What’s So Special About the Holocaust?

History has seen many genocides and large scale killings. Some of those resulted in more deaths than the Holocaust. So why is the Holocaust special? It’s special because it was the first and last example of the industrial production of corpses. It was, quite literally, a murder machine. The murders were not the actions of specific individuals who did what they did because of their identity, motives or pathologies. They were not like the brutalities of the Roman Emperor Nero, which were clearly his. Nor were they like the crimes of Saddam Hussein or any other identifiable criminal. In the case of the Holocaust, it was impossible to recognize an identity in the deed. The killers were impersonal, insignificant, loyal, conscientious and hardworking civil servants operating together in an organized, efficient, systematic and planned extermination, characterized by division of labor and the industrial production line. Everyone knew exactly what to do, and often that was a very small part of the process. Shared responsibility is often seen as diminished responsibility, and makes it easier to produce corpses. The detailed planning, organization and execution of the project sets the Holocaust apart from other genocides. Eichmann protested against spontaneous pogroms in the east, not because he was a humanitarian but because those unorganized interventions messed up his bookkeeping and made it difficult to count how many exactly were killed by the otherwise machine-like operation.

The Holocaust was not the action of an individual or a small group of people. Nor was it motivated by egoism, the will to power, money, hate, rage, revenge, sadism, war or the elimination of opposition. The victims were not guilty of opposition or even crime. The perpetrators weren’t motivated by self-interest (for example, the Nazis prohibited private confiscation of Jewish goods for personal use). Neither was it primarily the hatred of Jews that led the Nazis to try to exterminate them. It was the love of humanity – or better what they considered to be true humanity – and the need to protect it. The Holocaust wasn’t a war crime either and wasn’t part of the normal atrocities of war. It started well before the war and the German war effort suffered substantially from it: potentially useful labor forces were eliminated, soldiers and other means that could have been used in the war were diverted to the extermination effort etc. The Jews were murdered, not because that would have allowed soldiers to fight rather than guard prisoners, but because they were Jews. The extermination continued even in the final days of the war, when Germany was losing and all military resources should have gone to the war effort. And, finally, the purpose of the Holocaust wasn’t to instill fear. Normal state terror serves to scare the population and convince it to submit and to behave in ways that are acceptable to the rulers. Not in the case of the Holocaust. Fear had become useless because it couldn’t serve to guide actions and to steer away from danger. Danger would have found you anyway. Everyone knew that you were a Jew, and tactical maneuvering motivated by fear could have helped you escape only in very few cases.

Mengele’s twins

Self-interest, power hunger, sadism, revenge or other utilitarian motives were seen by the Nazis as diversions from the genocidal operation that was undertaken for the benefit of mankind. As was the military self-interest of Germany’s success in the war. The project of extermination of the Jews and the protection of mankind was more important than the risk of a possible military defeat of Germany. Pity as well could not stand in the way of the demands of nature and history. The pleas of the victims were not heard and people convinced themselves of the historical and natural necessity of the Holocaust. Like pity, the taking of money from a victim as a bribe for letting him or her live was a betrayal of nature. Germans had to be the superhumans that they were destined to be, free from all that makes us ordinary humans: pity, self-interest, hate and the will to power.

The Holocaust wasn’t a crime. A crime is a deed that goes against social order and established law and that challenges the powers that represent social order. In this case, we have an atrocity that emanated from the state and that had become the moral and legal law. Murder had become a form of government. Evil no longer had to fight the Good, and no longer had to hide and to be hypocritical. Evil ruled. There was only evil. The world was without a horizon, without hope or salvation. Another reason why the Holocaust can’t really be called a crime is the fact that the perpetrators didn’t have criminal motives. They just carried out the verdict of nature and implemented the laws of nature. A deeper legality defined the actions of government. Murder had become the law of nature as well as the legal law and the law of morality.

More on the Holocaust here.

The War on Terror is 11 Years Old Today, With No End in Sight

(source unknown)

The War on Terror, started by the U.S. government as a response to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks and later joined by other governments, is 11 years old today, with no end in sight. It has had and continues to have grave consequences for the human rights of people worldwide. Osama is dead, and the war in Iraq is over, and yet people are still stuck in Guantanamo, drone strikes are more numerous than ever before and the internal security forces of Western states are increasingly powerful. It’s a high price for an uncertain gain.

However, before I discuss the consequences for human rights, I would like to make it clear that I believe, as any rational human being, that terrorism is evil, that it has to be stopped and that democracies have a right to defend themselves against violent, anti-democratic fanatics (see this post for example).

I also believe that democratic governments should be especially vigilant because the freedoms that they are elected to protect, offer opportunities for those who hate freedom, opportunities that do not exist in other political systems. Potential terrorists find it relatively easy to enter a democracy and operate in it. A democracy is a very vulnerable form of government because of the freedom it gives to everyone, even those who don’t mean well.

The freedoms of a democracy can be and are abused, but this, it seems, has frightened democratic governments to such an extent that they have decided to limit these freedoms up to the point that they are in danger of abandoning them altogether, and hence doing the work of the terrorists for them. It can be acceptable to limit certain rights for the protection of other rights (see also this post), but the right to security seems to have taken on an absolute priority, at the expense of many other rights. There is no reasonable balance anymore.

1. Civil liberties

Governments try to defend their countries against terrorist attacks by limiting civil liberties in their territories.

• The right to privacy has been limited: CCTV has become ubiquitous, DNA databases have been created, eavesdropping and wiretapping have been legalized etc.
• “No-fly-lists” have come into force, limiting the freedom of movement of even those who have written critically of the government or attended peace-protests.
• Hate speech laws have been voted to silence jihadist hate preachers, silencing others at the same time.
• “Racial profiling” by the police has turned innocent people into possible suspects, often inverting the burden of proof.
• Habeas corpus has been limited, periods of detention without charge extended, sometimes indefinitely (for “enemy combatants”).

However, in spite of all this, the constraints on a government’s actions within its territory are sometimes still considered to be inhibiting:

• “Extraordinary rendition” has been covertly practiced, allowing suspects to be tortured outside of the territory by professional torturers in other countries.
• Extra-territorial prisons have been created, in Guantanamo, but probably elsewhere as well, where suspects can be tortured or held indefinitely and where the Geneva Conventions supposedly don’t apply.

2. Mentalities

The war on terror has also changed people’s minds and attitudes.

• The media have started to censor themselves. Solidarity with the government at war and the commander-in-chief, or the fear of being perceived as unpatriotic, appeasers, “useful idiots” or even open allies of the enemy have turned many in the media into uncritical supporters of the war.
• Citizens have turned on Islam and Muslims. Xenophobia and more specifically islamophobia have undermined the ideals of tolerance and multiculturalism, and have in certain cases even led to hate crimes against Muslims.
• A ”culture of fear” has been created by the terrorist but also nurtured by irresponsible western politicians. This fear has damaged democracy. Not only have the media relinquished their traditional role as watchdogs. Politicians as well, and especially incumbents, have abused the fear of terrorism to harness support. Alert levels seem to go up just before elections.

3. Preemptive war

The US government has elaborated and implemented the strategy of preemptive war, a war

waged in an attempt to repel or defeat a perceived inevitable offensive or invasion, or to gain a strategic advantage in an impending (allegedly unavoidable) war. (source)

The Iraq war was deemed a preemptive war because Iraq was allegedly about to attack the US with weapons of mass destruction, or supply these weapons to terrorists. Whatever the merits of the case against Iraq – and with the passing of time these seem to become weaker and weaker – the war has been framed, correctly or not, as a necessary stage in the ongoing war on terror. It has, however, resulted in massive numbers of casualties on both sides. The human rights violations caused by the war stand in no relation to the violations caused by terrorism or the violations that could have been caused by Saddam.

In any case, you can’t solve the problem of terrorism by violent means only. Terrorism has causes, and there will be terrorism as long as these causes exist. (Mind you, I don’t want to excuse or justify terrorism).

4. Counter-productive

It is now widely believed, even in US government circles, that the war on terror is counter-productive. Especially the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the torture in Abu Ghraib and the detentions in Guantanamo have produced a backlash and have increased rather than reduced the terror threat. The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate issued the following among its “key judgments”:

The Iraq conflict has become the “cause celebre” for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement. (source)

The war on terror has created and exacerbated resentment, hatred of the West and anti-americanism. And with anti-americanism often comes hatred of democracy and freedom, as wellas Islamic radicalization. Apart from the removal of the Taliban in Afghanistan, there is no evidence that any of the strategies in the war on terror has done any good (source). Any even this tiny success seems to be far from certain.

