Our Mistaken Ideas About Human Rights Failed Us in Afghanistan
Human rights are not a government, they’re a culture.
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Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Human rights are not a government, they’re a culture.
America was founded on that simple premise. The Declaration of Independence’s conviction in the equality of men, individual rights, and governments gaining their authority from the consent of the governed was based on “self-evident” truths.
These truths are “self-evident” to Americans in the way that they’re not self-evident to the average Afghan, Pakistani, Iraqi, Russian, South African or Chinese citizen. They have their own truths that are equally “self-evident” to them based on their own worldview and culture.
The Taliban, like the vast majority of Muslims, assert that believers in Allah are superior to infidels, that men must have supreme authority over women, and leaders over people.
This hierarchical model governs a lot more of the world than anything we’ve come up with.
And even in America there are voices that favor tearing up the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and reverting to a hierarchical model. From the Marxists on the Left to the Neo-Reactionaries on the Right, there are those who would turn back the clock to feudalism with enlightened philosopher-kings imposing an “ideal society” on the inferior class of men.
When we say that something is self-evident, it flows naturally from our values and our beliefs.
Consider the two radically different worldviews inherent in Benjamin Franklin writing that, “the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards" is "a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy” and the Ayatollah Khomeini proclaiming “Allah did not create man so that he could have fun" and thus there "is no fun in Islam.”
Both Franklin and Khomeini were expressing a worldview that was self-evident to them.
“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” came from people who believed that God loves us and wants us to enjoy life. Beheadings, butchery, and the burka came from Islamists who believe that Allah does not like us very much and that we deserve to be miserable.
The respective governments of America and the Muslim world just play out that theology.
America’s approach to individual freedom and meritocratic government came out of broader English and European intellectual trends. Western nations mostly came around to the approach, at least after two world wars, finding that happy people made for a good economy and stability.
Asian First World nations also came around to their own modified versions of a free society while still emphasizing hierarchy and collective morality. And those were the success stories.
Most of the rest of the world is littered with failures.
The American idea was exported successfully by contact with our culture which contained its individualistic, moral, and aspirational DNA. That’s much less true than it used to be. But what is still true is that our efforts to directly export our ideals have failed miserably. Whether it’s trying to explain the Founding Fathers to the Iraqis or funding Women’s Studies in Afghanistan, few were influenced, and many were confused, irritated, or moderately amused by our efforts.
Constructing “governments-in-a-box” in Iraq and Afghanistan was never going to fit their culture. Exporting human rights by explaining our self-evident belief in individual rights didn’t work in cultures that don’t think that people are primarily individuals with agency, but members of a group whose rights come from their role in a rigid hierarchy of ethnicity, gender or race.
Our own political and cultural elites have adopted that worldview making them particularly unfit to spread human rights or individual freedom abroad even as they eliminate them at home.
How can Biden, who decided to pick a black woman as his vice president, before deciding which individual was going to fill that role, credibly tell the Afghans or Iraqis that they shouldn’t pick their leaders based on their gender, tribe, ethnicity, or Sunni and Shiite status?
Before we explain freedom and rights to the Afghans and Iraqs, we need a refresher course.
Our democracy export business is based on a series of intellectual errors dating back to the two world wars which we had defined as fighting for democracy and against tyranny in Europe.
Ever since then our intellectual and cultural elites have stuck to the conviction that the entire world works much like Europe. Every country, whether it’s in Asia, Africa, or the Middle East, is in the midst of a struggle between liberal democrats and reactionary authoritarians. All we have to do is overthrow their Hitler or Mussolini, and a liberal democracy will emerge from the ashes.
This fallacy may have hit its peak with the insistence that the Arab Spring was Europe in 1848.
The rest of the world isn’t Europe of the past three centuries. Its intellectual trends, worldviews, and culture have little in common. While western lefties managed to export socialism to most of the world, it takes on very different forms in places like North Korea or Iraq. The “self-evident” assumptions of political ideas are lost in the translation and transition to very different cultures.
