Human Rights in a Divided & Dangerous World

HUMAN RIGHTS, 13 Oct 2025

Michael Nutkiewicz | Z - TRANSCEND Media Service

A severely malnourished girl in Gaza. Aid teams have repeatedly called for Israel to allow much more aid to enter Gaza to prevent the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe.  (Image © WHO)

4 Oct 2025 – Do human rights still matter in a divided and dangerous world? Does the fact that they are violated invalidate them as tools for making the world safer and fairer? Are there concrete ways to strengthen our understanding and commitment to human rights?

Since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights came out of the Holocaust, I’ll start by making some key observations about that event and its relevance to human rights. Studying just one Nazi camp reveals that the statement “it takes a village” can be applied to a village of evil. Take the death camp Treblinka located 50 miles northeast of Warsaw, which at its peak processed between 10,000 – 12,000 people a day. In total, about 800,000 men, women, and children were murdered there.

What sort of infrastructure, technology, and personnel did it take to kill that many people? How many architects worked on the design of the camp, and how many bricklayers, carpenters, and painters were involved in constructing and maintaining the gas chambers, cremation pyres, barracks, repair shops, offices, and other structures on the 42-acre site? How many lawyers were involved in drafting and reviewing legal documents? How many engineers worked on the gas chamber’s blueprints, which required special airtight doors and a ventilation system? What company made the galvanized walls that lined the gas chambers? Who made and maintained the engine and generator that sent the carbon monoxide into the chambers?

The train system alone boggles the mind: 130,000 freight trains carried Jews and other victims across Europe to death camps and labor camps. A half million civil servants, twice the number of other employees in Nazi Germany, were responsible for billing the SS, figuring out the routes, scheduling the departures and return, maintaining the tracks, loading and sealing the cars, and cleaning them after they delivered their human freight.

Now consider the logistics and manpower required to establish and run six killing centers in Poland, of which Treblinka was one, and approximately 44,000 subcamps, concentration camps, forced labor camps, transit camps, prisoner of war camps, and ghettos located throughout occupied Europe.

As the historian Raul Hilberg taught us, the lawyers, engineers, architects, chemists, and clerks were not part of an ideological vanguard. The daily tasks that made genocide possible was not managed by fanatical believers in Nazi principles. Most Germans were not card-carrying Nazis. Government and private sector bureaucrats simply applied their expertise to the problem at hand, namely, how to move and kill millions of people spread across a huge geographic area. When you deconstruct the Holocaust to its details, you see that the tasks and the people carrying them out were actually very ordinary: in each agency, department, and office, the officials were asked to do what they did on a daily basis. Hilberg concluded that: “The destruction of the Jews was an administrative process, and the annihilation of Jewry required the implementation of systematic administrative measures in successive steps.”

It is this very ordinariness that led the sociologist Zygmund Bauman to conclude: “We can no longer assume that we have a full grasp of the workings of our social institutions, bureaucratic structures, or technology.” It would be easier to understand the Holocaust by simply showing that everyone involved was fanatical. But that was not the case.

Of course, the genocide could not have occurred without an ideology that rationalized and justified German policy. Nazi ideology was a cluster of ideas that the German elite and many ordinary Germans accepted as a correct description of the world.

We have two take-aways from a study of the Holocaust: The first is that a policy whose goal is to eliminate or partially eliminate a group requires an ideology – whether couched in nationalistic, religious, political terms, or a mixture of these ideas – that serves as rationale and justification for laws and policies that take away fundamental human rights.

The second take-away is an insight about bureaucracies, namely, they are essential to any large-scale assault against people. As the historian Hilberg wrote: “There are not many ways in which a modern society can, in short order, kill a large number of people living in its midst….Yet, in reviewing the documentary record of the destruction of the Jews, one is almost immediately impressed by the fact that the German administration knew what it was doing. With an unfailing sense of direction and with an uncanny path-finding ability, the German bureaucracy found the shortest road to the final goal.” Hilberg’s statement encapsulates what can happen when a state’s civil service is co-opted on behalf of illiberal, autocratic, populist, or totalitarian regimes.

