[Peace-discuss] NYT book review on "history of human rights"

[David Green]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/books/review/Cooper-t.html?ref=books

One would have to look far and wide for an assertion more absurd than this one:

"Today’s human rights movement emerged “seemingly from nowhere,” Moyn says, as a 
depoliticized, moral response to disillusionment with revolutionary political 
projects, specifically the anticolonial independence struggles of the 1950s and 
’60s. Moyn credibly juxtaposes the hopes placed in a new internationalist 
“utopia” of human rights against the failure of national self-determination to 
guarantee human dignity."

Of course, such "failures" were in many cases the result of American opposition 
to self-determination. The notion of "human rights" has been selectively used to 
attack people we don't like.

DG


      
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