Rousseau and Human Rights

1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights Rousseau stated in his Social Contract that “Man is born free—and everywhere he is in chains.”[footnoteRef:2] The insistence on man’s nature right of freedom from the Enlightenment Era philosopher helped pave the way for the French Revolution with its insistence on liberty, fraternity and equality.

A century and a half later, those same ideals would still hold significant appeal for the Western nations, especially following two World Wars in the 20th century that decimated Europe and parts of Asia.

Liberalism was the main driver of the UN’s declaration of human rights—but the coming Cold War, the onset of which was very much in the minds of world leaders immediately following the carve-up of Europe between the unlikely Allies (capitalists in the West, Communists in the East), also played a part in the declaration: the West was anxious to promote itself as the standard bearer of liberal ideals—freedom, democracy, equality, brotherhood, human rights—i.e., the natural rights of man, as defined by the Enlightenment Era thinkers like Rousseau and Locke, whose ideas had come to be enshrined in modern Western politics.

[2: Rousseau, Social Contract, 1.] Locke was opposed to the idea of the “divine right of kings”[footnoteRef:3]—just as Rousseau had been (their antipathy towards anything smacking of Old World ways or values routinely informed their writing). This opposition to kingship was heralded by the American Revolutionaries and noted in the Declaration of Independence, infused as it was with the spirit of Thomas Paine, a virulent anti-monarchist.

The monarchy represented the Old World power structure and what was left it following the Protestant Reformation and the splitting apart of Christendom, which had held distinctly different ideals than the ones that Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire and others proposed. [3: Locke, J. Two Treatises on Government. ISR: Google Books.] By reaffirming its stance towards promoting human rights, equality, liberty and so on, the Western nations, through the mouthpiece of the EU were showing the Eastern nations that they essentially opposed their ideology.

Stalin was basically a monarch in Soviet Russia—lacking all but the title to go with his unquestioned power. Mao in Communist China would essentially become the Chinese version of Stalin—and both opposed the West’s liberal influence. The East held collectivist views and promoted the concept of everyone contributing to the whole, as opposed to the concepts of individualism, individual liberty, and equality for all.

Of course, the West did not really believe in these ideals either (and Jim Crow in the States showed it), but it at least paid lip service to them as a means of positioning itself as the morally superior half of the world at the end of WWII and outset of the Cold War. The West was showing it still opposed the idea of the “divine right of kings”—at least when other competitors claimed that right.

When the West (particularly the U.S.) claimed that right through the promotion of concepts like Manifest Destiny (a divine right of the Republic to expand its boundaries and rule the world, essentially), it had no problem with claiming a divine mandate—none whatsoever.

That was, after all, how it had pushed the Western frontier all the way to the Pacific, how it had taken Hawaii, and how it had gotten into Asia starting with the Spanish American War and culminating with the essential takeover of Japan, which would become a kind of client-state of the U.S. in the following decades. The U.S.

would keep pushing, reshaping the Middle East to serve its and (51st state) Israel’s interests—all, of course, in the name of human rights, as though dropping bombs on hundreds of thousands of people and sacrificing the lives of a million Iraqis somehow could be understood as a humanitarian intervention.

The UN’s declaration of human rights meant to build on the tradition of the West of the past 300 years—a tradition that was largely mere political dressing for the reality of the times, which were a total shakeup of the Old World order and the implementation of a new order based not on religious beliefs or dynastic assembly but rather on wealth, the levers of finance, and the use of sheer force in dominating opponents when wealth and finance failed to lure them in.

The past 300 years were shaped by Enlightenment shape in terms of politics, but in terms of practical policy, they were shaped as much by the engineers of high finance and the Age of Rothschild as by anything else. Human rights were just window dressing—a way for the ruling classes to sell their actions to the public and give them a moral stamp, since Old World morality was not permitted to rear its head now that Christendom had fallen.

The ruling classes of the West were primarily of two groups—WASPs (White Anglo Saxon Protestants) and Jews—and both believed themselves the chosen people of God. Therefore, using the writings of Rousseau to dress.