The philosopher Elaine Scarry suggests a psychological factor besides ideology and the bureaucratic will that gives license to cause harm. She calls it “The Difficulty of Imagining Other People.” “The human capacity to injure other people,” she writes, “is very great precisely because our capacity to imagine other people is very small.” Human beings find it difficult to empathize with people they don’t know, or at least with people unlike them. The fact that someone can torture another person is rooted in the inability to see oneself in that person. Nazi commanders were able to order the death of Jewish children and then come home to their own children and be good fathers. The difficulty of imagining other people is a psychological barrier to empathy. Human rights, however, are premised on a universalism that insists that laws apply equally to every individual without prejudice.

And now we come to a troubling observation and question. For 80 years scholars, theologians, writers, filmmakers, and artists have been pondering the “lessons learned” from the Holocaust. But in the 80 years since the end of World War II, we have seen genocides, mass killings, violent revolutions, and human rights abuses. In its 2023 report, Human Rights Watch calls out 103 countries for various abuses of human rights. In its report, Freedom House ranks 84 out of 195 countries as “free.” That means that 111 countries have not reached that status.

Further, we see undemocratic, hyper-nationalist and racist political parties take hold or make gains in democratic nations, most recently, in the United States. And, their success is not achieved through revolution or military coups, but by capturing the very instruments of civil society – elections, government bureaucracies, courts, and media – that are supposed to keep us democratic.

The process goes something like this: charismatic new leaders are elected and then use their electoral mandates to legally dismantle the constitutional systems. In every case, these populist leaders attack the civil service (sometimes termed by the bureaucratic sounding term, “the administrative state”), which consists of the professionals that staff the departments and agencies and that make government work on behalf of its citizens. They characterize the administrative state as the “dark state” or “deep state.” Once in power they attempt to dismantle the civil service: for example, agencies are defunded to the point that they find it difficult to fulfill their mandates. This crippling allows the leader and his party to point to the failure of government. The leader can then replace civil servants with loyalists – many of whom do not have the expertise to do the job. This process is also used against the judiciary. Legal scholars term the phenomenon “autocratic legalism”; by contrast, conservatives in the United States call it “rights renewal.”

I have portrayed a grim picture. Given the state of the world, what can be the role of human rights? This question is critical in a historical moment when so many of us are discouraged by world events and have lost heart.

Has there been progress in human rights? One of the most important positive developments in the 20^th century was the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is the basis for nine core universal agreements relating to human rights, such as The Convention against Torture adopted by the General Assembly in 1984, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted in 1989, among other covenants. In addition, nearly 600 international agreements have been signed, covering nearly every aspect of human activity such as disarmament, economics, trade, laws of seas, and the environment (the best known in this area is the 1997 Kyoto Protocol), and so forth. As Johannes Morsink, the historian of the Universal Declaration, writes: “The Universal Declaration is the moral engine of the legal system of international human rights.”

Unfortunately, many of these covenants are violated in the real world. No nation – democratic or not –  can claim perfect adherence to international human rights. Some countries have not signed human rights covenants or refused to join HR organizations such as the International Criminal Court (e.g., the US); other nations with long histories of human rights violations are signatories.

