“Few speak of U.S. policies as genocidal because the dominant tendency is to analyze national policies as the byproduct of specific administrations or political parties not as the consequence of a state apparatus built on and seeped in racial animus.”
—Joy James1
“. . . any serious interrogation of the history of Black life in the United States upends all notions of American exceptionalism.”
—Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor2
“The difference between what U.S. citizens think their rulers are doing in the world and what these rulers actually are doing is one of the great propaganda achievements of history.”
—Michael Parenti3
Countries vying to host the Olympic Games face a number of challenges. One of them is convincing the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that their government’s human rights record does not violate the Olympic Charter’s fundamental principles of Olympism. In past bids, Americans had no problem pointing to Russia’s anti-LGBT laws and China’s practices of imprisoning journalists as grounds for breaching the IOC’s commitment to “social responsibility and respect for universal ethics.” Rarely, however, do Americans question their own human rights record. Sportswriters Dave Zirin and Jules Boycoff are refreshing exceptions, pointing out what millions around the world already knew. Just as Los Angeles was submitting its bid to host the 2024 summer olympics, Zirin and Boycoff argued the following: “It’s easy to single out Russia and China as major human rights violators that do not merit hosting the world’s top-flight Olympic athletes. But the United States deserves similar condemnation. Americans should not allow historical amnesia and the tendency to root for the home team to cloud their vision. It’s time to face facts: The U.S. is a human rights outlier.”4
If the IOC really does care about a country’s human rights record—which is doubtful—then how has the United States managed to win bids to host eight Olympics games? Perhaps even more perplexing is the offense most Americans take to such a question. In the previous essay, we analyzed how U.S. imperialism employs a number of “aid” structures to facilitate the corporate robbery of Africa’s immense wealth. American imperial plunder is consistently masked behind a discourse of “human rights” that dominates American foreign policy discussions in Africa. The United States has taken it upon itself to rid the continent of “terrorist threats” in the form of Boko Haram and Al Qaeda. Yet as U.S. strategy in Africa reveals, “humanitarian” concerns are merely justifications for American political, economic, and military expansion at the expense of African nations. The sham of U.S. “human rights” discourse, however, is not restricted to Africa. For the rest of the world, American concern over “human rights” is synonymous with war.
Americans tend not to see what the world sees because “human rights” is often described in U.S. foreign policy circles as a righteous motivation for global action. Such “action” is driven by urgent calls for American military and political officials to “do something” about human rights violations around the world. American expansionism has become buried by a “human rights” discourse which assumes the well-being of people around the world is the primary concern of American foreign policy. Exceptionalist assumptions about human rights have rendered the U.S. not only an innocent global actor, but a benevolent and just one as well.5 After all, how many times have we heard politicians call the U.S. the “leader of the free world” with special responsibilities to protect it?
The point is not to grade the U.S. on how well it has lived up to expectations that it has defined for itself. Where the real problem lies is in the ideological framework of American exceptionalism and American innocence. These ideologies have prevented too many Americans from understanding just how much damage U.S. imperialism has spread around the world. Few Americans question U.S. foreign policy abroad since it is assumed that the U.S. upholds “human rights” around the world. When the U.S. does mess up, then it is simply that—a “mess up.” If people die along the way, then it must have been for good reason. If the country that the U.S. invaded is worse off than before, then at least it was done with good intentions. Whatever the result, America is always on the right side of history. The question of whether the U.S. really cares about human rights not only prompts further study into its record on the subject, but also leads directly to the urgent need to envision a new human rights framework independent of American imperial ideology.
