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Donald Trump is on an Orwellian mission to redefine human rights
Now, the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, wants to build a new intellectual framework to justify the administration’s rollback of human rights protections.
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the Trump administration wants to gaslight Americans into believing that this new commission is necessary because the fight to expand rights protections somehow gives cover to other countries to abuse the language of human rights to defend their repression. Pompeo speciously said: “Rights claims are often aimed more at rewarding interest groups and dividing humanity into subgroups. Oppressive regimes like Iran and Cuba have taken advantage of this cacophonous call for ‘rights’, even pretending to be avatars of freedom.” You read that right: the secretary of state is blaming people who work to protect human rights for supposedly helping authoritarian regimes.
And this is the Orwellian goal of the Trump administration. They want everyone to believe that what they are doing is in support of laudable goals – freedom, democracy, security, choose your own lofty noun. They make racist and antisemitic comments against others while claiming that they are somehow fighting antisemitism and defending Israel. They tear away children from their parents and place them in cages and claim that it is all a deterrent to protect those same migrants from the dangers of the journey to the United States.
In his novel about a fictional totalitarian regime, 1984, George Orwell memorably wrote that one of the regime’s mottos is: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” The Trump administration is doing its best to make this kind of gaslighting a reality in America. Don’t be surprised if one of the conclusions of this new commission is “human rights is repression”.
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the Trump administration wants to gaslight Americans into believing that this new commission is necessary because the fight to expand rights protections somehow gives cover to other countries to abuse the language of human rights to defend their repression. Pompeo speciously said: “Rights claims are often aimed more at rewarding interest groups and dividing humanity into subgroups. Oppressive regimes like Iran and Cuba have taken advantage of this cacophonous call for ‘rights’, even pretending to be avatars of freedom.” You read that right: the secretary of state is blaming people who work to protect human rights for supposedly helping authoritarian regimes.
And this is the Orwellian goal of the Trump administration. They want everyone to believe that what they are doing is in support of laudable goals – freedom, democracy, security, choose your own lofty noun. They make racist and antisemitic comments against others while claiming that they are somehow fighting antisemitism and defending Israel. They tear away children from their parents and place them in cages and claim that it is all a deterrent to protect those same migrants from the dangers of the journey to the United States.
In his novel about a fictional totalitarian regime, 1984, George Orwell memorably wrote that one of the regime’s mottos is: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” The Trump administration is doing its best to make this kind of gaslighting a reality in America. Don’t be surprised if one of the conclusions of this new commission is “human rights is repression”.
[link:https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/18/trump-pompeo-human-rights-un-orwellian-mission-redefine|
Gas lighting America one day at a time
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