5. Misnomer

There is something fishy about the concept of a “war on terrorism”. This “war” is in fact no such thing. There is no well-defined enemy. Anyone can at any time become an enemy. For this reason, there is no conceivable end to the war. And if you claim to wage a war on terrorism, you might as well claim to wage a war on carpet bombing. Both are tactics or strategies, not something you wage war against.

If you insist on calling anti-terrorist actions a war, then you give too much credit to the riffraff you’re opposing. Rather than deranged criminals they can call themselves soldiers. And soldiers defend something. You legitimize them. You turn a crime into a two-sided struggle in which each side defends its positions. This in turn leads to the view that the war on terror is a war of the West against the rest, bringing back images of colonialism, imperialism and the crusades, again legitimizing the terrorists, helping to consolidate their often internally opposed forces, and making them honorable in the eyes of some ordinary citizens.

I can understand that the concept of a “war on terrorism” is useful for some Western governments, because an executive that is at war has more powers, less oversight, more popular support and less criticism, but it’s a meaningless and dangerous concept. Let’s give it up, or let us at least declare victory in the one we’re now fighting for 11 years.

(This post is hoisted from the archives and slightly revised. The original was published on August 6th, 2008 and is unfortunately still relevant today).

Human Rights Maps (166): Killing Fields

These are the locations of prisons and burial sites during the Cambodian genocide:

(source)

This more or less tracks population density:

(source)

Meaning that the genocide was pretty much everywhere, something that’s also represented in this strange map (inspired by the iconic skull images of the Killing Fields):

(source)

More human rights maps here.

Limiting Free Speech (47): Incitement to Commit Suicide

heartbreak

(source)

An interesting story in the press some time ago:

A former nurse from Faribault, Minn., was convicted of two felonies Tuesday when a judge ruled he had used “repeated and relentless” tactics during Internet chats that coaxed two people to kill themselves.

Rice County District Judge Thomas Neuville found that William Melchert-Dinkel, 48, “imminently incited” the suicides of Mark Drybrough of Coventry, England, and Nadia Kajouji of Ottawa, Ontario. Drybrough, 32, hanged himself in 2005, and Kajouji, 18, jumped into a frozen river in 2008.

In a 42-page ruling that found Melchert-Dinkel guilty of two counts of felony advising and encouraging suicide, Neuville wrote that it was particularly disturbing that Melchert-Dinkel, posing as a young, suicidal, female nurse, tried to persuade the victims to hang themselves while he watched via webcam….

Neuville, in rejecting the free-speech defense, noted that inciting people to commit suicide is considered “Lethal Advocacy,” which isn’t protected by the First Amendment because it goes against the government’s compelling interest in protecting the lives of vulnerable citizens. (source, source)

I guess that’s correct, even though the case doesn’t really fit with any of the commonly accepted exceptions to free speech rights. We’re not dealing here with incitement to murder or a death threat – standard exceptions to free speech, even in the U.S. And neither is it speech that incites illegal activity – another accepted exception. Suicide isn’t murder and isn’t illegal (anymore). Abstract and general advocacy of crime and violence is – or should be – protected speech, but not the advocacy or incitement of specific and imminent crime or violence if this advocacy or incitement helps to produce the crime or violence. If speech intends to produce specific illegal or violent actions, and if, as a result of this speech, these actions are imminent and likely, then we have a good reason to limit freedom of speech. Examples of such speech:

• solicitation of a murder
• some types of death threat
• cheering on a criminal
• speech that constitutes aiding and abetting of criminal conduct etc.

None of these forms of speech should be protected, and laws making them illegal are perfectly OK. On the other hand, claiming that all politicians deserve to die or that people shouldn’t pay their taxes are, in most cases, forms of protected speech because they probably do not incite or help to bring about imminent lawless activity.

The problem is that none of this is applicable here. Suicide isn’t illegal, and neither is it violence as we normally understand the word. So, the commonly accepted exception to free speech rights that I just cited can’t possibly justify the conviction of Melchert-Dinkel. He did of course advocate, incite and cheer on his victims, and his advocacy, incitement and cheering probably helped to produce their suicides. But a suicide is not a crime or an act of violence. At least not as such. One could argue that the encouragement of a suicidal person should be viewed as a form of murder. And if that statement goes too far for you, you may want to consider the fact that causing someone else’s death is in general a crime, whichever way you do it. Moreover, if the victims in this case were suffering from depression or a mental illness, the state has a duty to provide healthcare, and allowing someone else to worsen their depression or illness to the point that they kill themselves is not consistent with this duty.

So, while the encouragement of suicide in general, the teaching the methods of suicide or the claim that non-suicidal people should go and kill themselves (“you don’t deserve to live”, “why don’t you just go and kill yourself”) are all forms of protected speech, the same is not the case for speech that encourages specific suicidal people to kill themselves.

More on the related topic of “assisted” suicide here. More posts about limiting free speech are here.

As a bonus, I can’t not post this image of what some have called the most beautiful suicide (a description that is in no way meant to glorify or encourage suicide):

suicide of Evelyn McHale, photo by Robert Wiles

(source)

On May 1, 1947, Evelyn McHale jumped to her death from the observation deck of the Empire State Building, landing on a car. Here is a close-up of her face:

Read the whole story here.

Political Graffiti (161): Mushroom Cloud

(source, artist unknown)

(source)

(source, by Hutch)

More on nuclear weapons here and here. More political graffiti here.

Human Rights Video (23): Nuclear Explosions, 1945-1998

Starts a bit slow, but interesting nonetheless: the numbers and places of nuclear explosions throughout the years:

More on atomic weapons here and here. More on Hiroshima here. More human rights videos here.

Related Articles

• Japan Commemorates 65th Anniversary of Hiroshima Bombing [Pic Of The Night] (gawker.com)
• “1945-1998″ by Isao Hashimoto: 2003 (edugeek.net)

Human Rights Stories (18): A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies

illustration for A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, by Bartolomé de las Casas

(source)

“A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies”, written by the Spanish Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas in 1542, is one of the first attempts by a Spanish writer of the colonial era to depict the mistreatment of the indigenous peoples of the Americas in colonial times. The description was sent to then Prince Philip II of Spain. It’s remarkable in the sense that it was written during the early stages of the Spanish conquest.

The Spaniards first assaulted the innocent Sheep, so qualified by the Almighty … like most cruel Tygers, Wolves and Lions hunger-starv’d, studying nothing, for the space of Forty Years, after their first landing, but the Massacre of these Wretches, whom they have so inhumanely and barbarously butcher’d and harass’d with several kinds of Torments, never before known, or heard. …

Those that arriv’d at these Islands from the remotest parts of Spain, and who pride themselves in the Name of Christians, steer’d Two courses principally, in order to the Extirpation, and Exterminating of this People from the face of the Earth. The first whereof was raising an unjust, sanguinolent, cruel War. The other, by putting them to death, who hitherto, thirsted after their Liberty, or design’d (which the most Potent, Strenuous and Magnanimous Spirits intended) to recover their pristin Freedom, and shake off the Shackles of so injurious a Captivity. …

Bartolome de las Casas

Finally, in one word, their Ambition and Avarice, than which the heart of Man never entertained greater, and the vast Wealth of those Regions; the Humility and Patience of the Inhabitants (which made their approach to these Lands more facil and easie) did much promote the business: Whom they so despicably contemned, that they treated them (I speak of things which I was an Eye Witness of, without the least fallacy) not as Beasts, which I cordially wished they would, but as the most abject dung and filth of the Earth; and so sollicitous they were of their Life and Soul, that the above-mentioned number of People died without understanding the true Faith or Sacraments. And this also is as really true as the praecendent Narration (which the very Tyrants and cruel Murderers cannot deny without the stigma of a lye) that the Spaniards never received any injury from the Indians, but that they rather reverenced them as Persons descended from Heaven, until that they were compelled to take up Arms, provoked thereunto by repeated Injuries, violent Torments, and injust Butcheries. …

[T]he Spaniards …, mounted on generous Steeds, well weapon’d with Lances and Swords, begin to exercise their bloody Butcheries and Strategems, and overrunning their Cities and Towns, spar’d no Age, or Sex, nay not so much as Women with Child, but ripping up their Bellies, tore them alive in pieces. They laid Wagers among themselves, who should with a Sword at one blow cut, or divide a Man in two; or which of them should decollate or behead a Man, with the greatest dexterity; nay farther, which should sheath his Sword in the Bowels of a Man with the quickest dispatch and expedition. They snatcht young Babes from the Mothers Breasts, and then dasht out the brains of those innocents against the Rocks; others they cast into Rivers scoffing and jeering them.