The problem with exporting our “self-evident” ideas is that they’re based on the belief in a loving and merciful God, on the value of individual life, and the genius of individual innovation. Most of the world’s cultures are not only not individualistic, many, like the People’s Republic of China or the Muslim world, are actively anti-individualistic and believe morality comes from hierarchy.
Is morality individual or is it collective? Is the role of government to free people to make moral choices or to force them to make the right choice? Where you come down on the answer to that issue is going to determine the sort of society and government you want and will fight for.
If you’re a member of the Taliban, of the Chinese Communist Party, a believer in critical race theory or the neo-reactionary ideology, odds are you will come down on the collective side.
And on the side of tyranny.
Is life basically good or bad? Are most people bad or good? Does God love us or hate us?
You can’t just casually export our underlying assumptions behind human rights to cultures that answer these questions in very different ways.
All of us, in a more tribal America, have experienced the frustration of mutually incomprehensible conversations with our fellow Americans that appear to be about issues, mask mandates, Black Lives Matter, or abortion, but that are actually about culture and values.
If it’s all but impossible to establish common ground on what rights and freedoms are with other Americans, what were the odds that we were going to do it with Afghans or Iraqis?
America can and should export human rights. But the best way to do it is by example.
Whether it’s parents influencing children, teachers acting as role models, or any other mentor relationship, the most vital lessons are not didactic, but personal. From our earliest years, we learn by imitation and we become like the people we want to be. Indeed, in both Judaism and Christianity, goodness comes from striving to learn from and imitate the ways of God.
Tellingly, the concept plays out very differently in Islam where Muslims imitiate Mohammed.
When nations and peoples around the world strived to be like America, it’s because they admired what we had, what we achieved, and how we lived. Most people assume that success is the result of values and behaviors. How people see a successful group, whether it’s Americans, Jews, or Asians comes down to the question of whether they achieved their success fairly through discipline and hard work, or unfairly by abuse and thievery. The answer to that question will determine whether someone is anti-American, anti-Semitic, or anti-whatever group.
These days the loudest voices stating that America is evil, and that everything we had was gained through colonialism and slavery, are coming from our own political and cultural elites.
Why would anyone admire or imitate us when we loudly announce that we’re liars and thieves?
Exporting human rights is not a matter of finding dictators to overthrow. The Muslim world isn’t Europe. It’s not in a state of conflict between tyranny and freedom, but between different flavors of tyranny which all share underlying assumptions about hierarchy over individualism.
Regime change won’t fix the culture.
There are times when America may need to intervene in other countries, when it’s to counter a threat or to prevent an extreme wrong such as genocide, but we cannot and will not fix the world. The vast majority of the planet will go on living under authoritarian regimes. Women in Muslim countries will suffer. And so will various ethnic and religious minorities under their rule.
We should condemn evil where we see it without assuming that we can make it go away and that should drive us to build alliances with nations that share our culture, heritage and values. Instead of spending billions reconstructing enemies, we’re better off strengthening our friends.
Above all else, we should show that our values lead to a good life. The example that we set for the rest of the world will do more to spread human rights than any military interventions.
That’s how it always was.
After a century of ideological cold wars, countering Communism and then Islamism, we have a lot of military interventions under our belt, but have gotten no better at making arguments for our way of life to our own people. While we were trying to convince Africans that Marxism wasn’t for them, our Ivy League institutions adopted it. And while we tried to talk the Afghans and Iraqis out of Islamic theocracy, our own cities, institutions, and governments filled up with Islamists.
If we want to defeat Islamism and protect human rights and freedom, we should start at home.
It’s not just Afghanistan where young girls are being enslaved or sexually abused by Islamists.
In 2019, I reported that there had been over 2,000 visas approved for underage 'brides' from Muslim countries. Two years before that I reported on a female genital mutilation network in Michigan. There have been multiple cases of slavery involving Muslim families in America.
The massive influx of Afghans into America will make those numbers worse, not better.
The fundamental lesson of our founding is that we can’t defend our rights without also defending our culture. The self-evident truths on which our freedoms were founded are no longer all that self-evident on a college campus, let alone in Islamist enclaves like Dearborn or Little Mogadishu. If we want to save our rights, we’ll have to defeat the Taliban at home.
