THE IRAQOMETER

Why people say they believe in human rights

If someone expresses a conventional belief but then performs actions, and by other beliefs he expresses, seems to refute that belief, we might doubt that he really holds the belief. For example, if a person of Christian upbringing agrees, in the company of his parents and some acquaintances from church, to the statement that sex outside of marriage is wrong, but has sex whenever he gets the chance, and often makes remarks about what he would like to do with some attractive girl walking down the street, we might assume that he does not really hold that belief, or at any rate does not hold it very strongly, but merely expresses it for appearance’s sake. Indeed, the attempt of an attractive woman to seduce him would be an opportune moment to see whether he really holds the belief or not.

In similar fashion, the war in Iraq, and the war in Afghanistan before it, have provided an opportune moment to see whether those who profess a belief in human rights are sincere or not.

We cannot credit anyone with a belief in human rights just because they express it, or sign onto international treaties upholding (but by no means ever enforcing) human rights, for the same reason that we cannot credit the young man with a belief in sexual abstinence merely because, in church-going company, he expressed it. The young man had a strong incentive to pay lip service to the belief, for if he disagreed with it, his dissent would not only be greeted with shock and indignation, but would be likely to cause his parents to keep a much stricter eye on him. In the same way, it is in no government’s interest to dissent from the prevailing belief in human rights, because this would not only earn widespread condemnation but, in a world dominated by a power—the United States—which has been firmly committed to human rights since its very founding and which was the principal agent in establishing human rights as a global norm, a rhetorical repudiation of human rights would alert the world to likely human rights violations, and would make the practical repudiation of human rights all the more difficult.

What we just deduced logically from people’s incentives, is confirmed by a glance at history. For fifty years, the United Nations Charter has been in place, with all the nations of the world as signatories. The preamble to the Charter states that “we the peoples of the united nations [are] determined… to reaffirm the faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women…” Among the signatories have been dozens of regimes that violated human rights on a massive and murderous scale, but none of them sent a polite note to the UN stating, “Dear UN, in view of the fact that it would be absurd to claim that we ‘reaffirm the faith in fundamental human rights’ when we violate these rights perpetually as a basic feature of our system of government, we hereby resign from the UN and forgo representation at all its bodies.” No, they pay expedient lip service.

In a somewhat different way, the same goes for the governments of continental Europe. Here human rights are much better respected internally. However, respect for human rights in most of continental Europe was imposed by American arms after World War II, and preserved by an American military dominance which persists, if in somewhat attenuated form, to this day. A European government that began to, say, jail people who voted for the opposition on a large scale, would certain provoke the wrath of local liberty-lovers, but from a realpolitik point of view it is very important that this opposition would be sure to enjoy American support. So even professions of support for human rights from our European allies cannot be entirely trusted.

Even the US itself is subject to suspicion. It is true that US power established human rights as an international norm, and the UN Charter was conceived as an imitation of the Bill of Rights, but today human rights have gained a normative force apart from US power, so that it is in the US’s interest to be seen as promoting human rights even if Americans (for the sake of argument) cared little about them per se. The truth is, Americans have a very strong tradition of rights, rooted not only in laws but in social values, and nowhere are rights more secure, but there are two problems: first, the American power elite is often caught in a game of means and ends, and in the pursuit of a large pro-human-rights objective, such as the defeat of communism, commits many smaller sins against human rights; second, the people are so accustomed to enjoying rights that they may take them for granted, which dulls both their passion and their understanding of human rights’ value.

What prompts hypocrisy on the part of governments may also prompt hypocrisy on the part of the press, civil society and so forth. If Le Monde, for example, were to state that “we oppose the war in Iraq because we consider the human rights of the Iraqi people relatively unimportant, much less so than humiliating those arrogant, ugly Americans,” they would simply be handing excellent propaganda to their opponents. For all these reasons, we should not be much cheered by the fact that rhetorical support for human rights is nearly universal, because history and logic suggest that many or most of these professions are insincere.