Read more.

More human rights stories here.

Human Rights Video (22): Landmines

WARNING: this video is disturbing, and meant to be.

(imagine if land mines were a part of your everyday)

From an advocacy standpoint, this is probably way over the top. Some would call it badvertising and, indeed, I don’t see the need to shock people in this way in order to raise consciousness. More on landmines here. More human rights videos here.

Related Articles

• Denmark against landmines : Picnic gone wrong [Video] (scaryideas.com)
• Picnic gone wrong (osocio.org)
• U.S. still undecided on joining landmines treaty (reuters.com)

Human Rights Maps (143): Hiroshima Bomb Damage

Within the first two to four months of the bombings, the acute effects killed 90,000–166,000 people in Hiroshima and 60,000–80,000 in Nagasaki, with roughly half of the deaths in each city occurring on the first day. Of the people who died on the day of the explosion, 60% died from flash or flame burns, 30% from falling debris and 10% from other causes. During the following months, large numbers died from the effect of burns, radiation sickness, and other injuries, compounded by illness. In both cities, most of the dead were civilians.

In Hiroshima, the radius of total destruction was about one mile (1.6 km), with resulting fires across 4.4 square miles (11 square km). The residents of Hiroshima were given no notice of the atomic bomb.

Map of the damage inflicted by the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima

(source)

Let’s focus on the area near ground zero, the hypocenter of the explosion, which is this part of the map above (the green lines are the rivers):

Below are a few 3D maps/maquettes of this area – which obviously suffered the most destruction – taken from an exhibition in the Hiroshima museum. They show the area before and after the explosion. In each one, you can see the famous dome structure which has become iconic for the event (I marked it on the images).

the red mark on the left is the impact spot

From another viewpoint:

(source, source)

More on Hiroshima here, and on nuclear weapons here and here. More maps here.

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (82): Children as Involuntary Suicide Bombers

(source unknown)

While targeting civilians in Kabul, the Taliban allegedly tricked an eight-year old girl into carrying a package containing a remote-control detonated bomb. Only the girl was killed in the blast. … [T]he girl was unaware that the bag she had been given by Taliban insurgents held a bomb. Her body was taken to a nearby security check post, and the police called her relatives. (source)

A similar case was described here. More absurd human rights violations are here.

Human Rights Maps (136): The Gulag Archipelago

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Gulag – or GulAG – was the government agency that administered the Soviet system of penal labor camps. The Gulag camps, although they housed also petty criminals, were in fact the major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature winner, likened the scattered camps to “a chain of islands”, hence the Gulag Archipelago, and described the Gulag as a system where people worked to death.

More than 14 million people passed through the Gulag from 1929 to 1953. Harsh treatment resulted in the death of more than a million of them. The total population of the camp system at any one moment varied between 500.000 and 1,5 million. The number of camps was roughly 500. Some of today’s major cities in Russia were originally camps.

A significant proportion of the camp population were political prisoners. Many of the inmates never had a trial. Some had a show trial. Although the camp system was dramatically scaled down in the 1960s, the USSR continued to imprison political opponents until the very end of the regime.

The Gulag, together with the purges, the terror famine and the deportation and exile to remote areas of the USSR of 6 to 7 million people, constitutes the major crime of Stalin’s totalitarian rule in the USSR.

Gulag map

(source, click image to enlarge)

Gulag prisoner stats, 1934-1953

(source)

More on communism, Stalin, Russia, and totalitarianism. More human rights maps.

Human Rights Maps (133): Stalin’s Terror Famine in Ukraine (Holodomor)

The Holodomor (a Ukrainian word for  “death by hunger”) was a famine in the Ukraine from 1932–1933, during which millions of inhabitants died of starvation (estimates range from 2.6 million to 10 million).

Scholars disagree about the causes of the famine: natural factors, bad economic policies and deliberately engineered measures are possible factors. Some have argued that the famine may have been provoked as an attack on the rise of Ukrainian nationalism, and therefore that it falls under the legal definition of genocide. Hence the expression “terror-famine”. Others blame unwise policies of industrialization and collectivization of farming.

These are the countries that do recognize it as a genocide:

Countries which officially recognize the Holodomor as genocide

(source)

This map shows the population decline during the famine:

rate of population decline during the Holodomor Famine map

(source, source; click image to enlarge)

More on famine. More human rights maps.

Related Articles

• YES: Stalin killed millions. A Stanford historian answers the question, was it genocide? Naimark… (pajamasmedia.com)
• Who’s Afraid of Ukrainian History? (nybooks.com)

Human Rights Stories (16): The Pit and the Pendulum

Excerpt from The Pit and the Pendulum, by Edgar Allen Poe:

I was sick — sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me. The sentence — the dread sentence of death — was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears. After that, the sound of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy indeterminate hum. It conveyed to my soul the idea of revolution — perhaps from its association in fancy with the burr of a mill wheel. This only for a brief period; for presently I heard no more. Yet, for a while, I saw; but with how terrible an exaggeration! I saw the lips of the black-robed judges. They appeared to me white — whiter than the sheet upon which I trace these words — and thin even to grotesqueness; thin with the intensity of their expression of firmness — of immoveable resolution — of stern contempt of human torture. I saw that the decrees of what to me was Fate, were still issuing from those lips. I saw them writhe with a deadly locution. I saw them fashion the syllables of my name; and I shuddered because no sound succeeded.

Edgar Allan Poe

I saw, too, for a few moments of delirious horror, the soft and nearly imperceptible waving of the sable draperies which enwrapped the walls of the apartment. And then my vision fell upon the seven tall candles upon the table. At first they wore the aspect of charity, and seemed white and slender angels who would save me; but then, all at once, there came a most deadly nausea over my spirit, and I felt every fibre in my frame thrill as if I had touched the wire of a galvanic battery, while the angel forms became meaningless spectres, with heads of flame, and I saw that from them there would be no help. And then there stole into my fancy, like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must be in the grave. The thought came gently and stealthily, and it seemed long before it attained full appreciation; but just as my spirit came at length properly to feel and entertain it, the figures of the judges vanished, as if magically, from before me; the tall candles sank into nothingness; their flames went out utterly; the blackness of darkness supervened; all sensations appeared swallowed up in a mad rushing descent as of the soul into Hades. Then silence, and stillness, night were the universe. (continue reading)

More on torture and capital punishment. More human rights stories.

Human Rights Maps (131): 9-11 and Ground Zero

Here are a few maps depicting the events of 9-11-2001. The first one shows the flight paths of the hijacked planes:

(source)

This next one shows the impact location in the two towers of the WTC, as well as the trajectory of some of the debris of the planes (the north tower, WTC 1 was hit first, 20 minutes before the second plane hit WTC 2):

(source, click image to enlarge)

This map shows which buildings were damaged or destroyed:

(source)

The following infographic explains why the buildings collapsed:

(source, click image to enlarge)

And this map shows the locations of human remains found on or around ground zero (never mind the indication of the “mosque“; some people believe that this is somehow relevant):

(source)

More on 9-11, the war on terror, al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden. More maps on terrorism. More human rights maps.

Human Rights Maps (129): London Bombings of 7/7/2005

On July 7th 2005, during the morning rush hour, a group of Muslim young men carried out a series of coordinated suicide attacks on 3 of London’s subway lines and on one double-decker bus. At 08:50, three bombs exploded within fifty seconds of each other on three London Underground trains (the three red circles in the map below), a fourth exploding an hour later at 09:47 on a double-decker bus in Tavistock Square (the red and black circle).

(source)

Here’s some more detail about the specific events and the chronology (click image to enlarge):

(source)

The map below gives some detail about the second attack, close to Russell Square:

(source)

The map below shows the last attack on the bus:

(source)

Read the full story here.

Two weeks later, on July 21st 2005, London witnessed four attempted bomb attacks, this time without much damage because the bombs failed to explode. While the manhunt for the perpetrators was in progress, on July 22nd, the police shot and killed a Brazilian man, Jean Charles de Menezes, at Stockwell tube station shortly after 10:00. Officers had pursued de Menezes from a location under surveillance, believing him to be one of the men wanted for the attempted attacks of the previous day. They apparently believed de Menezes was about to carry out a new attack. Afterwards, the police admitted that de Menezes was not involved in any of the bombings or attempted bombings. Read the whole story here and here. Here’s a map depicting the tragic event:

(source, click image to enlarge)

More maps on terrorism here. Other posts on terrorism are here. More human rights maps here.