A proper examination of the United States’ human rights record must take into account its imperial roots. American society has always been organized along the principles of racial oppression and class exploitation. “Racial genocide has been a historical fixture in Western democracies as citizens amassed existential wealth (white privileges) and material wealth (capital and militarism) through antiblack policies,” writes Joy James. “But those realities tend to be muted in public discourse, where blacks and other people of color are invited to sit at the table of accumulation as national and global narratives note progress.”6 The rulers of this society have from the outset sought global domination to achieve these ends. This explains why the Black Freedom movement, for example, has often placed human rights in the context of global politics. Black internationalism is an enduring theme of the 20th century. The dozens of Black Freedom activists who submitted the “We Charge Genocide” petition to the United Nations in 1951 did so on the basis that racist oppression violated international law. Malcolm X would echo these sentiments a decade and a half later in his call for the UN to recognize an independent plebiscite for Blacks in America. The demand was inspired in part by Malcolm’s visit to a number of African countries such as Ghana where he saw firsthand the benefits of genuine independence from American influence. The Black Panther Party even took after Malcolm X to openly call for the end of the American war machine, going to such lengths as to offer Black Panther Party members to fight alongside anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements abroad.
The fact that the Black Freedom movement has led the majority of domestic critiques of U.S. foreign policy should come as no surprise. Human rights have never applied to Black people in America. The U.S. has dehumanized Black people from the outset, beginning with mass enslavement and followed by segregation, Jim Crow terror, racist policing, and state repression. Human rights have only applied to white Americans because “white” has been the definition of “humanity” in America. White Americans were given the “privilege” of humanity, regardless of the degree of their labor exploitation, to ensure that they would comply with the super exploitation of the Black worker. Moreover, as Maximilian Forte shows, the U.S. has appropriated the concept of dignity—which serves as the moral grounds of human rights discourse—for its own imperial agenda. “U.S. national security documents seem to essentially equate dignity with having modern conveniences and cash,” he writes. “[I]n other words, an instrumentalist or transactionalist view of dignity that sits well with capitalist values, and makes for easy policy options.”7 Those who do not subscribe to this capitalistic view of dignity inevitably find themselves outside the protection of the capitalist state. Concepts “such as national dignity, and black dignity,” Forte continues, “speak of dignity as the possession of large collectivities, nor are they reducible to pragmatic calculations and the quest for monetary gain.”8 Human rights have been flexibly defined by the U.S. to fit its domestic and international agenda in stark opposition to collectivist definitions of dignity.9
A number of scholars have commented about the selective way that U.S. imperialism defines human rights. The politics of genocide are case in point. Acts of genocide—or “the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation”—committed or aided by the U.S. are rarely questioned and often times ignored. Yet the term “genocide” has been used selectively to justify “humanitarian” interventions abroad while absolving imperial powers like the U.S. of their own crimes against humanity. As Edward S. Herman and David Peterson note, “The path from the ‘White Man’s Burden’ to the regimes of selective ‘human rights’ and ‘international justice’ has been a lot more direct than its current-day travelers like to believe.”10 Or, as Maximilian Forte puts it:
It’s also interesting to reflect on the contradictory and bifurcated image created of ourselves by the humanitarian imperialists. On the one hand, as civilized Westerners we are something akin to angels. Our actions and thoughts reign high above history, residing in an altostratus of unimpeachable rectitude. In our teleological view of our own progress, we are at the highest point of human cultural evolution, ours being the highest stage of human achievement. We are the standard by which others are measured. We are what the future of all humanity looks like. The absence of our institutions and values in other societies is a measure of their inferiority. We should help them. We should help them to become more like us. These various “savage” others can be raised to our level of dignity, if we help them to acquire “prosperity” through the advance of “opportunity.” Fixated on providence and destiny, we of course resent history, because history carries the inevitability of change, and of the decline of empire. As much as we resent history, we find cultural particularity loathsome: some differences simply defy polite tolerance, and demand our corrective intervention. High up in the clouds, perched on the wings of our stealth bombers, we preach the ideology of universal, individual human rights.11
In other words, American foreign policy still operates under the assumption that the U.S., deemed a white state, must come to the rescue of darker, less civilized nations.