In addition to hypocrisy, there may be simple ignorance. Human rights are by no means as easy to understand as sexual abstinence. When the profession of a certain doctrine becomes conventional and obligatory, people may state it without understanding it. As an illustration of the complexity of human rights, earlier this year several anti-war actors were forbidden to express their views on the Oscars. Some opponents of the war complained, and it fuelled the misguided claims of “repression” in the US. Now, those anti-war actors had freedom of speech. They could express their opposition to the war, and did so many times, on TV, at demonstrations, in print, and so on. They did so without any fear of prosecution or imprisonment—and it is precisely in this lack of fear that that rare and precious entity, liberty, consists. But the Oscar’s sponsors also have freedom of speech. They hire actors to do the speaking for them, but in the process, they acquire rights to control what those actors say. The actors voluntarily relinquish their freedom of speech, for a short time, in return for participation in a well-beloved entertainment event which will give them financial and reputational rewards. If they don’t want to relinquish their freedom of speech in this way, they are free not to participate. Once this is explained, it is clear enough, but it is not obvious, and it is easy to see how people could quite innocently fail to understand it and think the actors’ rights were being infringed. We see, then, that understanding human rights requires a subtle mind, and no more than a very incomplete understanding of them is likely to be widespread.

Many nations may be signatories to the UN Charter even though few among their populations and leaders really understand what human rights are. Either of these situations—ignorance or hypocrisy—would lead to far more people expressing belief in and support for human rights than actually do believe in or support them. So it would be useful to have some test that distinguished people who genuinely understand and value human rights from the perhaps large numbers who only pay ignorant or hypocritical lip service to them. This is where the recent liberations come in.



The Iraqometer

In the past year, two mid-sized nations have experienced the fall of extremely repressive regimes, leading to a major improvement in respect for basic human rights such as freedom of speech, religion, association, press, and so on. These transformations took place under an unusually bright spotlight of global media attention. Because they are so famous, many writers have expressed opinions, many polls have been conducted, many governments and political parties and leaders have taken stands, and these opinions and commentaries may be thought to be more than usually informed about the facts, since these were much aired in the news. Moreover, because of the unusual political circumstances in which these events took place, approval was less obligatory than it would typically be with regard to such events. I am referring, of course, to the regime changes carried out by US-led coalitions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A word about how the regime changes improved human rights is hardly necessary, but it might be helpful. I suspect that the Taliban regime can plausibly be nominated as the most repressive in the history of the world. It had carried political unfreedom to such absurd extremes that virtually any change whatsoever would have been an improvement as far as human rights (though not some other values, such as order) is concerned. When Kabul fell to US allies, the populace exuberantly discarded its veils and shaved its beards, played soccer in the street, and played music—yes, even music was banned! Saddam had, and killed, thousands or tens of thousands of political prisoners. Say the wrong thing and you landed in jail. Kurds and Shiites were gassed. As for Shiites, they could not practice their religion. After Saddam, Shiites were freed to make pilgrimages to religious festivals and show their faith. Also, a lively press has sprung up, and Baghdad is now full of newspapers, political parties, even demonstrations. There are a few ironic twists to the tale: for example, I think some women feel less free to dress as they please because they fear random violence from stricter Islamists, which Saddam was able to keep in fear better than the Americans can. But generally the advance in human rights (though again, not in some other values such as order) is clear. Public opinion polls in both countries show that substantial majorities find the changes welcome.

Reactions to these events, therefore, provide a useful measurement device for the extent to which, lip service aside, people really understand and value human rights—the Iraqometer. Let me explain how the Iraqometer works. It is not just that people, parties and countries who supported the regime changes value human rights and those who opposed them don’t. People may have other reasons than human rights to support or oppose the wars. Rather, we should try to make an educated guess about how factors other than human rights would have shaped this person’s views, then compare this hypothetical opinion to the actual opinion that the person holds. A few examples will help to illustrate.

1. Michael Ignatieff. Michael Ignatieff is an influential thinker on the topic of human rights. I visited his class at Harvard and got a sense of the profound compassion which motivates him. He is a Canadian, and Canada tends to be keenly—perhaps obsessively—aware of the faults of its Southern neighbor. So Michael Ignatieff is not inclined to rejoice in American power for its own sake. His fans tend to be in the organizations and classes that fear American imperialism. Human rights aside, then, we would expect Michael Ignatieff to be a rather strong opponent of the Iraq war. Instead, he has taken his place among the open supporters of US imperialism. The Iraqometer, therefore, indicates that Michael Ignatieff understands and cares very much about human rights.

