Why Google Filters Out Certain Results

The Right to Clean Water

Introduction

When making assertions and declarations like everyone has a right to clean water, one should understand the underlying causes for the declaration. In 2010, the United Nations issued Resolution 64/292, which “explicitly recognized the human right to water and sanitation and acknowledged that clean drinking water and sanitation are essential to the realisation of all human rights” (“Water for Life”). On the face of it, the resolution is a positive affirmation of every human being’s right to have his most basic necessities provided for. However, under the surface one can see several other geopolitical factors that caused this resolution to be adopted. The resolution is essentially an excuse for the international community to regulate and intervene all over the world in order to “protect” those in need. When one examines the causes of an argument, one sees that there is often more than meets the eye going on. This paper will argue that the right to clean water is caused by a desire on the part of the Western international community to gain control and influence over underdeveloped nations. It will first discuss less important causes, then major causes. It will also present and refute opposing arguments.

Evidence

First Point: Clean Water Security is a Pretext for Interventionism

The UN was created in 1945 in order to bring to security to Europe and the wider world after WW2. It also sought to promote human rights, social progress and higher living standards (“History of UN”). One right that it has promoted and affirmed is the right of all people to have access to clean water. This means that no matter where one lives—even if it is in the desert—that person has a right to clean water and the international community has a social responsibility to ensure that this right is met. Since the time of the resolution on the right to clean water, the UN has gone on to embrace climate justice and to promote regime compliance. By emphasizing the need for water to support all life—something no one is going to deny—the UN opens the door for international powers to exert more control and regulations over other states so as to enforce regime compliance for the good of the people.

It is however merely a pretext for international meddling in underdeveloped states. One should ask, for instance, why the US should be concerned that Syria (which it has bombed and attacked and whose infrastructure it has helped to destroy by supporting rebels there) lacks access to clean water—especially when its own cities, like Flint, Michigan, have polluted water coming out of the taps (Denchak)? The reason is that it all links in with the idea of climate justice and things like the Paris Accords, which have set high standards for revamping the entire global infrastructure in order to save the environment. Why? Again, there are underlying causes at play: whenever new infrastructure is needed, there are huge amounts of money to be made. The push for climate justice is actually a push from behind the scenes by big money interests to capitalize on fear propaganda and authoritarian pronouncements that everyone must be regulated by the international order to achieve regime compliance (Slate).

When most people talk about everyone having a right to clean water they are not thinking about these underlying causes: they are only thinking that water is necessary and good and people should have it. But for thousands of years of human history, people have generally understood that. It is why civilizations have grown up around and near water. Saying that water is good and necessary is just common sense. But the UN is not saying that, nor is the international order: they are saying that people have a right to clean water, which is something else entirely. They are saying that every person everywhere should have access to water—and the assumption is that if those people are not granted that access by their state, the international community can take steps to intervene and put pressure on the state through sanctions or even through direct humanitarian interventions.

That means a nation in the West could ostensibly invade an African nation under the pretext of a humanitarian crisis involving lack of access to water. Say there is a drought one year, as often happens, and people suffer. The international community could see this as an opportunity to set up shop in a poor country and begin exploiting its resources under the guise of brining humanitarian aid. It has happened before and happens today: the UN is often a blanket excuse organization that enables this kind of fraudulent intervention for the purposes of geopolitical control—that is what the R2P (Right to Protect) doctrine is all about (Welsh).

Second Point: Necessities are Not Rights

By turning clean water into a human right, the international community turns the natural operations of human order upside down. People have basic human needs, and in charity others should help them to satisfy those needs. Calling a need a right is akin to elevating that need to the level of entitlement. It is like saying everyone has a right to education, or everyone has a right to have the Internet—but this is not true. Entitlement is a legalism; it is a judicial approach to human order that should be supported by love and human kindness—not by the heavy hand of the law. Entitlements are to law as needs are to human charity. Turning a need into a right turns charity out and replaces it with a police force. It is the very essence of Soviet Union style of control. Underlying the assertion that everyone has a right to clean water is the spirit of Stalinism displacing the spirit of Christ.

This type of Stalinist spirit is damaging to all people the world over because Stalin’s main focus was on power—not on satisfying people’s needs (Gitlow). Thus, when the UN puts out an order calling the lack of people’s access to clean water a “moral failure” (UN), it is serving up the same kind of excuses that Stalin used to undermine anyone who opposed his authority: he called them morally corrupt and entertained no other explanation for the situation (Gitlow).

