ACTUALLY, THEY'RE RIGHT

From Reuters via the Huffington Post news wire:

China Tells U.S. To Quit As Human Rights Judge

The United States is beset by violence, racism and torture and has no authority to condemn other governments' human rights problems, China said on Sunday, countering U.S. criticism of Beijing's crackdown.

The row between Beijing and Washington over human rights has intensified since China's ruling Communist Party extended its clampdown on dissidents and rights activists, a move which has sparked an outcry from Washington and other Western governments.

And

Its Foreign Ministry on Saturday dismissed the U.S. report as meddling, and its own annual report about U.S. human rights stressed Beijing's dismissive view.

"Stop the domineering behavior of exploiting human rights to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries," it said, according to excerpts published by the official Xinhua news agency.

"The United States ignores its own severe human rights problems, ardently promoting its so-called 'human rights diplomacy', treating human rights as a political tool to vilify other countries and to advance its own strategic interests," said a passage from the Chinese report

More here.

I'm certainly not going to get into any kind of discussion about which country honors human rights better because, in the end, I don't really know. I mean, China's bad, sure, but so are we. A decade ago, I would have never even entertained the possibility that our human rights record might be worse than China's, but that was before the Bush administration. Since 2001, we have essentially suspended habeas corpus. It is now legal for the federal government to spy on US citizens. We now openly torture prisoners of war; we are now openly torturing accused Wikileaker Bradley Manning, an American citizen. We have also denied access to civilian courts to US citizens accused of aiding terrorists. It is not controversial to observe that President Obama continues to execute all of these anti-human rights policies.

But even before the Bush administration our human rights record was dubious, at the very least, and all of these violations continue today unabated. We incarcerate an enormous percentage of our population, with extraordinarily high concentrations of non-whites, especially African-American men. We torture prisoners. We encourage prison rape. We enact economic policy that ensures chronic poverty for large segments of the citizenry while enriching a relative few white men. The sex slave trade thrives here. We allow masses of undocumented workers to toil in utterly inhumane conditions. In the name of the people, we murder citizens convicted of crimes. And on and on.

I mean, it didn't look pretty before, but since 9/11 it's a whole lot worse. China's definitely got a point here: the United States can no longer even pretend that we're a just nation with deep concern for human rights. We no longer have the moral authority to tell other nations what to do in terms of how they treat their own people. We are not a credible moral force.

And that's really fucking sad.

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