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More level-headed, rational, insightful and cogent analysis from Mr. Greenfield regarding the intrinsic, immutable and glaring pathologies of the ideology of "Submission" -- supremacism, totalitarianism, belligerence towards and hatred of, non-Muslims. An evil ideology, to the core -- a fact which is obvious to all rational observers.
There is a reason that Islamic societies are among the most oppressive and totalitarian on Earth, hostile towards religious and intellectual pluralism, and, hostile towards individual rights and women's rights. The tenets of the ideology of "Submission" are transparently and intrinsically incompatible with secular democratic norms and the values of the Enlightenment. Again, these are facts which should be obvious to all rational observers.
Just don't expect the feckless, stupid, naive and delusional Dhimmi-crat collaborators to comprehend any of this. Facts and rationality are anathema to Dhimmi-crats.
Democrats, that is to say leftists, align with fellow fifth column ideologies that seek to overthrow our society, so they find their natural allies in fellow irrational violent ideologues that believe that if they kill enough people, utopia will emerge
Insights of genius.
Muslims are Morlocks and our worthless Democrat Eloi are importing them into our country and hoping they will turn into Eloi too ... this is a self inflicted Darwin Award for the West
"If we want to defeat Islamism and protect human rights and freedom, we should start at home."
Sadly the western world does NOT wish to defeat the religion of peace, it is capitulating under mass migrations forced on us by the world leaders, unelected and unaccountable dictators who appoint "representatives" in the UN.
Time to UNravel
Good read!
It also shows what a weak Democrat "Progressivism" really is.
When it runs up against a more committed culture it folds like a cheap paper bag.
Leftist politics is inherently parasitic. If feeds on weakness and doubt in a society.
THE TALIBAN ARE WAITING FOR 9-11 TO CREATE ANOTHER ONE! "KABUL"
Brilliant! A crystal clear analysis of how we have lost touch with what made us successful and why we no longer even have the moral clarity to figure out why it is quickly slipping away.
We once were a nation under God. Then we began worshiping our form of governance and taking personal credit for successes of our nation. Most of us had no hope of discovering the theory of relativity, much less being able to coherently explain it, yet people felt cultural ownership and an undeserved sense of superiority because an American -- a relatively recent one at that -- was brilliant enough to bless our nation with his discovery. Just one instance of forgetting origins and ultimate origins.
By increasingly celebrating our form of governance, we praised ourselves instead of God. A big mistake. I seem to recall something about pride going before the fall. Our pride has made other countries dislike us as well. People who think you are too proud aren't likely converts.
We are in trouble. We had better humble ourselves before God, and soon, so we can get back on the right path.
This is all part of the dems' plans to completely DESTROY OUR NATION! Open the borders to whatever strolls in, force deadly jabs on people, introduce MORE third world muslims, and just generally do what they can to destroy our economy and jobs! How can this be allowed? This is NOT AMERICA - this is some kind of evil, disgusting plan being forced down our throats by DEMOCRATS/RINOS!! It needs to end! It looked like PRESIDENT TRUMP was making some headway to repair the extensive damage wrought by the POS oblama's regime only to face an insurgency from the deep state. I do hope he learned his lesson on how to play "fair" and has gotten over that! Next time it should be "scorched earth" and plenty of butt hurt feelings! He can use all the precedents that have been established during the first seven - SEVEN - months of IMPOTUS joe and harris to do pretty much ANYTHING to ANYONE and should not accept any criticism or "hawaiian judges"!
If we are to defeat the Taliban at home, we will need to elect more conservatives and expose Omar, etc as fifth travelers for the Taliban
Great article Mr. Greenfield. Apparently our elites must feel these Islamists have a better culture than us and admire their ideas. What could go wrong?
They know that our culture is terrible. That's the source of their power as they demand more authority to carry out "reforms".
It stands to reason that every culture, especially those that hate us, are better than ours.
The Ayatollah Khomeini proclaimed “Allah did not create man so that he could have fun; ... [there] is no fun in Islam.”
