hindus and the Muslims, which was not true. In fact, as it had done in the past, British policy was to foster enmity between the two groups. ‘I am not at all attracted by the prospect of one united India, which will show us the door,’ he admitted.” (Most Palestinians and Israelis with whom I have spoken attribute the source of their ongoing disastrous conflict to Britain’s Machiavellian policy of ‘Divide and Conquer’) “Phillips minced no words in his report to FDR: ‘Many of the rural areas in Bengal are foodless, with the villagers wandering into the cities to die there of starvation. Deaths from starvation on the streets of Calcutta are reported to have become so numerous that prominent European members of the community have addressed open letters to the municipal authorities requesting that more adequate means be found for the removal of the corpses.’…John Colville, Churchill’s private secretary, recorded in his diary: ‘The PM said the Hindus were a foul race protected by their mere pullulation from the doom that is their due, and he wished, Bert Harris, marshal of the air force could send some of his surplus bombers to destroy them.’ Modern estimates are that at least 1 million and perhaps as many as 3 million died.”

According to Dr. Sashi Tharoor, former Under-Secretary General of the United Nations,

“Churchill has as much blood on his hands as Hitler does.”

Perhaps, because India is now following the orders of her former slaveholder, Western imperialism, the horrifying number of suicides of their destitute farmers, the degradation of the women (innumerable gang rapes and murders of impoverished girls) receive little attention in the corridors of power at the United Nations, subsumed under general toothless resolutions upholding the rights of women.

By contrast, China has become the whipping boy of the Western Media which, overlooking the horrific human rights abuses of millions of impoverished Indians, is shedding incessant, ad nauseum crocodile tears about the condition of the Uighurs in China, and the “innocent protesters” in Hong Kong.

Massive evidence produced by Bashir Ja’afari, Ambassador of Syria to the United Nations, documents the fact that each year Saudi Arabia finances the travel of 5,000 Uighurs from Xingjiang, China to the Mecca pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, during which they are indoctrinated in Islamic extremism and jihad. These Uighurs are hosted for a month longer than other pilgrims, until their expertise in jihad is completed, and are then returned to China for the purpose of fomenting separatist movements and committing terrorist actions, which the Chinese government is attempting to prevent and from which the Chinese government is attempting to protect its population. The re-education camps, which are the ostensibly “undemocratic” means by which China is attempting to reintegrate these “Manchurian candidates” into Chinese society are the current target of Western concern with ostensible “human rights abuses” in China, while the West, itself is diverting attention from the egregious domestic human rights abuses occurring with impunity within these arrogant Western countries themselves. (George Floyd’s public strangulation is only one example of this ongoing atrocity, which occurs massively, and with impunity).

China is a huge country, comprised of 56 nationalities. It is most probable, and possibly indisputable, that there are hostile foreign interests in fomenting the disintegration of China, a rising herculean socialist economic power, and reducing it to the tragic weakness, and destitution to which the fifteen countries formerly comprising the Soviet Union were condemned.

The Uighur jihadists certainly fulfill their mission, as early as 2013 there was a terrorist bombing in Beijing’s center, and subsequent violent extremist actions elsewhere in China. The sophisticated Chinese, benefiting from a 5,000 year old civilization, recognized the hostile geostrategic policies underlying this new scourge of terrorism in their country, and have now taken action to prevent this horrific epidemic from causing further chaotic explosions on their territory. The re-education camps in Xingjiang are defensive measures, and have not provoked epidemics of suicide, as have the free-market economic policies in capitalist India, “the world’s largest democracy.”

US President Trump’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly on September 22, 2020 was an undisguised and brazen declaration of overt hostility toward China, now the world’s largest challenge to the US claim to “greatness.” The constant attack against China, with fabrications of human rights abuses against the country that has lifted 700 million people out of poverty, (while the US is pushing millions of people into poverty, with its trillion dollar investment in nuclear weapons, while American people are in massively increasing numbers starving, homeless, and lacking the medical equipment and resources that would contain and control the spread of Covid -19) is so conspicuously hypocritical that it should be obvious to even a casual observer. It is a testament to the overpowering indoctrination of masses of people in the USA and Western Europe that the inability (or rigid refusal) to recognize this blatant obfuscation continues through this very minute.

Increasingly frustrated and volatile protesters against racism and inequality in the West are denigrated and battered – or murdered, while anti-communist protesters in Hong Kong are lionized. The Orwellian character of this brainwashing is tragic, and an illustration of what a brilliant psychiatrist in Cambridge, Massachusetts recently said to me: “I have concluded that the human species does not know how to take care of itself, and as a result, may not survive.”

Introducing the opening of the UN General Debate, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres emphasized: “We are moving in a very dangerous direction. Our world cannot afford a future where the two largest economies split the globe in a Great Fracture—each with its own trade and financial rules and internet and artificial intelligence capacities. Such a divide risks inevitably turning into a geostrategic and military divide. We must avoid this at all costs.”

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Carla Stea is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and Global Research’s Correspondent at UN headquarters, New York. 

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