Anti-American Protesters

[gagged_Louise]

On either side of the issue are either the blind "patriots" who see nothing America does as ever being bad and those who, for some reason, really despise America and see nothing good in it. Both attitudes are, ultimately, unAmerican -- and pretty stupid.

The anti-war protesters who have an honest belief that their country is doing something wrong in Iraq have not only a right but a responsibility to speak out against it. I think they're misguided and naive, but that doesn't make them less patriotic.

Yes, on both sides there's these all-out guys who really don't care about any moral issues but revenge and hate. True outside of the US too - you'd be surprised how freely the brand "America haters" has been waved about in the European media for the past five years. Still, no one would expect the people interviewed on camera at a rally like this to be totally exhaustive about why they are there. They know that whatever they say will be cut down to soundbites and punchlines, so of course they tend to paint in broad strokes sometimes. And as the general mood in the US media has been so heavily pro-war for the past five or six years, they are merely using their right to speak up. For them as citizens this is a moral duty, as Ragoczy pointed out, and it's not cheap.

I think they are right in implying that the media ignore the number of civilian deaths since 2003 and before it (due to the embargos on medicine etc). It's the same outside the US, ten US soldiers dead is much more news than the continuous bloodletting around the country.

Besides, this kind of protest is motivated by knowing that you're not getting through in the mainstream media with any sensible questions. Any war polarizes in this way today, at least in a democracy - the time when you could unite the country behind a war against an inherently evil regime is long gone, especially when this regime is on the other side of the planet and is no real threat at all to the USA (true of both North Vietnam/FNL in the '60s and Iraq in 2003). So opinion unity has to be created, you have to sell the war and the sense of unity.

The guy who is interviewing mentions the 1971 Winter Soldier event (at Detroit) to look into the possible US war crimes and excess brutalities in Vietnam - that one was ignored by all the national media when it happened it seems (though it was later referred to in th US Congress). Not being American I had to look it up on Wikipedia. I had no idea what he was talking about.

Sometimes, being a patriot has to mean that you don't accept all things just because "right or wrong, it's my country". I think we're at one on that vital point Ragoczy.

What does CCR have to do with anything? That was the audience, it's irrelevant. That's not what that video was about

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CCR is the source of the video. The source influences the content, just as in the video from the original post, and must be considered. CCR supports the UN Declaration on Human Rights, one of the most reprehensible documents on "rights" ever created.

Isn't it obvious that the people who shot, edited and posted that video are affiliated with the Republican party and strong supporters of the Iraq war? The reference to John Kerry and hos taking part in the anti-war movement of the 70s is very telling (unlike Bush jr Kerry had seen actual frontier service). Watching a video is not the same as actually being there on the spot, so editing and picking what to show matters a lot with any film, especially documentary/news footage. This one has a heavy biased wish to portray the protesters (not just at that particular rally) as ignorant hippies and total pacifist "pussies".

That the United Nations declaration of human rights is an abhorrent document - well, you're entitled to your view of course.

[Ragoczy]

That the United Nations declaration of human rights is an abhorrent document - well, you're entitled to your view of course.

http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html

I draw your attention to Article 29(3):

"These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations."

If your exercising your rights is contrary to the purposes of the UN, you can't do it. I find this abhorrent.

It's the argument of natural vs. granted rights. The US Constitution does not grant rights, it grants power to government. The enumeration of rights is considered a recognition, not a grant. The difference is that a granted right may be revoked by the granter, whereas a natural right is inherent in the individual.

The UN takes a wholly granter approach to human rights, with no recognition of natural rights. Therefore, the UN reserves to itself the power to violate the rights of the individual if their exercising that right is contrary to the UN's purpose.

[gagged_Louise]

http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html

I draw your attention to Article 29(3):

"These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations."

If your exercising your rights is contrary to the purposes of the UN, you can't do it. I find this abhorrent.

It's the argument of natural vs. granted rights. The US Constitution does not grant rights, it grants power to government. The enumeration of rights is considered a recognition, not a grant. The difference is that a granted right may be revoked by the granter, whereas a natural right is inherent in the individual.

The UN takes a wholly granter approach to human rights, with no recognition of natural rights. Therefore, the UN reserves to itself the power to violate the rights of the individual if their exercising that right is contrary to the UN's purpose.

*excusing myself for keeping on this side of the topic, but it seems vital and this is my last post in the thread*

About the UN Declaration, well, nobody denies that it's hard to create a declaration of human rights - whether it's as a "bill of rights" or more generally stated, philosophical - one that's easy to issue and interpret, with sharp lines and easy to use in political reality. Americans are still arguing passionately about the essence of the Bill of Rights written more than 200 years ago, and about its relation to the power machinery of the constitution and to universal human rights. The law codes of many countries have some of the kind of "limit clause" you cited.

The UN was formed by countries with very different ideas of law and how to use the law - even Afghanistan was one of the founding members I think - so there was a need for that kind of clause to make the declaration viable. Both Truman, Hubert Humphrey (who was instrumental in working on the declaration) and Stalin understood that. The declaration isn't legally binding by itself really, but it managed to get a majority in the UN at the time (1948) - the countries who put themselves behind it by virtue of that vote - pledging to accept it - included China, Afghanistan, Britain, Soviet Russia, the USA and Turkey. Not an easy bunch to unite on the issues of human rights!

The UN declaration wasn't written to be used for any politically unified state, and the chances of getting to anyone who violates any of those rights if they are not tried under national law has always been an issue under fire. The new league of nations came about under the principle that every state is sovereign on its own territory and that you can't normally drag a state to court outside its own territory, except in a tribunal of War crimes, genocide and so on (the Nuremberg court, which was put in the deep freeze during the Cold War and emerged again as a plausible idea only in the 1990s as the International Court at The Hague. The other week that court received one of the most notorious warmongers of modern European history, Mr. Radovan Karadzic.