2. Tony Blair. It seems to have been in Tony Blair’s political interests to oppose the Iraq war. That was certainly what his party wanted, as well as most of the British public. Before the Iraq war, he was a popular prime minister, who liked being popular as well as getting political advantage out of it. It was also what his allies in Europe wanted, and certainly seemed the most likely course to the office that he coveted even though it had not yet been created—European President. Of course, there were benefits to siding with the superpower, too, and an argument can also be made that Iraq was a useful way to move right and gain ground against the Tories even if he lost some support on the left. Overall, though, human rights aside, Tony Blair’s inclinations and incentives all lay on the side of opposing the war. The Iraqometer, therefore, indicates that Tony Blair greatly values human rights.

3. George W. Bush. Bush certainly took a risk in going after Saddam, but not so great of one as Blair. Above all, the American public was behind him. Support for the war was consistently well over 50%. Indeed, the war seems to have helped the Republicans to gain control of Congress in October 2002. The display of American power, in general, was not unpleasant for most Americans; it fuelled their patriotism. Saddam Hussein was Bush’s father’s nemesis. And Americans, after 9/11, were especially sensitive to any possible terrorist threat. So, human rights aside, Bush might still have had good reason to support the war. The Iraqometer probably still gives Bush some credit for believing in human rights, but much less strongly than Blair and Ignatieff. The same holds for the American public generally.

4. The eastern Europeans. Seven prime ministers of states about to accede to the European Union supported the war in Iraq. They did so in spite of the angry disapproval of French president Jacques Chirac, who thought they should have “shut up.” France and Germany, major war opponents, have long been the “engine” of the EU, and are likely to have considerable influence in how “structural funds” designed to help poorer regions such as eastern Europe are distributed. The Iraqometer indicates that the eastern Europeans care a lot about human rights.

5. My friends Catherine Barber and Balachandiran Gowthaman. Both of these classmates of mine are long-time fellow-travelers of the left, and their initial reaction was to be indignantly opposed to the war. Catherine was a card-carrying member of the Labor Party until Blair turned hawk; Gowthaman has been affiliated with various Marxist strands of thought in the past. Yet during and after the war (with a little help from my arguments) both of them softened a bit. Gowthaman was positively gleeful when the war began; unlike Putin or the Arabs, if war there was, he wanted the US and UK to win as quickly as possible. Catherine has been much quieter, more self-doubting, even shame-faced in her opposition to the war since the events took place. I won’t presume to say that either of them is now pro-war, but they have come closer to it. The Iraqometer gives them high readings for understanding of and concern for human rights. (Sad to say, another of my friends firmly backed the war before it took place, but now counts himself an opponent because WMDs were not found. I’m afraid he gets a strongly negative reading on the Iraqometer.)

So far, all the Iraqometer’s measurements seem quite plausible. Michael Ignatieff, a leading and much admired expert on human rights, might well be expected to understand and care about them a great deal. Tony Blair has a reputation for high moral scruples, compassion and, among envious Americans at least, an eloquence and intelligence considerably exceeding those of Bush; so that he scores well on the Iraqometer is again not surprising. George Bush’s moderate score is also to be expected: as a politician from a country with a very strong rights tradition, some commitment to human rights might be expected, but he is a man of seemingly moderate intelligence, and Americans tend to take rights for granted so that even the best articulators of our own system are often foreign. So Bush’s moderate score is no surprise. As for the eastern European leaders, their countries were ruled not so long ago by “totalitarian” (or perhaps “post-totalitarian,” but certainly repressive) regimes, and have recently made a proud transition to freedom, so their high Iraqometer scores are not surprising.

Now we can look at some examples from the other side.

6. The European public. Public opinion polls varied from country to country, of course. But in general the European people were much less supportive of the war than their leaders were. No European public that I know of showed majority support for the Iraq war before it took place. I know less about opinion on Afghanistan but have the impression that it was also not favorable. The Iraqometer gives the European public a negative reading; however, there was a rebound of support for the war after the Allies were greeted as liberators, which speaks a bit in their favor.

7. Muslim public opinion. The “Muslim street” fiercely opposed both the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq, before, during and after. Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were seen as heroes. The Iraqometer gives them a strongly negative reading.

8. The Arab media. Al-Jazeera, al-Arabiyah and the rest strongly supported Saddam Hussein, willingly covering up for his crimes. They were embarrassed by the scenes of celebration in response to Hussein’s fall, which shocked the Arab world, but soon regained their footing, offering brutally negative reportage of post-war Iraq. Arab societies have a reason to resent America because of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and the Arab media are partly catering to this prejudice. Nevertheless, the Iraqometer gives a sharply negative reading to the Arab media.