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (77): The Execution of Hugh Despenser

Execution of Hugh Despenser, Lord of Glamorgan

(source)

An example of criminal justice in medieval England:

Hugh Despenser the younger tried to starve himself before his trial, but face trial he did on 24 November 1326, in Hereford… He was judged a traitor and a thief, and sentenced to public execution by hanging, as a thief, and drawing and quartering, as a traitor. Additionally, he was sentenced to be disemboweled for having procured discord between the King and Queen, and to be beheaded, for returning to England after having been banished.

Immediately after the trial, Despenser was dragged behind four horses to his place of execution, where a great fire was lit. He was stripped naked, and Biblical verses denouncing arrogance and evil were written on his skin. He was then hanged from a gallows 50 ft (15 m) high, but cut down before he could choke to death.

In Froissart‘s account of the execution, Despenser was then tied to a ladder, and – in full view of the crowd – had his genitals sliced off and burned (in his still-conscious sight) then his entrails slowly pulled out, and, finally, his heart cut out and thrown into the fire.

Just before he died, it is recorded that he let out a “ghastly inhuman howl”, much to the delight and merriment of the spectators. Finally, his corpse was beheaded, his body cut into four pieces, and his head was mounted on the gates of London. (source)

A similar story is here. More absurd human rights violations and more on capital punishment.

Human Rights Maps (126): Layout of Execution Rooms

This post isn’t about maps in the geographical sense, as is normally the case in this blog series about human rights maps. Still, I think it’s interesting to have a look at the topography of the death penalty, given that few among us actually know a lot about the actual practice of an execution (it’s not done in public anymore, at least not in most parts of the world).

Some are reconsidering the death penalty because of the costs involved, but not California. Here’s an image from Ari Kohen’s blog:

(source)

How nice of them to separate the two families. Let’s just hope that they won’t think that having a bigger room means having to use it more often.

An interesting setup is this one from Japan:

(source, source)

This is the execution room in the Tokyo Detention House. Notice the three buttons in the second picture, placed on the wall in a room adjacent to the actual execution room. The setup is designed in such a way that the executioner doesn’t have to come face-to-face with the convict. Moreover, the three buttons have to be pressed simultaneously by three officers, but only one button actually opens the trapdoor (red square on the floor, below the hook in the ceiling). None of the officers is told which button is the live one that will cause the prisoner’s death.

The red square on the white floor marks the spot in the windowless room where convicts stand with the noose around their neck, before a trapdoor opens below them and they plunge to their deaths. The noose is hung from the hook in the ceiling just above the trapdoor. I suppose the rings in the wall and floor are for restraining the prisoner temporarily.

Below is a floor plan of the execution room in the prison at Terre Haute, Indiana:

(source, source)

If you look carefully, you’ll notice that the viewing rooms have toilet facilities. I’m sure there’s a good reason for that.

Below is the hanging room in the Washington State Penitentiary (also called the Walla Walla State Penitentiary):

(source)

The curious thing here is that the viewing area seems to be positioned at a height that makes it possible to see the face of the convict after the drop. That’s not something I understand, or want to understand.

Between 1991 and 1998, Lucinda Devlin photographed in different penitentiaries in the U.S. She called the resulting series The Omega Suites, alluding to the final letter of the Greek alphabet as a metaphor for the finality of execution. The series includes numerous photographs of execution chambers. Here are a few:

Electric Chair, Greenhaven Correctional Facility, Greenhaven, New York, 1991

Notice the air filter just above the chair. I imagine the rubber on the floor is there to protect the executioners. The same room viewed from the executioner’s booth (notice the large switch):

Executioner's Room, Greenhaven Correctional Facility, Greenhaven, New York, 1991

(source)

Some more from the same series:

gallows at the Smyrna, Delaware prison

gas chamber in Baltimore, Maryland

(source)

There’s also this innovative approach in China.

More about capital punishment is here. More maps about capital punishment are here. More human rights maps in general are here.

Related Articles

• Japan opens up death chamber to media for first time (alternet.org)
• Human Rights Maps (116): Life Without Parole For U.S. Teenagers (filipspagnoli.wordpress.com)

Human Rights Maps (125): The Armenian Genocide

The Armenian Genocide was the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I. It was implemented through wholesale massacres and deportations, with the deportations consisting of forced marches under conditions designed to lead to the death of the deportees. The total number of resulting Armenian deaths is generally held to have been between one and one and a half million.

The starting date of the genocide is conventionally held to be April 24, 1915, the day that Ottoman authorities arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. Thereafter, the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians from their homes and forced them to march for hundreds of miles, depriving them of food and water, to the desert of what is now Syria. Massacres were indiscriminate of age or gender, with rape and other sexual abuse commonplace. The majority of Armenian diaspora communities were founded as a result of the Armenian genocide.

(source, click image to enlarge)

(source, click image to enlarge)

More about genocide. More human rights maps.

Moral Dilemma (17): Neutron Bomb or Regular Atomic Bomb?

a Soviet anti-war poster

(source)

Imagine you’re the commander in chief of a country fighting a war with a fascist dictatorship. The enemy army is losing the war but is going to fight until the last man. You have to end the war quickly or millions of soldiers – and a good number of civilians – on both sides are going to die during years of skirmishes. You basically have only one option: one huge explosion killing almost the entire enemy army, but also a large number of civilians. You have two bombs, a traditional atomic bomb and a neutron bomb.

A neutron bomb, or enhanced radiation weapon (ERW), is a type of nuclear weapon designed specifically to release a large portion of its energy as energetic neutron radiation rather than explosive energy. Although their extreme blast and heat effects are not eliminated, the increased radiation released by ERWs is meant to be a major source of casualties, able to penetrate buildings and armored vehicles to kill personnel that would otherwise be protected from the explosion. Most of the injuries inflicted by an ERW come from the intense pulse of ionizing radiation, not from heat and blast. This intense burst of high-energy neutrons is intended as the principal killing mechanism, but some amounts of heat and blast force are also produced. Neutron bombs are commonly believed to leave a good deal of the infrastructure intact.

A neutron bomb is sometimes claimed to be morally superior to a regular atomic bomb since the survivors will be able to rebuild their societies relatively quickly after the end of the war: the destruction it causes is minimal. On the other hand, the neutron bomb is commonly abhorred and has become something like the ultimate horror in popular culture.

More moral dilemma’s here. Those other dilemma’s are still open to vote, by the way. So if you have a couple of minutes, we would very much appreciate your contribution.

Measuring Human Rights (17): Human Rights and Progress

We’re all aware of the horrors of recent history. The 20th century doesn’t get a good press. And yet, most of us still think that humanity is, on average, much better off today  than it was some centuries or millennia ago. The holocaust, Rwanda, Hiroshima, AIDS, terrorism etc. don’t seem to have discouraged the idea of human progress in popular imagination. Those have been disasters of biblical proportions, and yet they are seen as temporary lapses, regrettable but exceptional incidents that did not jeopardize the overall positive evolution of mankind. Some go even further and call these events instances of “progressive violence”: disasters so awful that they bring about progress. Hitler was necessary in order to finally make Germany democratic. The Holocaust was necessary to give the Jews their homeland and the world the Universal Declaration. Evil has to become so extreme that it finally convinces humanity that evil should be abolished.

While that is obviously ludicrous, it’s true that there has been progress:

• we did practically abolish slavery
• torture seems to be much less common and much more widely condemned, despite the recent uptick
• poverty is on the retreat
• equality has come within reach for non-whites, women and minorities of different kinds
• there’s a real reduction in violence over the centuries
• war is much less common and much less bloody
• more and more countries are democracies and freedom is much more widespread
• there’s more free speech because censorship is much more difficult now thanks to the internet
• health and labor conditions have improved for large segments of humanity, resulting in booming life expectancy
• etc.

So, for a number of human rights, things seem to be progressing quite a lot. Of course, there are some areas of regress: the war on terror, gendercide, islamism etc. Still, those things don’t seem to be weighty enough to discourage the idea of progress, which is still quite popular. On the other hand, some human rights violations were caused by elements of human progress. The Holocaust, for example, would have been unimaginable outside of our modern industrial society. Hiroshima and Mutually Assured Destruction are other examples. Both nazism and communism are “progressive” philosophies in the sense that they believe that they are working for a better society.

Whatever the philosophical merits of the general idea of progress, progress in the field of respect for human rights boils down to a problem of measurement. How doe we measure the level of respect for the whole of the set of human rights? It’s difficult enough to measure respect for the present time, let alone for previous periods in human history for which data are incomplete or even totally absent. Hence, general talk about progress in the field of human rights is probably impossible. More specific measurements of parts of the system of human rights are more likely to succeed, but only for relatively recent time frames.

Bonus joke:

(source)

More posts in this series are here.