I think we're a bit to the side if we start arguing about whether the rights of US citizens are always natural rights; in practice, many Americans tie them in to the status of citizenship, of being an American. And the risk that some of those rights can be revoked at a time that's judged to be an "age of emergency" is all too clear from what's happened under Bush (Patriot Act etc). They can also be restricted so they won't apply to everyone (earlier racial segregation, which went unopposed for many many years).

The USA is certainly not the only country where people believe in inborn human rights - and that's part of the foundation for what those people at Santa Barbara were doing.

[Ragoczy]

*excusing myself for keeping on this side of the topic, but it seems vital and this is my last post in the thread*

About the UN Declaration, well, nobody denies that it's hard to create a declaration of human rights - whether it's as a "bill of rights" or more generally stated, philosophical - one that's easy to issue and interpret, with sharp lines and easy to use in political reality. Americans are still arguing passionately about the essence of the Bill of Rights written more than 200 years ago, and about its relation to the power machinery of the constitution and to universal human rights. The law codes of many countries have some of the kind of "limit clause" you cited.

The UN was formed by countries with very different ideas of law and how to use the law - even Afghanistan was one of the founding members I think - so there was a need for that kind of clause to make the declaration viable. Both Truman, Hubert Humphrey (who was instrumental in working on the declaration) and Stalin understood that. The declaration isn't legally binding by itself really, but it managed to get a majority in the UN at the time (1948) - the countries who put themselves behind it by virtue of that vote - pleedging to accept it - included China, Afghanistan, Britain, Soviet Russia, the USA and Turkey. Not an easy bunch to unite on the issues of human rights!

The UN declaration wasn't written to be used for any politically unified state, and the chances of getting to anyone who violates any of those rights if they are not tried under national law has always been an issue under fire. The new league of nations came about under the principle that every state is sovereign on its own territory and that you can't normally drag a state to court outside its own territory, except in a tribunal of War crimes, genocide and so on (the Nuremberg court, which was put in the deep freeze during the Cold War and emerged again as a plausible idea only in the 1990s as the International Court at The Hague. The other week that court received one of the most notorious warmongers of modern European history, Mr. Radovan Karadzic.

I think we're a bit to the side if we start arguing about whether the rights of US citizens are always natural rights; in practice, many Americans tie them in to the status of citizenship, of being an American. And the risk that some of those rights can be revoked at a time that's judged to be an "age of emergency" is all too clear from what's happened under under Bush (Patriot Act etc). They can also be restricted so they don't apply to everyone (earlier racial segregation, which went unopposed for many many years).

The USA is certainly not the only country where people believe in inborn human rights - and that's part of the foundation for what those people at Santa Barbara were doing.

Just a couple brief points:

Many of the drafters of the US Constitution didn't want the Bill of Rights included at all -- not because they didn't believe in the rights, but because they feared that enumerating them would lead to a belief that: a) they were granted and not natural; b) that they were the only rights. The latter fear was addressed by Amendment IX, which states that the enumeration does not deny the existence of other rights.

Both of these fears have become realized in the US. I can't count the number of times I've heard "That's not in the Constitution!" by someone denying that something's a right and our public school systems often teach that the Constitution "gives" us our rights. Unfortunately, most people don't make enough of a study on the topic to know any better.

American citizens, deliberately kept ignorant on the subject by a school system founded to educate people just enough to take instruction in factories, may have trouble with the concept, but legal precedent is clear: Constitutional protections apply to individuals, whether citizens or not, where the US has sovereignty. And in Boumediene (the Guantanamo decision), the protections were clarified to apply to individuals where US sovereignty was de facto as well as de jure.

My issue with the UN DOHR is that the inclusion of that exception gives the UN the power to deny someone a right because the UN says so. I have the same issue with any constitution -- if a country's constitution provides the government with the option to arbitrarily deny a right, then the rights aren't worth anything. The reason being that these documents, the rule of law, is there to protect the individual from the police powers of the State -- if the State gets to decide when those rights apply, then the protection doesn't exist.

With regard to the Patriot Act: I've actually read the entirety of the legislation (there's a fun evening) and although I have some issues with the language being vague enough for abuse, I've seen no practical application that I feel was unconstitutional, especially with its sunset provisions. Now, keep in mind that this is coming from someone who spent 10-years as a card-carrying, dues-paying member of the American Civil Liberties Union and reads Supreme Court decisions for leisure -- I take my Constitution pretty seriously.

The rights that are most often mentioned with regard to the Patriot Act are privacy rights and habeus corpus. Habeus was addressed by Boumediene, and the rule of law decided that the right applies to foreign nationals held at Guantanamo -- the Government didn't get to say "but that's contrary to the interests of the government" and make the decision go away, because the US Constitution contains no clause granting the government the power to do so: habeus rights are inherent in the US, regardless of the US' interests. (Yes, there's a provision to suspend habeus, but that hasn't been done at this time.)

But, yes, I understand that there's sometimes a balancing act necessary in order to maintain a political whole. Since you brought up race in the US, I'll go back to the beginning when the issue almost destroyed the country before it was even formed. If the Northern States had pushed, as most wanted, for the abolition of slavery from the start, the Southern States would not have joined the Union and we'd all be speaking english here right now ... erm, well, the funny kind from across the Pond, not the good english we have now.

The misconceptions around slavery in the US and the extent to which that balancing act went are incredible. One of the examples of this is the 3/5 clause in the Constitution, which most people here in America consider to be racist and pro-slavery, when in actuality it helped to abolish slavery earlier than would otherwise have been possible.

I'm going to stop now.

And, yes, for me, this was brief. Imagine if I decided to be verbose.