The World
My world view - Western values are the best
I believe in
the western Enlightenment model of free speech, human rights,
democracy and capitalism.
These ideas are universal, and they will work
for every country that adopts them.
Every country in the world should adopt these ideas.
They will be much freer, much happier,
and incidentally much richer,
if they do.
If the whole world adopts these ideas
it will mean
the end of war
forever.
This isn't an opinion.
This is statistical fact.
My world view might be shocking
if you were brought up in the polite left-liberal
consensus in Europe.
My view is that there is something basically wrong
with the non-westernised world.
My view is that humanity has discovered the correct way
to live - the so-called western way - and any country in the world
that doesn't adopt it is simply backward.
Other races aren't backward. Other cultures are.
Western values - reason, science, democracy, free speech,
freedom of religion, free press,
a secular state, private property, free enterprise, and so on -
are not the property of one racial group (as America itself shows).
They belong to all races,
and these values should be adopted by the
whole world.
My world view - Defend the West (and all free countries)
My world view can be summed up by
Freedom House's list of free and unfree countries.
Freedom House
divides the world into
"Free", "Partly Free" and "Not Free".
Accepting that one could debate indefinitely where to draw the lines,
Freedom House's division does express a basic truth about the world.
About 2 billion people in the world
live in unfree countries,
and every civilized person must hope for their liberation.
For me, an ethical foreign policy would be
to be allies (including formal military allies)
of the countries in the "Free" category,
to be
neutral
about the countries in the "Partly Free" category,
and to be formally hostile
to the regimes in the "Not Free" category.
If you think that sounds reasonable, then why don't you
read
what countries are in each category,
and then you will realise how
skewed our foreign policy currently is.
I regard every regime in the "Not Free" category
as invalid and illegitimate.
These regimes have no right to exist
and should be replaced by free democracies.
I do not recognise as valid any vote in which these regimes
participated
- such as
UN resolutions,
UN world conferences,
or
Arab League meetings.
Is it simplistic to rank countries, as Freedom House does?
I prefer
Freedom House to
other human rights groups
such as Amnesty International
since the other groups refuse to rank countries.
They refuse to say
that such a thing as a "free world" exists
- that, for example,
the Netherlands is more free than Saudi Arabia.
Instead, they just list criticisms of each country.
But since every country can be criticised about something,
why should one take, say, criticisms of Sudan, China or
North Korea seriously.
After all, Britain and France can be criticised too.
So yes, Amnesty and the others do important work,
but they should have the courage to say that
there is such a thing as the free world
and it is not perfect but
it is better than the unfree world.
Map of world freedom 2006,
based on rankings of
Freedom House.
Green - "Free".
Yellow - "Partly Free".
Purple - "Not Free".
See full size:
Political freedom
- Freedom House
(and here
and here)
is my preferred source of human rights country reports.
- Freedom in the World report 2006
- Freedom in the World report 2005
- Freedom in the World report 2004
- press release
-
Summary chart:
-
Comparison of freedom of countries with their prosperity:
shows that political freedom makes you rich.
-
Of the 48 high-income countries,
80 percent of them rank as "Free" on political freedom.
-
At the very top,
20 out of 20 of the top richest countries in the world are "Free".
- Of the "Not Free" countries,
76 percent of them are low-income,
24 percent are middle or high income.
- Of the "Partly Free" countries,
71 percent are low-income,
29 percent are middle or high income.
- Of the "Free" countries,
17 percent are low-income,
83 percent are middle or high income.
- "Free" countries account for 89 percent of the world's wealth.
They are rich because they are free,
not for any other reason.
- There is a clear correlation
between political freedom and prosperity,
just as there is
between economic freedom and prosperity.
Why is the world too stupid to see this? Why don't they
embrace freedom too?
- Freedom in the World report 2003
- Freedom in the World report 2002
- Freedom in the World
report 2001
Criticism of human rights groups
Freedom House is the most objective human rights organisation.
The others do useful work, but
allow politics to influence what they say
and which countries they focus on.
- Amnesty
- I have mixed feelings about Amnesty.