9. Vladimir Putin. Putin strongly opposed the war in Iraq, both before and after it had taken place, and in a speech hinted at a comparison between the Bush Administration and the fascists. Aside from human rights, Putin’s motives go both ways: he wants oil prices high, so the oil sanctions suit him; he has oil contracts with Saddam, and Russia has long contacts with him over the years; Russians are nervous of the expansion of US power; but Putin had a good relationship with Bush and is eager to end Russia’s ostracism by drawing closer to the West. The Iraqometer gives Putin a negative reading.

10. Gerhard Schroeder. Schroeder has a mitigating factor: the lessons of German history make them highly suspicious of conquest, and very respectful of international institutions, which help to tie down the German state and assuage the suspicions of its neighbors. Schroeder opposed the war early, but seemingly for electoral advantage. The Iraqometer gives Schroeder only a slightly negative reading.

11. Brent Scowcroft. This former national security adviser from the Reagan and Bush administrations opposed attacking Saddam. He gets a negative Iraqometer reading.

12. Left-wing intellectuals. Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, and a host of other left-wing intellectuals, were savage critics of both the wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq. They impugned the motives of the administration, attributing to them a whole range of avaricious and wicked motives. Some of the motives, such as an oil pipeline through Afghanistan, seem, to say the least, fanciful. Their opposition was extreme and uncompromising, and showed no difference before and after the war, nor wavered or changed character with the events. We can include Arundhati Roy, Naomi Klein and others in the indictment. The Iraqometer suggests that these people understand or value human rights much.

13. The anti-globalization movement, and assorted protesters. Opposition to the war in Iraq gave the anti-globalization movement, which was losing a bit of steam by the end of the 1990s due to the incoherence of its message and its coalition, a new raison d’etre. Anti-globo activists formed the core of a wave of massive protests worldwide. To discern a coherent general program or philosophy behind the crude babel of sloganeering spewed forth by these protesters is difficult, but certainly the Iraqometer gives them a sharply negative reading.

14. Jacques Chirac, and the French generally. In Germany, the left-wing party in a conservatively inclined country with no revolutionary tradition took a stand against the war, while the other party supported it. In France the right-wing party opposed the war, and with much more effect: France’s stand against the second resolution ultimately forced the hand of the US and the UK, to carry out the war without such a resolution. Chirac had the support of most of the French populace, and certainly of the French press, of which leading papers such as Le Monde are fiercely hostile to the US. The Iraqometer gives Jacques Chirac and France a strongly negative reading.

Now, how plausible is this set of Iraqometer readings? First, in general, we have seen that because there are strong incentives for insincere and uncomprehending professions of belief in human rights, so the large number of negative Iraqometer readings is consistent with our expectations. More particularly, we should not be surprised by the readings on Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent in a country which has never had a strong human rights tradition. Nor should we be surprised by the poor readings of the Arab media or the Muslim populace: the Islamic religion to which they are committed dictates the death penalty for an apostate, and its laws are generally repressive and incompatible with freedom of thought. In any case, it is not surprising that the populaces here, Muslim and European, get negative readings, for as we have seen, human rights are a complex concept which those not trained in it are unlikely to grasp. A statement like “Iraq was under Iraqi rule, therefore free; now it is under foreign occupation, and therefore unfree,” has a certain superficial plausibility. To understand that a domestic totalitarian regime may be far more repressive than an enlightened foreign occupier takes a bit more thought and intelligence.

The most surprising Iraqometer readings are those for France and for the left, which tend to have a positive reputation for understanding and respecting human rights. It will take a glance at history to dispel this prejudice and see that this finding, too is unsurprising.



Human rights and the left

There is a tradition of identifying human rights with the left that goes all the way back to 1789, when the French enacted a Declaration of the Rights of Man. But the sequel to that Declaration shows the true nature of the left’s relationship to human rights. Within a few years, the French were guillotining people who held the wrong opinions. And the set of right opinions was constantly changing and narrowing. The left advocates human rights only as an oppositional tactic. It has little or no interest in them once in power.

The same story was played out during the Russian Revolution, leftists showed through their actions their contempt for human rights. They killed not only outright opponents, but killed off one “deviation” after another. They starved kulaks, punished people for a class background which they could not help, forced the peasants out of their villages onto communal farms, causing famines; they shipped whole nations from west to east and east to west, tortured “confessions” out of thousands of people, even went through a phase of anti-Semitism after World War II. And all this time, a large contingent of fellow-travelers among the Western intelligentsia continued to pay intellectual allegiance to Stalin. Mao followed the pattern, in a different way perhaps—he introduced a “Hundred Flowers” moment of intellectual freedom then turned around to crush those who had been tempted to let their dissent out into the open.

