Episode 24: Some Restrictions Apply

In this episode, Peter and Steve take a close look at a document most people assume they already understand: the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Steve traces how he first stumbled onto the question at the 2023 Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago, where a line in the Declaration's preamble caught his eye and was waved off by the panelists. That line says human rights should be protected by the rule of law "if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression." Tyranny and oppression, as Steve points out, are simply two synonyms for domination.

The conversation then turns to what the drafters wrote before they wrote that. The first draft, dated June 4, 1947, had no preamble at all. Its Article 29 was a single sentence: "Everyone has the right, either individually or with others, to resist oppression and tyranny." Eighteen months later, when the Declaration was adopted on December 10, 1948, that sentence was gone. In its place stood three clauses about duties to the community, limitations "determined by law," and a prohibition on exercising rights "contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations." A right to resist became a duty to obey, with rebellion demoted to a last resort after every procedure and tribunal has been exhausted.

Peter and Steve ask what that reversal reveals. The United States and France, whose revolutions were premised on exactly the right the 1947 draft affirmed, were central to producing a final text that folds resistance into a complaint system administered by the state. From there the discussion widens: what is a "right," what is "the state," what is a "person"? These are ideas treated as if they were physical realities, and yet real people in bureaucracies embody them and enforce them. Steve draws on the 1608 Calvin's Case, in which English judges declared allegiance was owed not to England or the crown but to the person of the king, to show how the whole structure rests on a mental world of projected relationships.

The episode closes on the View from the Shore. Steve reconsiders the language of "dehumanization," suggesting that the projection of "heathen," "pagan," and "infidel" onto Native ancestors was the dehumanizing step, while the brutal "humanizing" process, the California missions being one example, was the forcing of those ancestors under the domination system. If "person" comes from the Greek word for mask, then a right to personhood is a right to an identity card issued by the state. As Peter's t-shirt puts it: Land of the Free. Some restrictions apply. Void where prohibited.

Listen for a conversation that reads the fine print on human rights from the vantage point of those who were never asked to sign.

#HumanRights #UDHR #UniversalDeclarationOfHumanRights #RightToResist #Domination #DominationSystem #DoctrineOfDiscovery #ViewFromTheShore #Decolonize #IndigenousRights #IndigenousSovereignty #UnitedNations #Podcast

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