Few individuals embody the “White Man’s Burden” syndrome in U.S. foreign policy more than Samantha Power, the former U.S. Ambassador to the UN under the Obama Administration. Power has been one of the most vocal architects of the doctrine of “humanitarian intervention” throughout her career in politics, media, and foreign policy think tanks. Her book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, illustrates the central problem with the United States’ doctrine of human rights. It also serves as a welcome case study for how easy it is to be deceived and seduced by ideologies of American exceptionalism and American innocence. The book, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003, characterizes America’s foreign policy toward genocide in the 20th century as that of bystander. Power details countless examples of when the U.S. knew that genocide was happening but decided to do nothing about it. The U.S. had the opportunity to stop genocide, she argues, but chose not to intervene. This is, according to Power, our “problem from hell.”
But is this our problem at all? Power attempts to pass as a courageous citizen-journalist speaking truth to power about the country’s many sins of omission when nothing could be further from the truth. There are many problems with her book, a few of which are exposed by Edward Herman and David Peterson. The book, they write, “devotes only one sentence to Indonesia, ignoring entirely the mass killings of 1965–1966, mentioning only its invasion-occupation of East Timor in 1975 and after.”12 Power then argues that America “looked away” during the quarter-century long genocide in Indonesia from 1975–1999, failing to mention that the U.S. and its Western allies generously supported what she called a “monstrous regime” during that period. Power also left out the fact that U.S. imperialism created the conditions for the genocide when it supported a coup a decade earlier which killed over a million so-called “communist sympathizers.” As Herman and Peterson conclude, “Notice that in Power’s hands, the ‘monstrous regime’ is the one that arose after the other regime’s bombers ‘killed tens of thousands of civilians’—but no negative adjectives are applied to the regime that sent along those bombers from the other side of the planet.”13
The doctrine of American humanitarianism disguises American innocence as guilt to mask the direct role that U.S. imperialism plays in the most heinous war crimes around the world. In other words, by painting the U.S. as bystanders to genocide, Power deceptively covers up America’s long history of perpetrating genocide. Power’s problem, argues Dan Kovalik, is “her refusal to acknowledge the incontrovertible fact that the U.S . . . is in reality the world leader in war crimes commission, and an active facilitator of genocide.” Power, like many of us, would like to believe that the the U.S. has been “a force for halting such evils.” Her book invites readers to embrace the seductive myth that Americans should have known better by pressuring the government to live up to what America is really about; namely, the business of protecting human rights. “Power has done an impressive job in advancing this myth,” Kovalik concludes, as well as “in perpetuating the false belief that the world would be better off if only the U.S. were more active militarily throughout the world.”14
The idea that the U.S. is a bystander to genocide further perpetuates the myth of American innocence. When it comes to genocide, American innocence compels a national admission to the sin or mistake of “looking away,” but never of perpetrating it. Recall that one of the ways this myth functions is by painting the U.S. as a victim of other countries’ aggression. The U.S. is never the aggressor. It is either retaliating for something that was (supposedly) done to Americans or something it anticipates will be done to them. Either way, the U.S. is, as Captain America’s shield suggests, always on the defensive. The deceptive nature of this ideology makes it much easier to buy into Samantha Power’s argument. Power’s logic describes the U.S. as a nation-state showing too much restraint in the realm of foreign policy—we did nothing when we should have done something. But this fantasy becomes much harder to believe when we take into account just how involved the U.S. military is in the world. The U.S. is constantly playing the role of aggressor. Its war-apparatus is constantly “doing something.” But Power would have us all believe that the U.S. is in the habit of not acting and only acts when acted upon. This narrative is incredibly convenient for the U.S. war machine. After all, it becomes much easier for the U.S. to dismiss charges of imperialism if it is perceived as a mere passive bystander to global events.
Urgent calls from the likes of Power for humanitarian intervention have justified many atrocities, including American-led sanctions on Iraq in 1991. The U.S. and its allies had already invaded Iraq for using its oil wealth to modernize domestic infrastructure and fortify its national borders in a conflict with Kuwait. However, the U.S. expressed concern for human rights to justify the war. American foreign policy experts claimed that the war prevented Iraqi atrocities by enforcing a UN mandate for the removal of the nation’s chemical and biological weapons. When Iraq was declared out of compliance with the mandate, American forces deliberately invaded Iraq and bombed vital infrastructure. Sanctions ensured that Iraq was unable to repair vital infrastructure damaged by American bombs. In 1998, these sanctions were declared a form of “genocide” by the UN coordinator of Humanitarian Affairs in Iraq.15 The World Health Organization (WHO) found that a half million Iraqi children died because of the sanctions, a body count that U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright claimed was “worth it.”