Related Articles

• Human Rights and Utopia (filipspagnoli.wordpress.com)

Human Rights Maps (123): Lynchings in the U.S.

(source)

map of lynchings by state and county in the US 1900-1930

(source; the legend is not very clear but the main message is; what is a lynching according to this map? “There must be legal evidence that a person was killed. That person must have met death illegally. A group of three or more persons must have participated in the killing. The group must have acted under the pretext of service to justice, race or tradition.”)

More data on lynchings are here. More textual information on lynchings and racism here and here respectively. More human rights maps here.

Nazism Between Utopia and Anti-Utopia

Adolf Hitler

On the one hand, Nazism was clearly a utopian movement. It wanted to create a perfect world for the pure Aryan race, devoid of degenerating forces. In a sense, it was idealistic. It had an ideal view of humanity and wanted to realize it, in part by way of the destruction of the less than ideal human beings and of those who were considered enemies of and dangerous to the better humans. Nazism had a peculiar kind of love for humanity. It’s love for humanity implied the destruction of those who abase, bring down and pollute it. Humanity was of course defined in a very particular way: true humans were the Aryans. The love for Aryans rather than hatred of Jews and other inferior beings was the prime motive. Love was what mattered, not hate, sadism, rancor or revenge. The future mattered, not our origins. People’s origins and race mattered only to the extent that racial mixing would threaten the future existence of the better race. And although there was blind and violent rage, the Nazi killings were in general rational, dutiful, professional, organized, and framed in terms of self-defense against degenerating forces.

On the other hand, as George Steiner has pointed out, Nazism was also a movement based on rancor towards Judaism and towards the impossible promise of unbearable and unattainable moral demands emanating from Judaism. Judaism presented to the world an impossible ideal, and we never hate anyone more than those who present us an impossible ideal. Nazism wanted to exterminate the Jews because Jews continuously confront humanity with its failings. The unbearable perfection caused the destruction of the emissaries of this perfection.

Steiner puts the following words in the mouth of Hitler (in “The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.):

Related Articles

• Human Rights and Utopia (filipspagnoli.wordpress.com)
• Hitler exhibition in Berlin breaks taboos on how Germany embraced the Nazis (dailymail.co.uk)

Human Rights Maps (110): Ethnic Cleansing in Europe After WWII

(source, from “Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944-1948″, Edited by Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak; click on the image to enlarge)

After WWII, millions of ethnic Germans were cleansed from the eastern parts of Europe, partly in retaliation for wartime cleansing by Nazi Germany. Read the whole story here.

Here’s another version of the map:

(source, click image to enlarge)

More maps on ethnic cleansing are here. Some more descriptive information is here. More human rights maps are here.

Related Articles

• Eric Hobsbawm on multiculturalism | Andrew Brown (guardian.co.uk)
• 40,000 Irish people to be Ethnically Cleansed (politics.ie)
• Nick Clegg rejects social ‘cleansing’ claims (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Ben Daniel: Why Do We Ignore the Plight of the Roma in Europe? (huffingtonpost.com)

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (58): Child Dying in Warsaw Ghetto

(source)

victim of famine in Warsaw ghetto

(source)

Read the story about the Warsaw Ghetto here.

More iconic images of the holocaust are here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. More textual information on the holocaust is here. More iconic images of human rights violations in general are here.

Related Articles

• Rare Nazi Warsaw Ghetto film released (bbc.co.uk)
• Richard Z. Chesnoff: A Film Unfinished: The Warsaw Ghetto As Seen Through Nazi Eyes (huffingtonpost.com)
• Sharon Waxman: Why Did the Nazis Film the Dying Jews of Warsaw? (huffingtonpost.com)

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (57): Child Survivors of the Holocaust

(source)

Child survivors of the Holocaust filmed during the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp by the Red Army, January, 1945.

More iconic images of the holocaust are here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. More textual information on the holocaust is here. More iconic images of human rights violations in general are here.

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (56): Food Theft in Sudan

Food theft in Sudan

(source)

1998 picture by British photojournalist Tom Stoddart traveling with Medicins Sans Frontieres. More on Sudan, famine and development aid. More iconic images of human rights violations are here.

Related Articles

• UK should not put trade with Sudan ahead of human rights | Tom Porteous (guardian.co.uk)
• South Sudan LRA rebel raids rise (bbc.co.uk)
• donate to Oxfam, Unicef and/or Medicins Sans Frontieres

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (64): The Commodification of Albinos

Albino boy in Tanzania

A lobby group says politicians are involved in the trade of human albino body parts in Africa and use them as charms to bring them good fortune.

Albino body parts are sold for hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars in parts of Africa. Coumba Makalou, president of the U.S.-based Salif Keita Global Foundation, a group that advocates for albinos‘ rights, says those who pay for body parts include rich businessmen and politicians looking to improve their political fortunes.

Makalou says body parts sell for as much as $2,000. At least 57 albinos have been killed in Tanzania and 14 in Burundi since 2007. Thousands of albinos are estimated to live in hiding.

The killings are fueled by superstitious beliefs that human albino body parts will bring wealth and success. (source)

More on commodification and organ trade here and here. More on dehumanization here. More absurd human rights violations here.

Related Articles

• Swaziland Tries to Protect Albinos From Witch Doctors (newser.com)
• Fighting the Limb Harvesters (thedailybeast.com)
• The Witch Doctors (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)
• Kenyan albino trafficker jailed (bbc.co.uk)

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (61): Honor Killing the Wrong People

An “honor killing” gang murdered a married couple in their home when they set fire to the wrong house. Abdullah Mohammed and wife Aysha [not in the image] suffocated after petrol was poured through their letterbox and set alight by the gang of young men. …

Four men were yesterday found guilty of murdering the husband and wife, including 21-year-old gang leader Hisamuddin Ibrahim who had intended to attack a man who was having an affair with his married sister. (source)

More on honor killings. More absurd human rights violations.

Related Articles

• Journalist: Women raped at Abu Ghraib were later ‘honor killed’ (angryindian.blogspot.com)
• Honor killings (thehill.com)
• Editorial: Only Horror in ‘Honor Killings’ (nytimes.com)

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (59): Stoning

When stonings happen, how do they work? First, you get buried. Iran’s Islamic Penal Code states that men convicted of adultery are to be buried in the ground up to their waists; women, up to their chests. If the conviction is based on the prisoner’s confession, the law says, the presiding judge casts the first stone. If the conviction is based on witness testimony, the witnesses throw the first stones, then the judge, then everyone else—generally other court officials and security forces. Stones must be of medium size, according to the penal code: Not so big that one or two could kill the person, but not so small that you would call it a pebble. In other words, about the size of a tangerine. The whole process takes less than an hour.

One possible upside of getting stoned is that people who manage to escape from the hole are allowed to go free. But this applies only to those who have confessed to their crimes. (If you were sentenced to stoning on the basis of witness testimony, then digging out of the hole does you no good.) In any case, it’s very difficult for anyone to escape the punishment: Prisoners are wrapped in a white cloth sack with their hands tied.

Stonings in Iran used to be public. Between 1983 and about 2000, anyone could attend and throw rocks. After that, public outcry against the practice grew, and stonings began to be carried out in private, often at a cemetery. In 2002, the head of Iran’s judiciary issued a moratorium on stoning sentences, but that was more of a guideline rather than a change to the law, so the practice continued even as top officials denied it. (source)

More on stoning, on Iran, on Sharia and on capital punishment. More absurd human rights violations.

Related Articles

• Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, Iran Stoning Death Woman, May Be Spared Execution, Lawyer Says (huffingtonpost.com)
• Amnesty condemns Iran over Ashtiani confession (newstatesman.com)
• Where is stoning legal, and how is it done? (msnbc.msn.com)

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (54): Oklahoma Bombing

The image of firefighter Chris Fields holding the dying infant Baylee Almon won the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography in 1996. Two people, Lester LaRue and Charles Porter, standing just three feet apart, took almost the same image yet it was Charles Porter’s image that won the Pulitzer.

Read the whole story here. More on terrorism here and here. Other iconic images of rights violations are here.

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (58): The School Where Mentally Disturbed Students Are Jolted Into Good Behavior

The only thing that sets [the] students [of the Judge Rotenberg Center, a private boarding school for special-education students in Canton, Massachusetts] apart from kids at any other school in America – aside from their special-ed designation – is the electric wires running from their backpacks to their wrists. Each wire connects to a silver-dollar-sized metal disk strapped with a cloth band to the student’s wrist, forearm, abdomen, thigh, or foot. Inside each student’s backpack is a battery and a generator, both about the size of a VHS cassette. Each generator is uniquely coded to a single keychain transmitter kept in a clear plastic box labeled with the student’s name. Staff members dressed neatly in ties and green aprons keep the boxes hooked to their belts, and their eyes trained on the students’ behavior. They stand ready, if they witness a behavior they’ve been told to target, to flip open the box, press the button, and deliver a painful two-second electrical shock into the student at the end of the wire. (source)

More on corporal punishment here, here and here. More absurd human rights violations here.