And just like Stalin would cite all sorts of stats and figures to justify his own policies and plans, the UN today does the same: its leaders make totally unverifiable claims (or at best they are claims based on cherry-picked data) like this: “The planetary crisis, including the interlinked threats of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution, will increase water scarcity…By 2040, one in four of the world’s children under 18 – some 600 million – will be living in areas of extremely high-water stress” (UN). Such claims have been countered thousands of times by individuals who know that the climate change fear propaganda is based on biased studies. Big Tech supports this bias: Google “climate change cherry-picked data” and all the results on the first page will be how climate deniers use cherry-picked data; there will be no links to articles suggesting that climate change fear propagandists are the ones cherry-picking the data. This is just how Stalin operated: he gained control of the press, used the media to spin his own narratives in a favorable light, and crushed any oppositional voices. Google claims to be unbiased, but even reporters at The Wall Street Journal have pointed out that Google tweaks its algorithms to filter out results that it does not want people to see (Grind et al.). And the same people behind Google and the rest of Big Tech (companies like Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft and Tesla) are the same ones pushing for regime compliance. As George Carlin used to say to the people in his audiences, “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.” The “big club” is intent on promoting its own agenda, and it uses “rights”—i.e., entitlement (an appealing lure to people have no entitlements)—to justify its policy of interventionism and monopoly.

The reality—as exposed by researchers who actually leave their offices and go do research in the field—shows that people are not as worried about climate change as the major news outlets and Big Tech companies and UN international order would have people think. As McNamara and Gibson have shown in their study, people in the Indo-Pacific have no desire to be labeled as climate refugees: they have lived in their homes for generations and have seen climate fluctuation all their lives; they have weathered the bad times and enjoyed the good times. They are not victims of what the UN calls climate change. They are people whose different way of life is being exploited by unscrupulous researchers, politicians, and media outlets. McNamara and Gibson are not the only researchers to point this out. Farbotko and Lazarus have pointed out how disingenuous the narratives in the media are about climate refugees and climate mobility. Tacoli does as well. What they all show is that when researchers conduct unbiased research, they discover that the narratives of alarm surrounding climate change are the poor people affected by it are not rooted in reality.

Opposition Argument

Yet the opposing argument is that clean water is not getting to the people who need it, as is the case in parts of China, or the Middle East, or Africa, or the American Southwest. Nations have a responsibility to help people get clean water. Regardless of whether one thinks climate change is real or not, lack of access to clean water is a problem and it needs to be addressed.

This argument is actually fine and good. But notice that one is now talking about “needs” as opposed to “rights.” If the argument is flipped to say that everyone has a right to clean water, it opens the door to the bigger problem of interventionism and legalism, regulatory action and sanctions. By discussing the problem of lack of access to clean water as an issue that needs to be addressed, one keeps it in the realm of human agency and charity—of looking to see what is really needed, first and foremost, and then of acting to address that need insofar as is possible.

But what happens if the opposing argument presents its case from the standpoint of rights? It would go something like this: everyone has a right to clean water, and that right is not being satisfied in parts of China, in the Middle East, Africa, the American Southwest, and so on. Therefore, a new policy is needed at the international order to address this situation and bring equality to all. This argument is problematic because it rests on a number of invalid assumptions, which shall now to be examined.

Rebuttal

The first assumption of the opposing argument is that water is a right. Who gave everyone this entitlement? Does the person who chooses to live in a dry part of the country have this entitlement? Why? Did he inherit it? Is it just something he believes he possesses because he was born into this world? Others might make an effort to be near a clean water source and to put down roots there, but he does not—because he is entitled to have the water brought to him, as though he were equal to a king. This is an important point to make. When the UN talks about equality, one must ask—equal at what level? Equal at the level of the peasant, or equal at the level of a king?

If everyone expects to be treated like a king because of the entitlements the UN says they all have, the world is sorely mistaken. The only equality that will come will be that of the peasant, as Gitlow showed was precisely the case under Stalin. Those who have water will see it taken away and wasted as hapless states attempt to control water supplies and ration clean water. It will end up being so that no one has clean water anywhere except for the kings—the good pigs ruling the Animal Farm that Orwell described.

This is why one must stop and think about the causes—the reasons—that arguments and assertions are made, especially by the international community at the UN. These people have a very poor track record when it comes to actually caring about “the people”—they have bombed countless nations and called it “humanitarian intervention” and they have routinely stood up this notion of human rights in order to create a Stalinist environment in which every state must bow and submit to the international order regardless of its own sovereignty. Just look at what the West has done to Iran or Libya or Iraq or Syria or numerous other nations over the past century and a half. The people of these nations must not matter. The million dead Iraqis who died as a result of the US invasion following 9/11 must not matter. What matters to the people at the UN is that everyone gets a dose of their rich virtue signaling and drinks the kool-aid of climate change, so that the international leaders can get the support they need from the people at home to go and invade, intervene, regulate, and dominate in a neo-colonial style of global geopolitical maneuvering.