Since that is the case, how can human rights be regarded as marks of progress? I want to suggest why, in the final analysis, human rights are always forward-looking and are critical instruments for human progress. Once human rights declarations have been uttered, written down, and made public, they become the Gold Standard, the touchstone, and the referent for all peoples and nations. They are forward looking because inevitably, people return to them and demand that they be taken seriously. Once the proposition “All Men are created equal” becomes a public declaration, once it is declared, people will sooner or later demand from the powers that be that the words be taken seriously. The declaration is no longer aspirational. If the words are not expressed they can never be real. But they were expressed in 1776 when the American authors of the Declaration of Independence wrote “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights….”; and again in 1789 when the authors of the French Revolution wrote in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen that “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights”, and again in 1948 when the United Nations declared in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights;” These declarations in their various forms were bequeathed and now belong to all humanity. Each declaration initiated new ways to protect people and gave them new rights. I subscribe to Martin Luther King’s statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice”

There will be discussions and disagreements about what those declarations mean and how to best implement them. And there will be forces that attempt to suppress the ideas embedded in them. Nevertheless, studying history reveals that advocates and detractors alike inevitably deal with them. These fundamental declarations give individuals, groups, and nations some measure of authority from an outside gold standard. This is progress and a positive achievement in human history.

History reveals another way that progress in human rights occurs. The historian Lynn Hunt showed that feelings about what it means to be an autonomous person with rights developed over time. She uses the development of the novel as one example of what led to a new understanding of personhood. When men and women began to read novels, they identified with the emotions and dilemmas of others. In the 17^th and 18^th centuries these new feelings were called “sympathy” or “sensibility.” In the 19^th century the French writer, Tocqueville, called then “habits of the heart;” today we call them “civic virtues.” They are internal transformative changes about personhood that over time are shared by increasing numbers of people in society. They are what led to the abolishment of routine torture in the 18^th and 19^th century and to the idea that children are people with rights and not property. As the historian Hunt put it: “The history of human rights shows that rights are best defended in the end by the feelings, convictions, and actions of multitudes of individuals, who demand responses that accord with their inner sense of outrage.” A social studies teacher once told me that she hesitated to teach the Holocaust because she was concerned that her students would feel rage and anger. She missed the point that outrage and indignation are the doors that open us to moral feeling and to action.

Let me turn to the question of how we can deepen our “habits of the heart?” What concrete steps can we take to implement durable democratic values? I base my ideas on my work with social justice organizations and with educators in school districts around the country. These actions are admittedly modest and difficult, but I believe ultimately powerful.

One: If indeed it is difficult to imagine the Other, then we need to build strong competency in understanding the Other. Cultural sensitivity is not the same as cultural competency. Sensitivity has to do with respect. Cultural competency is understanding the values and behavior of people that are different than us and finding ways to communicate effectively and appropriately. We need to understand these differences in order to forge a deeper relationship. Literature, travel, living in another country, learning another language, and volunteering are some of the paths to imagining other people.

Two: We need to develop a strong ethical personality in school-age children. Educators and educational psychologists can develop pedagogic methodologies that deepen how children look at and resolve moral conflicts. A pioneer in this area is Carol Gilligan. She has shown that boys and girls actually have different orientations in addressing moral dilemmas. In the preface to the book, Mapping the Moral Domain, she recounts the following story taken from a newspaper article in Memphis. “Children had been asked to write essays on how to improve their city, and the journalist noticed a difference between essays written by boys and by girls. To the boys, improving the city meant urban renewal as we generally conceive it: more parks, new buildings, renovations, better streets, more lighting. Girls, however,…suggested strengthening relationships between people: responding to people in need and taking action to help them.” Gilligan calls these two moral orientations: the “justice perspective” (focusing on justice and rights) and the “care perspective” (focusing on care and response). Gilligan’s intention is not to reduce boys and girls to certain essential differences; rather, she concludes that we need two approaches for moral reasoning. She argues that both are needed to form a morally mature person. Thus, one half of what it means to think morally is a commitment to justice and universalism. The other half emphasizes “character” – how we respond to injustice. Parents and teachers need to invest time to cultivate the moral personality.

We should not be afraid of the word “moral” just because the term is utilized by religious fundamentalists, radical conservatives, or because it is a contested term. Nor should we regard moral education as coercing children into obedience or as a nebulous call for improvement. As the moral philosopher Susan Neiman notes: The consequence of our reluctance to talk about morals is that we advocate for none. And we end up abdicating the discussion to populists and demagogues.