Limiting Free Speech (41): Crush Videos

In its irresistible march toward the deification of the First Amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court has again decided in favor of free speech absolutism. (And it’s not like I don’t care about free speech). In United States v Stevens the Court ruled that a federal law criminalizing the commercial production, sale, or possession of so-called crush videos was an unconstitutional abridgment of the First Amendment right to freedom of speech. The movies in question are depictions of cruelty to animals, used to satisfy a particular “sexual fetish”. They feature the intentional torture and killing of helpless animals, often by women wearing high-heeled shoes who slowly crush animals to death while talking to them in a dominatrix voice (source).

Let’s assume that cruelty to animals is universally considered a crime. If we can agree on that, we can – I think – also agree that filming a crime and distributing the movie is not, by definition, a crime in itself. On the contrary, it can help solve the crime. Think of the Rodney King video for example. However, if a crime is filmed, and the makers of the film fail to notify the authorities, then they can be considered as accomplices or guilty of criminal neglect. The crime then is the failure to notify the cops, not the act of making a video. The video itself should not be banned or criminalized, only the failure to report a crime.

But we can go one step further. In the case of crush videos, the video of animal cruelty is not contingent to the act of cruelty itself. In other words, the act of cruelty – the crime – would not have taken place had it not been filmed. The precise purpose of the act of cruelty is its videotaping and the subsequent sale of the videotaped cruelty. There would have been no crime had it not been filmed. So, we can reasonably assume that the act of cruelty, the filming of it, and the distribution of the film are in fact one and the same act. It’s therefore wrong to claim that we are dealing here with a simple case of free speech. The speech part of the act – distributing the film – is inseparable from the other parts of the act – cruelty and filming. If you care about the enforcement of anti-cruelty laws, you should make the distribution of such movies illegal and carve out an exception to free speech. If, on the contrary, you allow the distribution, then you provoke, condone or at least accept the existence of cruelty. In the words of Alito – dissenting:

criminal acts . . . cannot be prevented without targeting . . . the creation, sale, and possession for sale of depictions of animal torture.

If you enforce anti-cruelty laws, you de facto limit freedom of speech. So, either you take an absolutist position on free speech and you have to allow animal cruelty and violation of the law, or you don’t want to allow that and then you can’t take an absolutist position.

(source, click image to enlarge, more Calvin and Hobbes)

Anyway, free speech absolutism isn’t a widely held position, not even in the Supreme Court. Many kinds of speech have historically been granted no constitutional protection by the Court (“well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem”):

• obscenity
• defamation and libel
• fighting words
• incitement
• child pornography
• speech integral to criminal conduct and
• solicitation of crime.

However, in this case, the Supreme Court was not inclined to add an exception for another type of speech, even though the harms caused by animal cruelty perhaps outweigh those caused by obscenity for instance. This disinclination is even less understandable when you consider that in United States v Stevens, Justice Roberts – for the majority - cited the older rationale for prohibiting child pornography, namely that it’s a special case because the market for it is intrinsically related to the underlying abuse. How is the same rationale not applicable in the case of animal cruelty? It seems to me that both child pornography and depictions of animal cruelty fall within the Court’s longstanding jurisprudence that “speech or writing used as an integral part of conduct in violation of a valid criminal statute” (source) is a valid exception to the general rule of freedom of speech.

More posts in this series. More on animal rights. More on pornography and on sex and human rights.

Human Rights Ads (50): Stoning

(source, source)

More on stoning here, here and here. More human rights ads here.

Human Rights Maps (87): Nuclear Weapons, Ctd.

(source, click image to enlarge)

This is an update for an older post. More on nuclear weapons here. More human rights maps here.

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (46): Bombs in Breast Implants

I really hope this isn’t true:

Female homicide bombers are being fitted with exploding breast implants which are almost impossible to detect, British spies have reportedly discovered.

The shocking new Al Qaeda tactic involves radical doctors inserting the explosives in women’s breasts during plastic surgery – making them “virtually impossible to detect by the usual airport scanning machines.”

It is believed the doctors have been trained at some of Britain’s leading teaching hospitals before returning to their own countries to perform the surgical procedures.

MI5 has also discovered that extremists are inserting the explosives into the buttocks of some male bombers.

“Women suicide bombers recruited by Al Qaeda are known to have had the explosives inserted in their breasts under techniques similar to breast enhancing surgery,” Terrorist expert Joseph Farah claims. (source)

More on suicide bombers. More innovative terrorism (also here). More on the war on terror in general. More absurd human rights violations.

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (51): Palestinian Girl Buried Under Rubble During the Gaza War

Palestinians evacuate the dead body of a child from in the rubble of a four story house that collapsed when struck by an Israeli air strike on January. 6, 2009 in Gaza City, Gaza Strip. By Thair Hasani/Getty

(source)

I’ve hidden the image so as not to shock people who visit this site for the first time and don’t know what to expect. Read more about the Gaza War of the Winter of 2008/2009 here. This image reminds me of the Bhopal girl, although the circumstances are quite different. Some say that posting such images, even in a hidden manner, is needlessly shocking, a form of disaster pornography, and that my entire blog series is misguided. Generally I disagree and I think evil should be shown and not hidden away for the moral tranquility of people who have a comfortable life far away from war and suffering. (Read also the content warning for this blog). However, in this case there may be some truth to the allegation. Hamas is known to use such images for propaganda purposes, and even to use corpses as photo opportunities.

Hamas (and the Aksa Brigades, and Islamic Jihad, the whole bunch) prevents the burial, or even preparation of the bodies for burial, until the bodies are used as props in the Palestinian Passion Play. Once, in Khan Younis, I actually saw gunmen unwrap a shrouded body, carry it a hundred yards and position it atop a pile of rubble — and then wait a half-hour until photographers showed. It was one of the more horrible things I’ve seen in my life. And it’s typical of Hamas. (source)

More iconic images of human rights violations. More on Israel, Palestine and the Middle East.

Human Rights Poem (77): Once in Awhile a Protest Poem (Famine)

Once in Awhile a Protest Poem, by David Axelrod

Over and over again the papers print
the dried out tit of an African woman
holding her starving child. Over
and over, cropping it each time to one
prominent, withered tit, the feeble
infant face. Over and over to toughen
us, teach us to ignore the foam turned
dusty powder on the infant’s lips,
the mother’s sunken face (is cropped)
and filthy dress. The tit remains;
the tit held out for everyone to see,
reminding us only that we are not so hungry
ogling the tit, admiring it and in our
living rooms, making it a symbol of starving
millions; our sympathy as real as silicone.

More on famine and on disaster pornography. More human rights poems.

Moral Dilemma (13): The Responsibility of Small Contributions

screenshot from the movie "Untraceable"

(source)

In the movie Untraceable, a serial killer rigs contraptions that kill his victims based on the number of hits received by a website (“www.killwithme.com“) that features a live streaming video of the victim dying. Millions of people log on, hastening the victims’ violent deaths. The manner of murder is typically a slow process, for example putting the victim in water and replacing the water with acid. Every single website visit add a tiny amount of acid.

The movie writers assume, quite explicitly, that the serial killer has primary moral responsibility for the deaths and that the website visitors are mere accessories. However, one could plausibly argue that the serial killer is responsible only for kidnapping and hostage taking since he does not himself act in a way that leads to the murder. In that case, the group of visitors of the website is the primary or even sole perpetrator of the murders. On the other hand, one could argue that every single visitor’s contribution to the murder is insignificantly small. When the victim dies or is set to die after 10.000.000 visitors, for example, is doesn’t matter much if the 8 millionth visitor visited or not. Perhaps the 10 millionth visitor is responsible, but the script of the movie doesn’t make it clear that the threshold of number of visitors required for killing the victim is set in advance. On the contrary, the script suggests that even the kidnapper (let’s not call him killer just yet) can’t tell in advance which exact number of visitors is required to kill them victim.

So who do you think carries prime responsibility for the murder? The kidnapper? The entire group of visitors, and equally so (meaning the first visitor just as much as the last)? The last visitor (who can’t possibly know before visiting that his or her visit will be the final straw)? An indeterminate group of visitors who visit near the final moments of the victim (as the progress of the murder is streamed live on the internet, late visitors can see that death is imminent)?

