When It Comes to Human Rights, the US Has No Leg to Stand On

Human rights discourse is mainly used as a rhetorical sleight of hand.

The US, together with its Western European allies, has long claimed to be a champion of so-called “human rights” and has tried to hold other countries accountable for human rights violations. As usual, though, when a mirror is held up to it, the US fails to practice what it preaches while still holding other countries accountable for actions that pale compared to what the US does.

How can the US genuinely try to promote the idea of human rights around the world — itself a highly Eurocentric, rather than a universal concept with a narrow and historically limited understanding of rights and what it means to be human — when it does not uphold the human rights of people within its own borders?

The US was founded on the twin evils of the enslavement of African people and the genocide of indigenous people. To date, the US has never fully atoned for these atrocities, and they continue to haunt the nation today. Black Americans are incarcerated at much higher rates than their white compatriots, and the average Black family possesses only one-tenth of the wealth of the average white family.

Indigenous communities were dispossessed and extracted from their land, their populations were nearly entirely decimated, and their sophisticated and complex cultures and systems of knowledge were suppressed.

Beyond that, migrants from south of the US border are routinely rounded up and interned in spaces reminscent of concentration camps, and if they make it across the border alive, they are referred to as “illegal aliens” or “undocumented” rather than as human beings fleeing from violence, poverty, and oppression (the root of which can often be traced to US “interventions” in Central and South America).

In order to grow and maintain its hegemony and power as a global empire, the US has built up a nefarious military presence all around the world. When the US wags its finger at Iran and other countries for being so-called state-sponsors of terror, the US clearly expects people to blindly ignore the fact that it has (and still is, thanks to Biden) dropped bombs and launched military and geopolitical campaigns across far too much of the globe.

While there is no exact number to account for all the civilians the US military has killed around the world in the conflicts it has started or ventured into since the Korean War, far too many people — some of them Americans, but most of them non-Americans — have lost their lives because of American Empire.

The total number of deaths the US has directly or indirectly caused in places like Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Nicaragua, Bolivia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile, Cuba, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Angola, Iran, Philippines, and Haiti, among others, is in the tens of millions.

The current “War on Terror” should be renamed the never-ending “War of Terror,” as the US has terrorized the lives of millions of people across Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond, places it should have never been in. The US needs to look in the mirror because it has been and will continue to be the greatest exporter of terror around the world, no matter what it says otherwise.

Within its own borders, it does not guarantee that workers can take time off from work if they are sick and still be paid, nor does it guarantee that everyone has the right to paid vacation and maternity/paternity leave. Far too many Americans do not have access to clean drinking water, and many more cannot even afford human necessities like housing or food or health care.

In effect, the US does not honor the human rights of all of its inhabitants. So how can it turn around and demand that other nation-states honor principles of human rights when the US itself is guilty of violating these ideals? The US has always liked to take a sanctimonious tone when dealing with other countries on the world stage — currently, Biden is pointing the finger at China for human rights violations, for example — but it consistently cannot live up to its own rhetoric.

In the US, you only count as a human if you have a certain amount of wealth, if you are a certain skin color, if you are of a certain gender, if you have certain physical abilities, if you have a certain sexual orientation.

Until the US truly and finally reckons with its dark origins — by putting in place a truth and reconciliation commission, for instance, and paying retributions to indigenous communities and families who were formerly enslaved — and until it ceases its forever wars of global terror, and until it treats every human being within and without its borders with the dignity and respect they deserve, then it cannot legitimately level accusations of human rights violations against any other country.