There is another leftist who followed this pattern with respect to human rights. Of course, Adolf Hitler is traditionally not classified as a leftist. He is seen as a member of the “right.” As a result, when intellectuals have observed the similarities of the Nazi and Soviet regimes—secret police, terror, inquisitorial intrusion in art, a personality cult surrounding the leader, compulsory participation in a profusion of organizations which embodied the ruling ideology—or when they have considered the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939—by which they jointly carved up eastern Europe—they remark on such phenomena as somehow paradoxical. But perhaps the similarities are not paradoxical. Hitler was, after all, a National Socialist. He attacked the bourgeoisie and the “bloodsuckers” of the banks and the stock exchange. The Nazis first tried to appeal to the proletariat, then shifted their emphasis to the lower-middle-class, but in the end they attracted millions of proletarian votes. More importantly, proletarians made up the ranks of the crucial Sturmabteilung, or stormtroopers, who carried out the Nazi revolution on the ground after Hitler had come in the door at the top. True, Hitler hated Bolsheviks, but no more than Stalin hated Trotskyists; it seems to be the nature of revolutionary leftist parties to constantly divide and hate each other. If his economic program, once he came to power, was not especially egalitarian, here too he resembles the Bolsheviks, or, in Germany a few years earlier, the Social Democrats. Hitler was an eccentric leftist, to be sure, in his views on race, for example, or his respect for the British Empire. The party label is fairly accurate: he attempted to combine socialism with nationalism, just as Stalin was then trying to re-infuse socialism with Russian nationalism as he built “socialism in one country.” Hitler bears no resemblance to the so-called right, in either its reactionary form (he used the reactionary Nationalist Party briefly on his road to power but soon liquidated them) or in the Burkean/Churchillian form found in Britain.

Even after he was in power, Hitler knew how to use human rights as an oppositional tactic. When he wanted to take over the Sudetenland, a German-majority fringe of Czechoslovakia, he played indignation at the “oppression” of the Germans by the Czechs.

Even in the United States the story is played out. Rights are deeply rooted in American laws and mores, and the center was easily strong enough to hold, so the leftist assault took a far more moderate form. Yet leftists still imposed their “political correctness” (chilling phrase) on the nation, rearranging the terminology with which people spoke of Negroes/blacks/African-Americans and Indians/Native Americans.

Leftists override human rights because of utopianism and paranoia. The Bolsheviks and Maoists looked forward to communism, the Nazis to the thousand-year Reich, American liberals to a society of totally “equal opportunity.” Meanwhile, Stalin had his Trotskyites and his imperialists, the Nazis had the Jews, and American liberals have bizarre and paranoid caricatures of fundamentalist Christians. Human rights find their place in structures which create safety and dispel fear because they can be relied upon, and they can be relied upon because they are conservative. They are too fragile to survive long in the ecstasies of revolution.



What are human rights?

So far I have argued that the Iraqometer reveals a widespread lack of understanding of and/or support for human rights, particularly on the left. I have not yet argued that they are wrong, and this is not so easy to do.

One possibility is that people may value human rights but find other things more important—in particular, as mentioned before, order. The liberations of Afghanistan and Iraq came at the expense of order, both locally—warlordism, looting, and chaos came in the wake of the regimes’ fall—and globally—the erosion of the UN doctrine of sacred borders may increase the chances of instability. Traditionally, the right is considered to value order above freedom, the left to value freedom above order. One of the most fascinating ironies of the war in Iraq is that the right and left switched places. The “right” ventured to the ends of the earth to storm Bastilles, while the “left” gave stern warnings that the legitimacy of the Baathist ancien regime must not be questioned or disturbed.

But if this were the main problem, we would expect to see people openly admitting that in this case, human rights were not worth the price paid in disorder. Instead, we tend to see people maintaining strident rhetorical support for human rights while opposing the actions that make human rights possible in these countries. This rhetoric may be hypocritical, indeed much of it certainly is. In that case, though, it is strange that the hypocrisy is not more transparent.