More moral dilemmas (which are still open to votes by the way).

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (47): Genocide in Rwanda, the Machete Pile

Jim Nachtwey's photo of a pile of machetes used in the Rwandan genocide. Machetes were a weapon of choice, an agricultural tool found in most Rwandan households, it was easily accessible

(source)

More on James Nachtwey. More images from the genocide in Rwanda. More information on genocide. See the whole series on iconic images of human rights violations.

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (37): The Minutiae of Waterboarding

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney “specially designed” to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner’s nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding “session”. Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to “dam the runoff” and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee’s mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second “applications” of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee’s nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus. (source, source)

I’ve got my “mother post” on torture here. More on waterboarding specifically is here (or there’s also a video and some images). More on torture in general is here. And here are other absurd human rights violations.

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (35): Nicaragua, No Abortions, Ever

Although I’m ambivalent on the issue of abortion, this strikes me as absurd:

The cruelty of Nicaragua’s extreme abortion ban is undeniable in the case of Amelia (an alias), a 27-year-old woman with cancer. Passed in 2006, the law criminalizes abortion, even if the woman’s life or health is at risk. Amelia, who has a 10-year-old daughter, needs to have an abortion so she can undergo treatment for the cancer, which may have metastasized in her brain, lungs and breasts…

From a statement from … organizations [advocating on behalf of Amelia]: Even though the treating physicians concluded that the patient requires an abortion to initiate chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatment, the young woman has been hospitalized since January 29th without being able to receive an abortion and therefore, without receiving any kind of treatment to stop the cancer.

Under these circumstances, Amelia is in imminent danger of losing her life, given the impossibility of accessing an abortion. Under current Nicaraguan law, women in need of therapeutic abortions to save their life or protect their health are in fact, sentenced to death. Additionally, in this case, her minor daughter would be orphaned. (source)

More on Nicaragua. More on abortion. More absurd human rights violations.

Ironic Human Rights Violations (1): Holocaust

In this series, I understand irony as “a state of affairs that appears perversely contrary to what one expects”.

When Yitta Schwartz died last month at 93, she left behind 15 children, more than 200 grandchildren and so many great- and great-great-grandchildren that, by her family’s count, she could claim perhaps 2,000 living descendants. Mrs. Schwartz was a member of the Satmar Hasidic sect, whose couples have nine children on average and whose ranks of descendants can multiply exponentially. (source)

Yitta Schwartz was a survivor of the Holocaust, which, needless to say, was an operation intended to destroy the Jewish people… More on the Holocaust.

Human Rights and International Law (19): Child Soldiers and the Rights of the Child

[This post is by guest-writer Line Løvåsen].

In 1989, the Convention on the Rights of the Child became the first legally binding international convention to affirm human rights for all children. (Although the other, older human rights treaties and declarations of course didn’t exclude children). The Convention has the highest ratification rates of all major Human Rights Treaties with signatures from 193 States. Only the US and Somalia have yet to give their backing.

The ratification of the CRC was a monumental moment in the fight for children’s rights. With the adoption of the Convention, these rights were no longer an option–they became an obligation under international law. Two Optional Protocols, seeking to strengthen the rights set out in the Convention, were adopted in 2000.

The importance of the rights of children is obvious: our solidarity should be first and foremost with the most vulnerable. Children are more likely to be victims and therefore deserve and require our special care and concern. Their capacities and voices need strengthening. They don’t have the power, education and knowledge to fight for their rights themselves.

Child soldiers

This posts examines a particularly horrendous type of violation of children’s rights: the phenomenon of child soldiers. Here’s an overview of the participation of children and adolescents in armed conflict:

Countries with Child Soldiers fighting in current and recent conflicts (g = government forces, p = paramilitaries, o = armed opposition groups) Africa: Algeria (p,o), Angola (g,o), Burundi (g,o), Chad (g), Congo-Brazzaville (g,o), Congo-Kinshasa (g,o), Eritrea (g,o), Ethiopia (g), Liberia (g,o), Rwanda (g,o), Sierra Leone (g,p,o), Somalia (g,p,o), Sudan (g,p,o), Uganda (g,o) Asia: Afghanistan (g,p,o), India (p,o), Indonesia (p,o), Myanmar (g,o), Nepal (o), Pakistan (o), Philippines (o), Solomon Islands (o), Sri Lanka (o), East Timor (p,o), Tajikistan (o), Papua New Guinea (o), Uzbekistan (o) Middle East: Iran (g,o), Iraq (g,o), Israel/Palestine (g,o), Lebanon (o) Latin America: Colombia (p,o), Mexico (p,o), Peru (o) Europe: Russian Federation (o), Turkey (o), Yugoslavia (p,o). From the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers

In spite of the universal condemnation and prohibition on the use of children as soldiers (see for example articles 6 and 19 of the CRC), children as young as 8 continue to be enrolled in many armed forces and militant groups around the world. (There’s a map here).

Why are there child soldiers?

What drives this? Why are children recruited for warfare? First of all, the proliferation of inexpensive, lightweight weapons has made it easier to use children as soldiers. These small arms are lethal and easy to hide, transport and use with little training. (More data on the arms trade here).

Children are also relatively easy to abduct, subjugate, and manipulate. They are more impressionable and vulnerable to indoctrination, they learn skills and tasks quickly, are fast and agile on a battlefield, more willing than adults to take risks and are seen as more loyal and less threatening to adult leadership. Moreover, it is easier for children to slip through enemy lines unnoticed, making them effective spies and bomb carriers. Children are typically viewed as cheap and expendable labor; they require less food and no payment. In addition, using child soldiers can present a moral dilemma to enemies: should they kill children?

Consequences

Child soldiers are separated from their families, forced to flee their homes and schools, and in many cases, killed, maimed, sexually abused or otherwise exploited. Needless to say this has a devastating impact on their physical and mental wellbeing for the rest of their lives. They are usually forced to live under harsh conditions with insufficient food and little or no access to healthcare or education. They are almost always treated brutally, subjected to beatings and humiliating treatment. Punishments for mistakes or desertion are often very severe. They are forced to engage in hazardous activities such as laying and clearing mines or explosives, using weapons, playing the role of spies, bomb carriers, sentries and human shields.

Girl soldiers are particularly at risk of rape, sexual harassment, abuse and sexually transmitted diseases. They may give birth during their time with combatants and their children are exposed to the same dangers.

Child soldiers suffer enormous emotional, physical, developmental, social and spiritual harm.

Recruitment methods

Patterns of recruitment of children vary according to the context. Although recruitment of children by governments has been less systematic, there are reports of ad-hoc and/or forcible recruitment by groups with the acquiescence of governments such as the previous administration of the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) in Somalia.

In some instances the commanders approach the children directly and use scare tactics or entice them with money. They may also glorify freedom fighters, use gifts such as bicycles or false promises of overseas scholarships to bring the child under the control of the armed group, leaving the parents without any say. In some countries children have been told that killing the enemy is part of the Jihad, and if they die in the effort they will go to heaven. Previously recruited children are also used to recruit other children. If children resist, they are either killed, forced to participate in an assassination or put at the front line with the objective of breaking their will.

What makes children join armed forces? It’s likely to be a mix of desperation, poverty, dysfunctional schools systems, situations of extreme and traumatizing violence, the desire to take control of events, the protection offered by being at the shooting end of a gun, and peer-group pressure.

As much as we should advocate to dissuade forces from using children, the most certain way of preventing the recruitment of children is to stop civil or international conflict from occurring. As explained by a mother of three children who did not join the armed forces or groups, in Monrovia, Liberia:

If these people had not brought war, children would not have joined the fighting forces…

References

• Child Soldiers: Care and Protection of Children in Emergencies. A Field Guide, Mark Lorey, SAVE the Children Federation, 2001, Editors: Amy Hepburn and Tanya Wolfram
• Special UN Representative for Children and Armed Conflict
• Fighting Back: Child and Community-led strategies to avoid children’s recruitment into armed forces and groups in West Africa, Save the Children (funded by Oak Foundation) 2005, UK
• International Law and the Child Soldiers 1987, H. Mann, International and Comparative Law Quarterly, Vol. 36 pp 32-57
• Dr. Radhika Coomaraswamy’s, (SRSG/CAAC) Statement at the Paris International Conference “Free Children from war”, Monday, 5 February 2007

More on child soldiers. Other posts on human rights and international law. More about children’s rights.