The mass genocide of children was “worth it” because of the supposed danger to “human rights” that Iraq’s possession of chemical and biological weapons posed to the world (a danger that has long been proven a lie). What the damage of the first American venture into Iraq ultimately reveals, however, is the utter hypocrisy of “human rights” discourse in U.S. foreign policy. Human rights have historically only mattered when the U.S. has a vested interest in invading or destabilizing the nation in question. The American nation-state claims to possess a duty as “leader of the free world” to protect “democracy” and “human rights” abroad while it simultaneously violates the human rights of nations where it sends its military. This contradiction becomes all the more apparent when we compare U.S. policy toward its allies on the one hand with nations that it has deemed human rights violators on the other.
Take, for example, the United States’ so-called concern for Iran’s possession of nuclear capabilities and Syria’s possession of chemical weapons. War in the form of sanctions and proxy invasions has been waged on both countries despite their efforts to appease the demands of U.S. imperialism. Iran signed a P5+1 agreement in 2015 to curb the development of domestic nuclear energy in exchange for an alleviation of sanctions. When Obama drew a “red line” in the sand over the Syrian government’s alleged use of chemical weapons in 2013, Russia and the U.S. negotiated a deal with Syria to rid it of its stockpiles of chemical weapons. Yet both Syria and Iran remain in the crosshairs of U.S. imperialism. American foreign policy experts have said little about the human rights atrocities committed by American, NATO, and Saudi-backed “rebels” in Syria since 2011, which include extrajudicial killings and kidnappings that have been aided and abetted by the so-called “human rights” organization, the White Helmets.16 As journalist Stephen Gowans has observed, the real reason for hostilities toward Syria and Iran is their independent political and economic posture toward the American global empire, a posture that the U.S. desperately wants to destroy as it did in Libya and Iraq.17
So while Iran continues to face economic sanctions and Syria continues to see death and displacement tolls rise beyond a million, U.S. imperialism maintains its “innocent” and “exceptional” position as the world’s dictator of “human rights.” This despite the fact that the majority of American “allies” receive American aid to commit the most heinous human rights violations around the world. Israel, for example, receives nearly $4 billion per year in military aid from the U.S. to colonize the Palestinian people. During Israel’s invasion of Gaza in 2009, the U.S. stood by Israel by blocking any UN resolutions from forming in opposition to the 21-day assault that murdered over 1,300 Palestinians.18 Israel invests heavily in American politics through the lobby organization AIPAC, which bribes American officials with campaign financing to support Israeli policies in the Middle East and Africa. Furthermore, Israel possesses over 200 nuclear warheads that have been kept secret from the public while the United States’ nuclear arsenal approaches 7,000.19 Yet the U.S. has fixed its gaze not on its own threat to humanity, but rather on those countries it has labeled a “threat.” The U.S. thus succumbs to one of the earliest critiques of the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine (R2P), namely “the issue of selectivity, of who gets to decide, and why some crises where civilians are targeted (say, Gaza) are essentially ignored, while others receive maximum concern.”20
American exceptionalism and innocence render invisible an obvious double standard in U.S. foreign policy. When American imperial interests are at stake, the “human rights” narrative is invoked to capture enough public support to ensure that opposition to American war crimes is minimal.21 Criminality comes to define the targets of war, whose governments are labeled “threats” to American interests and security. Michael Parenti offers a substantial list of independent, left-wing governments that the U.S. government has overthrown in service of this narrative:
US leaders profess a dedication to democracy. Yet over the past five decades, democratically elected reformist governments—guilty of introducing redistributive economic programs—in Guatemala, Guyana, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Syria, Indonesia (under Sukarno), Greece, Cyprus, Argentina, Bolivia, Haiti, the Congo, and numerous other nations were overthrown by their respective military forces funded and advised by the United States [. . .] US forces have invaded or launched aerial assaults against Vietnam, Laos, the Dominican Republic, North Korea, Cambodia, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Libya, Iraq, Somalia, Yugoslavia, and most recently in Afghanistan—a record of military aggression unmatched by any communist government in history. US/NATO forces delivered round-the-clock terrorist bombings upon Yugoslavia for two-and-a-half months in 1999, targeting housing projects, private homes, hospitals, schools, state-owned factories, radio and television stations, government owned hotels, municipal power stations, water supply systems, and bridges, along with hundreds of other nonmilitary targets at great loss to civilian life.22
U.S. imperialism continues to wage war in all forms to ensure that nations around the world are unable to exercise sovereignty and self-determination. “Intervention,” writes Maximilian Forte, “is fundamentally opposed to” the respect of human dignity. “[T]he very act of intervention,” he writes, “implies that there is some deficit or deficiency that requires the curative power of foreign actors.” Of course, we cannot ignore the exceptionalist ideologies that underlie the United States’ obsessive urge to meddle in the affairs of other nations. “With a heightened sense of their own entitlement as a people blessed by God and destined to rule the earth, their overweening estimation of their own dignity is accompanied by an equally lordly view of ‘justice,’” Forte concludes. “The basic structure of belief in providence in shaping empire has changed little since the U.S. wars against Indigenous resistance in the nineteenth century and its invasions and occupations of Central American and Caribbean nations.”23
A critical piece of American warfare is the support of brutal, oligarchic dictatorships around the world. As Glenn Greenwald explains, American foreign policy “has been predicated on overthrowing democratically elected governments and, even more so, supporting, aligning with, and propping up brutal dictators. This policy has been applied all over the world, on multiple continents, and by every administration.”24 Indeed, a significant part of the U.S.’s modus operandi involves propping up ruthless right-wing formations to prevent the rise of popular movements from taking power in a given country. The list of specific cases is exhaustive, spanning from Brazil’s coup government led by Michel Temor, which paved the way for the election of the far right-wing Jair Bolsonaro, to the openly neo-Nazi government in Ukraine. Often, these oligarchic arrangements are satisfied with exporting national wealth to American corporations while importing dependence on U.S. military and corporate arrangements.
That the United States supports such arrangements may come as a surprise to many Americans who have been told that their government is primarily concerned with“human rights” and “democracy.” Yet American support for brutal dictatorships is not incidental to American foreign policy. Such support is part and parcel of the structure of U.S. imperialism, a system where war crimes are inherent to its drive for profit and power. The U.S. provides military aid to over 70 percent of the world’s dictatorships.25 Thus, claims “of protecting civilians, preventing genocide, ending human rights abuses, putting war criminals on trial, providing humanitarian relief,” writes Maximilian Forte, “are rarely even of secondary concern to the Key Western actors in practice, except as weapons.”26 As we will see, this contradiction between American imperial support for dictatorship and its purported commitment to human rights becomes even more evident in the the United States’ engagement with Saudi Arabia and Cuba.
For U.S. imperialism, Saudi Arabia is a long time friend while Cuba is a long time foe. Saudi Arabia’s human rights record is rarely mentioned in American corporate politics or media, while Cuba has been subject to American economic, military, and political warfare since 1959, the year of the Cuban Revolution. The discrepancy in the United States’ treatment of Cuba and Saudi Arabia confirms the phenomenon that “human rights help produce a certain narration of history, which simultaneously confers . . . a highly flexible political discourse with the capacity to be constantly appropriated, translated, performed, and retooled in different political arenas.”27 Human rights discourse has been used flexibly by American political and military officials to demonize Cuba on the one hand and ignore Saudi Arabia’s egregious human rights record on the other.