They have the standard leftist blind spot on anything
that America and Israel are doing,
and they are not trustworthy on those issues.
But on other parts of the world they are fairly objective.
They are willing to criticise
communists,
Muslims, Arabs
and black Africans,
for example
(whereas many on the left won't).
- America, Iraq, War on Islamism
- Amnesty were objective (and pioneering) in attacking Saddam when he was
an ally of the west.
But they lost their objectivity when he became
an enemy of the west.
-
The Trouble With Amnesty, December 8, 2002
- Amnesty are so anti-war,
they don't want anyone to actually
depose
the worst human-rights abusing regimes.
Now that someone is
doing something about Iraq,
they suddenly want to
keep Iraqis oppressed.
Also
here.
-
Amnesty for Iraq, April 24, 2003,
by Christopher Archangelli
- Amnesty's poor performance during the war,
when Iraq's losing strategy consisted almost entirely of war crimes,
yet Amnesty still kept focusing on the Allies.
-
Calling It Like They See It, 3 Apr 2003
- Jonathan V. Last on Amnesty.
-
Amnesty "sells out" on Iraq
(also here), Mar 2003
- i.e. They sell out to their mainly left-wing members
by allowing politics to decide what abuses they highlight,
rather than highlighting the worst abuses, no matter who did them.
- Amnesty Ireland disgrace themselves
by inviting
Noam Chomsky
to deliver the
2006 Amnesty Lecture.
- Israel
- NGO Monitor
(and here
and here
and search)
on Amnesty's anti-Israel bias.
- Summary:
"in 2006, Amnesty singled out Israel for condemnation of human rights
to a far greater extent than Iran, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Syria, Egypt,
and other chronic abusers of human rights.
During the year, Amnesty issued 48 publications critical of Israel, compared to 35 for Iran, 2 for Saudi Arabia, and only 7 for Syria."
-
Amnesty calls for an arms embargo on Israel.
- Death penalty
- I also don't agree with Amnesty on the
death penalty for murderers.
Amnesty use this issue to focus a disproportionate amount of attention
on the free democracy of America,
which gets more of their attention than many utterly
unfree tyrannies.
- HRW
- Iraq
- Israel
- Islamic fundamentalism
- U.S. State Department
- Israel
-
Surrealism vs Reality
by Caroline Glick
- on the bias of U.S. State Department
Human Rights Reports
on Israel and Palestine.
- "The report very sensitively gives the names of a dozen or so Palestinian children who died during Israeli assaults against Palestinian terrorists who used these children for cover.
Yet, grotesquely, while the names of Palestinian children are listed, the report provides not one name of any Israeli victim of Palestinian terrorism."
- Freedom House is the only unbiased human rights reporter.
Amnesty, HRW and the U.S. State Department are useful sources of information,
but one must read around their political biases each time.
- NGO Monitor
-
Survey of human-rights criticisms by churches
sums up the entire problem with the western left.
Amnesty's lowest moment
- The claim that America runs a "gulag", May 2005
Again, I still support Amnesty - for the work they do outside of their leftist blind spots.
I do not trust anything they say about America or Israel.
But they still do good work elsewhere in the world.
The "gulag" comment, though, must represent Amnesty's lowest moment ever.
- Guantanamo Bay
-
Amnesty call Guantanamo Bay "the gulag of our time",
simultaneously trivialising
the Soviet gulags,
ignoring the real North Korean gulags,
and absurdly smearing a
POW
camp as if it is a jail for dissidents.
- The Soviet democide
- Rudolph J. Rummel
estimates that 39 million innocent people
died in the Soviet gulags.
-
Amnesty's Idiocy
by John Podhoretz, on the difference between Guantanamo and a real gulag.
"Maybe the people who work at Amnesty International really do think that
the imprisonment of 600 certain or suspected terrorists is tantamount to
the imprisonment of 25 million slaves.
The case of Amnesty International proves that well-meaning people can make morality their life's work
and still be little more than moral idiots."
- The Jawa Report,
on what the Soviet gulags were really like.
"For Amnesty International to stoop to the low of making such a comparison
reveals their ignorance of history
and their political bias against the United States.
