Hey, remember back when human rights violations used to be a big deal?
Sure you do! China would do some crazy thing like execute a defendant without giving him a trial, and the U.S. would be all like, “Oh no, you did NOT just do that!” And then all the relatively sane countries in the world (as well as Australia) would agree with us and maybe impose a few sanctions.
No, it didn’t necessarily change anything, but it established a precedent: You do crazy human rights-violating stuff and you’re gonna get called out.
Well, apparently that’s not happening much anymore.
Last week’s issue of Newsweek has an interesting little blurb in the Internationalist section titled, “Giving up on human rights in China and beyond.”
The author, Joshua Kurlantzick, writes, “The age of global human-rights advocacy has collapsed, giving way to an era of realism unseen since the days of Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon.”
Evidence?
Countries throughout the world are shutting up about China’s flagrant human-rights abuses, mostly because they are lending money to the rest of us. When the offending country is needed to rebuild the global economy, leaders are going to be a lot more polite and willing to discuss prisoner abuse, governmental kidnaps and the Gmail-hacking in private.
But the most alarming part of all this is that the public doesn’t seem to care that their leaders are letting corrupt governments off the hook. Kurlantzick wrote, “With unemployment skyrocketing, citizens have turned inward, and are paying far less attention to what happens in Sudan or North Korea.”
And typically, when the electorate doesn’t care about something, neither do the elected.
Of course, the upside to all of this for a young, idealistic journalist like me is that it presents a new problem that could be solved (at least partially) by good, solid watchdog journalism. After all, if news oulets relentlessly covered the abominations that were taking place in these countries, the public might sit up and take notice.
I know we’re all worried about our jobs, our bills and our mortgages, but if the Haiti earthquake has taught us anything, it’s that even the most down-and-out American still wants to help when he is confronted with international turmoil. A lot of it depends, though, on how fiercely the turmoil confronts them.
Cue the journalists of the world.