Since the Cuban Revolution of 1959, Cuba has charted an independent path of socialist development and separated itself from the grip of American corporations that dominated politics on the island for nearly a century prior. The U.S. has never acknowledged the legitimacy of the Cuban Revolution, instead labeling the country a pariah to “freedom” and “democracy.” For almost six decades, the U.S. imposed sanctions on Cuba in an attempt to starve the country back into submission to its imperial dictates. According to a Cuban report to the UN, American sanctions have cost Cuba over $800 billion dollars worth of development generally and over $2 billion worth in health care spending alone over this period.28
Yet despite the devastating impact of sanctions coupled with thousands of American attempts to politically and militarily overthrow the Cuban government, Cuba in many ways is an exemplary case of a country that extends fundamental human rights to all of its citizens. The UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) rates the Cuban education system the best in Latin America in terms of reaching the Education for All (EFA) indicators. Education in Cuba is free through university level. And in just six decades, Cuba has raised the standard of living for all of its citizens despite the challenges posed by a history of underdevelopment, slavery, and colonialism. The Cuban health care system is also free for all Cubans. Cuban health care has reduced the infant mortality rate to below that of the U.S., eliminated child malnutrition, and reduced the HIV transmission rate to one of the lowest in the world. Investment in universal health care has also led to achievements such as a lung cancer vaccine. Cuban society’s overall dedication to human rights is also seen in its internationalist orientation toward Africa and the world at large.29 Cuban assistance to South Africa, for example, was instrumental in the fall of apartheid from 1975–1991, and Cuban doctors and aid workers currently outnumber all other countries around the world in the provision of free health care to nations such as Venezuela, Haiti, and Pakistan.
Cuba’s achievements in the field of human rights have gone unrecognized by the the United States. Imperial ambitions have compelled American political and military officials to label Cuba an “authoritarian regime.” The Cuba “regime” has been repeatedly accused of violating what the U.S. defines as “democracy’ and “human rights.” The U.S. even invaded Grenada in 1983 under the pretext that Cuba—and the Soviets—were turning the island nation into a military base. Of course, few Americans consider their own “rogue democracy” when condemning “failed” democracies in other countries.30 Americans are unable to see—and often refuse to see—the ways “their own democracy had been thwarted, their Constitution undermined, and their diplomacy militarized” by their so-called political “representatives.”31 And while this hasn’t stopped the U.S. from punishing Cuba for its alleged human rights abuses, never has the U.S. protested the violations of its long time partner, Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia possesses one of the worst human rights records in the world on the basis of its domestic policies alone. It is one of the few states left in the world that maintain a monarchy organized on the basis of religious right, in this case a variant of Sunni Islam called Wahhabism. Wahhabism is an extremely conservative strand of Sunni Islam that is reflected in all spheres of Saudi policy. Saudi women were unable to vote for political office until 2011. While American human rights doctrinaires have criticized Cuba for a lack of “free speech” in the media, Saudi Arabia possesses a long track record of imprisoning and executing dissident journalists. Public beheadings of activists and Shia minorities are an ordinary policy of the Saudi monarchy. In one day in 2016 alone, Saudi Arabia executed 47 people.32 These human rights abuses have received little attention or scrutiny in the halls of American power.