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (42): The Last Jew of Vinnitsa

Picture, inscribed on the back as of the Last Jew in Vinnitsa, was taken by a German Einsatzgruppen soldier

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In the summer of 1941, during their invasion of the Soviet Union, German troops captured the town of Vinnitsa in Ukraine and massacred 28.000 Jews, meaning the entire Jewish population.

More iconic images of the holocaust. More information on the holocaust. More on antisemitism. See the whole series on iconic images of human rights violations.

Limiting Free Speech (39): From Hate Speech to Hate Crime, the Case of Rwanda

hate speech cartoon by David Fitzsimmons

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I’ve argued before in favor of possible and limited restrictions on hate speech (see here, here, here and here). Although I take human rights, and especially freedom of expression, very seriously (I wouldn’t be writing this blog otherwise), I also believe that hate speech can produce hate crime. It’s a thin line between hateful words and hateful actions. Impressionable people can be led to violent crimes by hate speech. This is called incitement to violence. I do understand the problems with this justification of limits on freedom of speech: it can be abused by those who want to muzzle their opponents. If people react violently to criticism, ridicule or insults, then they may claim – wrongly in my view – that the responsibility for the violent acts lies with those making “incendiary remarks”. You can read my objections against this type of argument here.

Nevertheless, I think there are other cases in which hateful words can turn into hateful crimes. The classic example is Radio Mille Collines, the Rwandan hate radio that called for the extermination of the Tutsi ethnic minority population before and during the 1994 Rwanda Genocide (it infamously swept up the Hutu’s to start a “final war” to “exterminate the cockroaches“):

During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) broadcast anti-Tutsi propaganda and called for violence against Tutsis, which many experts believe significantly contributed to the violence. An interesting new job-market paper by David Yanagizawa seeks to determine the precise role that RTLM played in the genocide. Yanagizawa relies on “arguably exogenous variation in radio coverage generated by hills in the line-of-sight between radio transmitters and village” to determine the causal effects of RTLM. He finds that RTLM played a significant role in the genocide: full village radio coverage increased violence by 65 percent to 77 percent. The effects are larger in villages with a large Hutu majority and in villages without access to other information sources i.e. villages with lower literacy rates. In total, Yanagizawa calculates that the radio station’s broadcasts explain 45,000 deaths (or 9 percent of the total death toll). (source)

If this is correct, it’s difficult to maintain the doctrinal position that freedom of speech is always and absolutely beneficial and worthy of protection without exception. Unless of course you claim that freedom of speech is more important than the right to life. I refer to an older post on balancing different human rights.

Don’t get me wrong, freedom of speech is absolutely vital, for many different reasons (some as fundamental as thought itself, see here), and no regular reader of this blog can say that I’m ambivalent about it. But what I do object to is the school of thought that believes free speech is the uppermost value, trumping all others in all cases and all circumstances. Maybe this quote from Isaiah Berlin can help to get my point across:

I came to the conclusion that there is a plurality of ideals, as there is a plurality of cultures and of temperaments. I am not a relativist; I do not say “I like my coffee with milk and you like it without; I am in favor of kindness and you prefer concentration camps” — each of us with his own values, which cannot be overcome or integrated. This I believe to be false. But I do believe that there is a plurality of values which men can and do seek, and that these values differ. There is not an infinity of them: the number of human values, of values that I can pursue while maintaining my human semblance, my human character, is finite — let us say 74, or perhaps 122, or 26, but finite, whatever it may be. (source)

This description of Berlin’s value pluralism is from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

According to Berlin’s pluralism, genuine values are many, and may—and often do—come into conflict with one another. When two or more values clash, it does not mean that one or another has been misunderstood; nor can it be said, a priori, that any one value is always more important than another. Liberty can conflict with equality or with public order; mercy with justice; love with impartiality and fairness; social and moral commitment with the disinterested pursuit of truth or beauty; … knowledge with happiness; spontaneity and free-spiritedness with dependability and responsibility. Conflicts of values are “an intrinsic, irremovable part of human life”; the idea of total human fulfillment is a chimera. “These collisions of values are of the essence of what they are and what we are”; a world in which such conflicts are resolved is not the world we know or understand. … “we are faced with choices between ends equally ultimate, and claims equally absolute, the realisation of some of which must inevitably involve the sacrifice of others”.

More on Rwanda. More on genocide. More on hate speech. More on hate crime. Read the other posts in this blog series.

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (39): Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Photo from Jürgen Stroop's report to Heinrich Himmler from May 1943, titled “The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw is no more!”. One of the best-known pictures of World War II.

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During the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Jews imprisoned there by the Germans occupying Poland during World War II, attempted unsuccessfully to oppose the Nazis’ effort to transport the remaining ghetto population to Treblinka extermination camp. The poorly armed resistance was crushed by the German troops. It was the largest single revolt by the Jews during the Holocaust. Approximately 13,000 Jews were killed in the ghetto during the uprising. Of the remaining 50,000 residents, most were captured and shipped to Treblinka. The film The Pianist by Roman Polanski offers a classic depiction of the events. The identity of the boy in the image is unknown.

More iconic images of the holocaust. More information on the holocaust. See the whole series on iconic images of human rights violations.

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (38): German Civilians forced by the US Army to Visit Buchenwald

German Civilians forced by the US Army to Visit Buchenwald. Image by Margaret Bourke-White

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Margaret Bourke-White – who also took this famous photo of Gandhi – was with General Patton’s Third Army when they reached Buchenwald on the outskirts of Weimar. Patton, outraged by what he saw, ordered his police to get a thousand civilians to make them see with their own eyes what their leaders had done.

Bourke-White said, “I saw and photographed the piles of naked, lifeless bodies, the human skeletons in furnaces, the living skeletons who would die the next day… and tattoed skin for lampshades. Using the camera was almost a relief. It interposed a slight barrier between myself and the horror in front of me”.

LIFE magazine decided to publish these photos in their May 7, 1945 issue many photographs of these atrocities, saying, “Dead men will have indeed died in vain if live men refuse to look at them”. (source)

Margaret Bourke-White prepares to take a photo of corpses, April 16, 1945

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More iconic images of the holocaust. More information on the holocaust. See the whole series on iconic images of human rights violations.

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (37): Muslim Prisoners in a Serbian Detention Camp

Read the whole story here, as well as the general story of the war in ex-Yugoslavia. Other posts on this topic are here. More iconic images of human rights violations are here.

Update January 12th, 2010: commenters tell me that this is a fake…

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (21): The North Korean Famine

The North Korean famine

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From 1995 to 1997, famine raged in North Korea. According to a report by North Korea’s Public Security Ministry, up to 3 million lost their lives (source). As this isn’t the most neutral observer, real numbers are probably much higher. (See an older post here about not trusting governments with the job of human rights measurement). Still today, the country is in such a state that it won’t take much for famine to return.

It was Kim Il Sung who used to say, “Communism is rice,” meaning the system would succeed by giving the people enough to eat. The famine was caused by mismanagement and the inability to adapt to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic transformation of China.

All that said, Kim Jong Il acted with callous disregard to the suffering of his people. Rather than lose face, the North Koreans denied the food crisis for years and then kept humanitarian aid out of the places it was most needed. The regime executed people who tried to adapt by engaging in private business.

By the way, Kim Jong Il is famous for being one of the biggest foodies in Asia. Throughout the nineteen-eighties and well into the famine, he flew couriers around the world to procure delicacies for his own palate — fresh fish from Tokyo for his sushi, cheese from France, caviar from Uzbekistan and Iran, mangoes and papaya from Thailand. (source, source)

There’s always something absurd about famines in a world where there’s plenty of food, too much even in some areas. But this one was particularly surreal. More on North Korea. More on famine. More absurd human rights violations.

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (36): Neda, Victim of Government Crackdown in Iran

A picture combo shows a screen grab posted on YouTube (L) of Iranian Neda Agha Soltani, who was reportedly killed when hit by a bullet during a protest in Tehran, along with an undated picture of her posted on the Internet on June 22, 2009. A video showing the young woman bleeding to death was put online on June 20 and has since been viewed hundreds of thousands of times around the world. Riot police fired tear gas to break up an opposition rally in Tehran on June 22, reportedly called to pay tribute to Neda, witnesses said, as demonstrators defied a warning from the Revolutionary Guards that it would crush further protests over the disputed presidential election (Photo credit AFP/Getty Images)

Read the full story here. And here is the shocking video of her death (viewer discretion required!):

Her killer has been identified as one Abbas Kargar Javid, by Dr. Arash Hejazi, the bystander who tried to stop the bleeding (source):

Neda's shooter Abbas Kargar Javid

More on the post-election protests in Iran in 2009 is here, here and here. More iconic images of human rights violations are here. Suggest a new image in this series.