Three: Whenever we teach or promote social justice, it should be accompanied by civic engagement and service. Talking about justice, rights, and caring remain abstract until we actually work or volunteer in some sort of social service capacity. Civic engagement is critical for understanding the Other, and for putting political and moral concepts into practice. Service is an opportunity to analyze a social problem, investigate its origins and manifestations, strategize, and implement solutions.

One of the most troubling phenomena in the United States in recent decades is civil disengagement. In a wonderfully titled book published in 2000, “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community”, sociologist Robert Putnam claims that current society does not have or provide the social networks that develop “habits of the heart.”  Put simply, we don’t interact with each other anymore (he captures this idea quantitatively by showing that bowling leagues have declined while individual bowling has increased). The consequence is weakened citizenship in the neighborhood, workplace, city, and nation.

Privileging the individual over the collective has always been a strand in the American political tradition, pitting Jeffersonian liberty with Hamilton’s federalism. But in the past few years, the idea of the collective good has been eroded by appeals to “liberty,” either religious or individual, what conservatives call “rights renewal.”

It is critical for all of us to develop or renew our faith in the common good. Civic engagement is one road towards that goal. Engaging with others in our community builds an appreciation that we are part of the same social nexus.

Four: Our educational system – from the elementary school student to the undergraduate – must offer and prioritize basic literacy about American constitutional history, law, and how government works. This disciple is called civic education. One of the most respected nonprofit organizations that engages in this work for elementary and secondary school classes is The Center for Civic Education, founded in 1965 at UCLA.

Here in New Mexico, the UNM Law School participates in a national program called the Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Program, bringing law students into high school classes to teach civic education. Last year the law school had eighteen law students teaching nine classes in six local public high schools. A fundamental objective of the program, according to the law school website is “[to open] up a world of possibilities for underrepresented high school students and empower[s] them to become engaged, productive citizens.

Conclusion

It is crucial to remember that human rights cover a very large swarth of human concerns. They have something to say about inequalities, exclusion, and marginalization of different segments of the populations such as women, indigenous peoples, people living with disabilities, among other marginalized people. They address the rights of religion, employment, property, education, and legal rights. Human rights shape constitutions. And human rights are moving into new areas such as environmental justice and technologies that on the one hand provide resources for human development but on the other hand strengthen the repressive capabilities of states and bad actors.

Towards the end of his book Candide, Voltaire tells the following story:

Candide, Pangloss, and Martin pass an old Turkish man who is sitting next to his house. Plangloss asks the man about a particular bit of news concerning an execution in Constantinople. The man replies: “I have no idea what you’re talking about; my general view is that people who meddle with politics usually meet a miserable end, and indeed they deserve to. I never bother with what is going on in Constantinople; I only worry about sending the fruits of the garden which I cultivate to be sold there.” The man then invites Candide, Martin, and Pangloss to share a meal with him. On their way home Candide reflects on the old man’s words and says to his companions: “This honest Turk seems to be in a far better place than kings…. I also know that we must cultivate our garden.”

“We must cultivate our garden.” Voltaire doesn’t mean that we must all stay on our little plot of land and worry only about ourselves. Our garden is very big indeed and includes our family, neighborhood, our community, our society, our world.  Note that in Voltaire’s story, the old man invites the travelers to share a meal – a small but meaningful act of civility. There are many avenues – wonderful initiatives, organizations, and programs – where we can sit together and help cultivate this garden that is our world. Despair is a non-starter. As Eleanor Roosevelt wrote when she was fighting for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.”

Go to Original – znetwork.org

Share this article: email mastodon facebook 🔗 copy link

DISCLAIMER: The statements, views and opinions expressed in pieces republished here are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of TMS. In accordance with title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. TMS has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is TMS endorsed or sponsored by the originator. “GO TO ORIGINAL” links are provided as a convenience to our readers and allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the “GO TO ORIGINAL” links. This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

There are no comments so far.