I'm betting Cindi Lauper and a bunch of other girls wouldn't like Islam much.
This thesis leads into questions about USA 2021: What percentage of our population, and specifically of our younger population, has been brought up in a subculture intolerant of individual rights and of freedom in general? Is this group capable of self-government in a Constitutional republic? Is it growing into a majority? We can throw the bums out and restore our Republic only if most of us are not bums, too. That should create some urgency.
Do you know anyone who has consented to a government that can by executive decree take away the very freedoms that the founding documents guarantee and the authors of the decrees have sworn to uphold?
Do you know anyone who has consented to a government that can take away personal freedoms by legislation?
Do you know anyone who has consented to the government, period?
Human rights in this country are a cult. And cults eventually eat their own.
Examples of self-evidence:
You can mess up. You don't get to tell others how not to mess up.
You can't disarm your enemies. You don't get to try to disarm mine.
If you know what to do, you do it. I'll watch, and if it works, I'll do it too.
If laws that exist to limit violence are not applied the same to everyone, there are no laws that limit violence, just power changing sides.
Self-evidence stands on its own. It's a very high criteria to meet. If you don't have self-evidence, don't act. This is much different than moslem or marxist moral relativism, which exists to create leadership immune to the restraint of laws. Humans turn back into animals tearing each other apart. Wars spiral out of control and destroy everyone.
There are ways to fix the world. Cure disease such as HIV and cancer, and only cure ourselves. It goes airborne. Everyone we don't like dies. Or use the crowing about climate change as an excuse to geo-engineer and terra form. I get a nice fall, snow on Christmas, a sunny Saturday in February, and a bug free summer. The rest of the world gets hit by a maelstrom and dragged down into a whirlpool of lava. If you having lower standards than self evidence, I doubt you are able to do that yourself let alone stop me. Criminals who take power by force only care about avoiding their just execution by their enslaved followers who hate them.
America was made great in it's Churches, with Democrats and atheists denying we are one Nation under God and forcing their secular evil they create an arrogant dyspeptic froth destroying our union. Psalm 9:17 "The Nation that forgets God will be turned into Hell". Dark days ahead, pray for America and take action against the evil that is overrunning us border to border and coast to coast. Vote honest men and women into political office, vote out the vile political hacks who are liars and thieves sucking the life out of us. Our military must be given free reign in solving the desperate situation caused by the faux Biden in Afghanistan. The murdering savage Taliban must be destroyed and our people freed from desperate situations. Our government is undone by the dishonest acts of enemies within (democrats-RINOS) and without. China was a major factor in destroying our last election. Time is about up and determination with courage is the order of the day or we are lost. William
What is wrong with FPM? Not a single article on the FDA's misguided approval of the Pfizer Clot-Shot?
Your writers have had time to prepare...we've known it was a done deal for a week but not even one writer has any views about the FDA breaking its own Rules and Guidelines in order to grant Big Pharma the chance to make billions of Dollars on a perpetual variant virus producing so-called "vaccine"?
But thanks for the dozen or so articles on the Taliban kicking our ass.
In order to defeat your enemy you must first understand him, otherwise you have already lost the battle... The Art Of War.. Uncle Sam always seems to think that they alone know what is best for everybody in the World, because he knows whats best for America, but FYI Hombre... the World aint America, never has been, never will be... President Trump said America cannot be the Policeman of the World and THE LEFT called hm a fascist, racist, sexist, however I betcha if Obummer had said the same words they would all be cheering. Most countries around the World are being ruled by people you probably would not want to invite for Dinner at your home, but the stable nature of each country is somewhat accepted by the population of such countries as they are making enough to feed themselves and their families, the monsoon rains are not coming through their Tin Roofs, they may have a small shop or food stall, nobody is killing anybody on the streets every night,(like Chicago), folks see their kids getting an education, and until people have an empty stomach then all will go on as is. Revolutions start in an empty stomach and not in a intellectual head. One obese American woman, I kinda sorta know, told me that, when Trump was President, that she does not want to live in America as its being ruled by a fascist, so she found a job in Cambodia... Go figure huh?.