Human Rights Day and its discourse

Today is Human Rights Day, and today the state of the world in terms of human rights is deplorable. Today in different countries of the world different organizations, human rights organizations, will of course draw attention to the gains in human rights too, and will set out the balance sheet of the current situation and its deficiencies.

Right next to us in Syria, the savagery produced by occupying states or terrorist organizations on top of state terror that has been continuing for more than five years renders all humanity's gains void. The human rights report card of a world with Syria in it could not in any respect receive a passing grade.

The murders, massacres and tortures committed for more than 5 years by the state, the intervening countries and the terrorist organizations, each of which has patron states, have left no trustworthy branch to hold on to in the name of human dignity.

The reason today is called Human Rights Day is that exactly 68 years ago, on 10 December, the 30-article Universal Declaration of Human Rights prepared by the UN Commission on Human Rights was proclaimed at the General Assembly meeting in Paris.

As is known, the thinking that led to this declaration emerged as a result of the conditions after the Second World War.

It proceeds in the light of the causes and conditions that led to the war and from the idea of developing a lasting measure against those conditions. When one looks at the ideas expressed in this declaration, which the victorious states took the lead in so that the human rights violations, genocides, tortures and discriminations that took place under war conditions and shamed humanity would not be experienced again,

there is nothing to object to, nothing unpleasant to the ear.

That everyone may enjoy all the rights and all the freedoms proclaimed in the declaration without distinction of race, color, sex, language, religion, political or any other belief, national or social origin, wealth or poverty, birth or any other distinction, etc. T

he problem is that these rights were not being voiced for the first time, and the gravest massacres, the most massive genocides in the world took place in the shadow of these declarations.

True, when writing history Westerners write their own works as the history into which the world's mainstream flows, and they point to England's

Magna Carta

of the 12th century as a starting text for human rights.

As if humanity had not known rights and law before.

That even while speaking of human rights and law they thus trample the greatest law, nobody knows.

They do not even see the declaration of human rights that the Prophet of Islam set forth and actually put into practice as early as the year 631 with the

Farewell Sermon.

By contrast they cite as the basic reference texts for human rights the

American Declaration of Independence,

published in 1776 and emerging against the human rights violated by British occupation, and later the

Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,

proclaimed after the French Revolution.

All these texts refer to the equality of all people and to everyone's having, from birth, the right to life, the right to equal treatment before the law, and the right to property and liberty. Of course nobody can say that these texts later played no role in people's holding certain rights in society. It cannot be denied that, thanks to these texts, a certain level of law at least was established and sustained.

But we know that even in the world where these texts and the discourses based on them prevailed, they could not prevent racism, wars of religion, discrimination, massacres and mass human rights violations.

In Europe wars of religion and the massacres based on them were carried out while the Magna Carta document was there.

The massacres, tortures and oppressions that the English, who followed the Magna Carta as a maxim, inflicted on the peoples of the lands they colonized all over the world have an entirely separate history.

If we recalled only the practices they undertook in India to break the back of local production in order to sell their own cloth, nobody would even want to hear the rest. The fingers of the local Indian women producers were cut off by the English so that they could not produce those beautiful fabrics that competed with English cloth.

When they put their signature on this savagery, the Magna Carta was there, and so was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

Later, when the Germans carried out religious and ethnic genocide against the Jews and the Gypsies, these texts were again there, continuing to light their way, and on top of that all the humanist texts of German Enlightenment idealism,

with its Kant, its Kierkegaard, its Goethe, its Schopenhauer, its Feuerbach, its Hegel, its Dilthey,

continued to nourish German culture.

After the Second World War, Europe, which put great emphasis on human rights discourse so that the same things would not be experienced again in the world, while establishing a state for the Jews it had persecuted as atonement for its own great sin, both got the chance to push the racism within itself under the rug, and made other children of humanity, the Palestinians, pay this atonement instead of paying it itself. At the time the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was published, the state of Israel too was being founded, by those who published this very declaration and under their supervision, at the price of the exile, massacre and dispossession and homelessness of the Palestinian people.

There is likewise no war, massacre or systematic human rights violation in the world in which those who pioneered this declaration are not involved.

Against these wars and massacres it has produced, and does not produce, any hope or remedy to soothe the pain of the masses who believed in the Declaration of Human Rights even for a moment.

Today the human rights discourse remains merely a pretext to which dominant states resort to keep some countries under pressure and control, and since it has been shown to be so by countless examples, it has no credibility left.

That is why the world urgently and acutely needs a new contract. For this I think the rightful need to be strong, because the rights produced by today's powerful serve only to consolidate their own power further by wheeling and dealing.