In the case of Saudi Arabia, the U.S. has not merely “looked away” from the human rights abuses of one of its key allies in the Middle East. A deep economic and military partnership exists between U.S. imperialism and the Saudi monarchy. For over seventy years, the American ruling class has provided the Saudi Royal Family with military protection in exchange for access to Saudi Arabia’s large oil reserves for American corporations such as Chevron, Exxon, and Dow. American corporations currently possess hundreds of billions of dollars worth of assets in Saudi Arabia. From 2009–2015, President Obama facilitated over $100 billion worth of arms deals to Saudi security forces.33
The Saudi-American oil-for-arms partnership has directly implicated the U.S. in each and every one of Saudi Arabia’s domestic and foreign policies. Saudi Arabia is one of the largest state sponsors of terrorism throughout the world. Their sponsorship of terrorism has been linked to the 9/11 hijackers, which was fully exposed in a 28-page Congressional report.34 Saudi-backed proxies can be found throughout the world but have played especially critical roles in the American-led wars in Libya and Syria. Yet perhaps the most heinous example of the United States’ implication in Saudi human rights violations resides in Yemen.35
Since 2015, Saudi Arabia has been engaged in a bloody invasion of neighboring Yemen in an attempt to maintain hegemony over the insurgent and independent Shia-led Houthi movement. American weapons traded to Saudi Arabia are drenched in Yemeni blood. Saudi Arabia has used American-produced F-15 fighters and an array of weapons to carpet bomb Yemen’s schools, hospitals, and water supply systems. Several thousands of civilians have been killed and 80 percent of the country’s population needs some form of humanitarian assistance.36 Not only has U.S. military weaponry facilitated the Saudi war on Yemen, but it has also directly participated in it. American military advisors have given extensive logistical support to Saudi Arabia and coalition forces invading Yemen in so-called opposition to unverified claims that its long-time foe, Iran, is backing the Houthi movement. This includes guidance in the facilitation of torture in United Arab Emirates (UAE–controlled prisons in southern Yemen which are reminiscent of the CIA torture program most famously exposed during the Bush-era years of the War on Terror.37
If the U.S. really cared about human rights, it would not condemn Cuba, an island nation that has used its meagre resources to advance human rights, and support a country like Saudi Arabia, which has used its vast riches to do the exact opposite. It would not facilitate economic warfare on Cuba in the name of “human rights” and provide military assistance to Saudi Arabia in its brutal war on Yemen. The narrative that presumes the U.S. as the global guardian and protector of human rights is soaked in the blood of American exceptionalism and American innocence. Entire nations have been disrupted, devastated, and dehumanized as a result of America’s “commitment” to “human rights.” These wars serve as “grim reminders of the millions of bodies upon which the audacious smugness of American hubris is built.”38 However, war crimes in the name of “human rights” are “worth it” to the American ruling class regardless of how much they obliterate the very notion of international law. The American project to bring “democracy” and “human rights” to the world defines international law in its image. More to the point, international law doesn’t apply to the U.S. at all. This means that the United States’ self-proclaimed exceptionalism gives it the right to intervene wherever it wants and whenever it wants with absolute impunity.
The doctrine that the U.S. cares about human rights has rendered most Americans unable to challenge the lies that justify U.S. militarism. This can be seen in the small numbers of Americans who have opposed Washington’s cries to “do something” about alleged uses of chemical weapons by the Syrian government, deemed by both Obama and Trump to be a “red line” that shall not be crossed. The long record of American imperial warfare abroad shows that concern for “human rights” is a mere public relations framework that facilitates public acceptance for wars of aggression that enrich American corporations, military contractors, and financial institutions. Part of this propaganda involves drawing a sharp contrast between their barbaric violence and our benevolent attempts to keep the peace. “A US President can declare a ‘red line’ against the alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria,” observes Maximilian Forte, “while still using white phosphorus, depleted uranium, and various cluster munitions in the US weapons stockpile. Poisoned gas becomes the weapon of the ‘uncivilized,’ and the cruise missile the weapon of the ‘civilized.’”39
To envision a new framework for human rights requires that American exceptionalism and innocence be exposed as governing ideologies of the United States’ “human rights”–based foreign policy. Rather than centered on American domination, human rights must be centered on the people forsaken by the American quest for global domination. Human rights must be “people’s centered” along the lines articulated by the US Human Rights Network. A “people’s centered” approach to human rights is not based on guilt or the “white savior’s” commitment to defining the existence of oppressed peoples and nations. Rather, the approach is rooted in the internationalism and global unity of the oppressed reflected throughout the history of the Black Freedom movement and the Cuban Revolution. It is up to us, the people, to imagine what a “people’s centered” approach to human rights can look like today in the American context.40 A good start would be for more Americans to realize how the twin evils of American exceptionalism and American innocence are inevitably geared toward turning them into devoted disciples of U.S. imperialism.