So far I have used the phrase “human rights” in a deliberately uncritical way, but now we must take a closer look. What are human rights and why are they valuable? Do they exist at all? There is reason to doubt it. Here is Alasdair MacIntyre, one of America’s finest social philosophers, refuting the philosopher Gewirth concerning human rights:



Quite clearly the introduction of the concept of a right needs justification both because it is at this point a concept quite new to Gewirth’s argument and because there is something special about the concept of a right.



It is first of all clear that the claim that I have a right to do or have something is a quite different type of claim from the claim that I need or want or will be benefited by something. From the first – if it is the only relevant consideration – it follows that others ought not to interfere with my attempts to do or have whatever it is, whether it is for my own good or not. From the second it does not. And it makes no difference what kind of good or benefit is at issue…



One reason why claims about goods necessary for rational agency are so different from claims to the possession of rights is that the latter in fact presuppose, as the former do not, the existence of a socially established set of rules. Such sets of rules only come into existence at particular historical periods under particular social circumstances. They are in no way universal features of the human condition. Gewirth readily acknowledges that expression such as ‘a right’ in English and cognate terms in English and other languages only appeared at a relatively late point in the history of the language toward the close of the middle ages. But he argues that the existence of such expressions is not a necessary condition for the embodiment of the concept of a right in forms of human behavior; and in this at least he is clearly right. But the objection Gewirth has to meet is precisely that those forms of human behavior which presuppose notions of some ground to entitlement, such as the notion of a right, always have a highly specific and socially local character, and that the existence of particular types of social institution or practice is a necessary condition for the notion of a claim to the possession of a right being an intelligible type of human performance. (As a matter of historical fact such types of social institution or practice have not existed universally in human societies.) Lacking any such social form, the making of a claim to a right would be like presenting a check for payment in a social order that lacked the institution of money… It would of course be a little odd that there should be such rights attaching to human beings simply qua human beings in light of the fact, which I alluded to in my discussion of Gewirth’s argument, that there is no expression in any ancient or medieval language correctly translated by our expression ‘a right’ until near the close of the middle ages: the concept lacks any means of expression in Hebrew, Greek, Latin or Arabic, classical or medieval, before about 1400, let alone in Old English, or in Japanese even as late as the mid-nineteenth century. From this it does not of course follow that there are not natural or human rights; it only follows that no one could have known that there were. And this at least raises certain questions. But we do not need to be distracted into answering them, for the truth is plain: there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns.



What can we say? The argument not only convinced me, I found it exhilarating. I had always been annoyed by the way “human rights” seemed unduly manipulable, subject to inflation, a means to insist on something without permitting anyone to offer a counter-argument. And yet I would like to salvage something of the notion.

If we admit that “human rights” have no independent metaphysical reality apart from particular social institutions, they are still—as MacIntyre acknowledges—an entity (a combination of practices, mores, etc.) that social institutions can create, and we may argue that it would be a good thing to create them. But how will we argue for the creation and preservation of human rights? What kinds of human rights should we create? Which are most important? What kind of human rights are feasible to create in a given context? What benefit do they offer?

Obviously these are big questions which are beyond the scope of the essay. I’ll offer only the embryo of a couple of arguments for now, and a hint of where to look for better:

1) Socrates, the prophet Daniel, and Jesus Christ all died at the hands of the state. Many have died on the hands of the state, but those three (and others, of course) were high-minded men who died for the sake of truth and of conscience, who in dying made it clear that they were voluntarily choosing martyrdom over perjury and apostasy. By that act they discredited the regimes that killed them for the rest of history. This creates a powerful intuition that the state should respect the rights of freedom of thought and of speech.

2) The regimes of Stalin, Hitler and Mao under the Cultural Revolution went mad because of, to put it in a way that suits our present purposes, failing to respect human rights. The lack of internal criticism made it impossible to live in truth. Rulers could not get honest feedback because people were afraid of saying the wrong thing and getting killed. Human rights protect a state from its own enthusiasm.

3) Respect for property rights, the right to exchange and to be free from the threat of arbitrary confiscation, is a key part of the prosperity of market economies.

The anti-totalitarian writers, Solzhenitsyn and Serge, Orwell and Arendt and the rest, offered a powerful understanding of the evils of regimes which disdained all rights. Their work would be a good place to find the intuitions needed to provide a new, less confused basis for human rights. We certainly need it. The world’s understanding and commitment to human rights has become so feeble and flawed that decent people can regret the fall of Saddam Hussein.