...
Shame on you Amnesty International, I will never take your accusations seriously again."
- Austin Bay
is more like me
- he wants to save Amnesty, not just condemn it.
"Amnesty International is paying a hard price for its PR cheap shot, and it should.
.. Amnesty's current leadership inhabits a self-referential echo chamber, and over the next few months
will find that there is such a thing as bad publicity
...
The gulag accusation hurts the organization, and at some level its leaders know it.
Amnesty's leaders could beat their own mistake by coolly retracting the gulag comparison
and then insisting they stand for the human rights of prisoners everywhere,
even the rights of mass murdering terrorists. Now that would be a tough, principled action
- accepting responsibility for a mistake and then making a plea for the fair, just treatment of prisoners.
But I doubt if the organization's leaders have the class and wits to do this.
...
This entire, sad incident suggests that Amnesty's leadership cadre desperately needs some real diversity."
- People who were actually in the gulag
criticise Amnesty:
- Pavel Litvinov:
"By any standard, Guantanamo and similar American-run prisons elsewhere do not resemble,
in their conditions of detention or their scale, the concentration camp system
that was at the core of a totalitarian communist system."
- Natan Sharanksy
describes Amnesty's gulag analogy as
"typical, unfortunately".
- James Taranto,
November 21, 2006,
on a case where a jihadi is refusing to have a required heart procedure
done at Guantanamo because he thinks its medical facilities are inadequate.
"The poor terrorist has to get a lawyer to keep those monsters at Guantanamo
from performing life-saving surgery on him.
You see why people keep comparing Guantanamo to Nazi Germany. The parallels are eerie."
As an atheist,
I stand completely with religious people everywhere
who are not free to practice their religion.
Most of the religious intolerance in the world
is in Islamic states
and communist states.
Persecution of Christians worldwide
For me, the most important issue
in all future world politics
is the need to prevent genocide and mass murder by dictators.
The only real, long-term solution to this
is to end
all dictatorships.
- The arrest of Pinochet, 1998, and
immunity for mass-murderers:
- The reality is that there is no such thing as law in this world,
and there never has been.
Within a sovereign state governments can do anything they like.
Murder, rape, torture and genocide go unpunished as they have always done.
And Pinochet's
arrest is one of the few hopeful signs
that at last there may come into existence
a form of law for this long-suffering planet.
- Sovereignty - the friend of tyrants
-
The Sovereignty Con
by Ralph Peters
rages furiously against the UN and the left's
defence of "sovereignty".
- "Today, claims of territorial sovereignty by dictators and
illegitimate regimes
amount to the biggest con in history.
No
matter how unfairly borders are drawn, no matter how
monstrously tyrants behave toward their populations, no
matter how ruthlessly a strongman seizes power, the world
pretends that
those who hold the reins in the capital city are
entitled to do whatever
they want on their own territory.
The current system is the greatest collective violation of
human rights in our time.
The United States must shatter this
antiquated scam"
- "today's international revolutionaries are on
the political right.
The left wing represents the ancien regime"
- Unfree regimes have no right to exist
and "every government should be
of the people, by the people,
and for the people"
- this sums up the revolution of the right.
-
This sick petition in support of Castro's Cuba
explicitly calls on the world
to "uphold the universal principles of national sovereignty,
respect for territorial integrity
and self-determination".
This is what the left stands for - not human rights.
-
Sovereignty can't protect mass killers
by Robert
Horvath
- "Why can't John Pilger et al
see that human rights are more important
than sovereignty?"
Rudolph J. Rummel
has done some of the most exhaustive statistics
of history's genocide and state mass murder.
He has come to a simple, but totally unappreciated, point,
that, I believe, is now the central point of world politics.
Democracy brings peace, life and prosperity.
A powerful state brings war, genocide, death,
poverty and famine.
It's not an opinion.
It's statistical fact.
Reading these statistics
should innoculate you against all philosophies
(e.g. socialism)
that demand a powerful state.
Return to
Politics
page.
Russia downgraded to "Not Free".
Putin
is now officially listed as a dictator.
