Humanitarian Intervention: The Human Rights Gift that Keeps on Giving to U.S. Imperialism

A new, people-centered human rights movement must be developed that rejects the fiction of non-political human rights and is not afraid to name white supremacist, capitalist/colonialist patriarchies as the interconnected enemies of global human dignity. A human rights movement that is anti-war, anti-imperialist, committed to systemic change and grounded in ethical standards that emanate from the experiences, knowledge and perspectives of peoples and not just governments. – Ajamu Baraka

A Voice from the Margins

Sept 4, 2013

by Ajamu Baraka

With the announcement by the Obama administration that it intends to launch an attack on Syria in response to the chemical attack alleged to have been carried out by the Syrian government, the U.S. Administration has again assumed for itself the role of global “gendarme,” policing, punishing, and as its’ drone warfare program demonstrates, even executing the natives of the global village at will. In its single-minded dedication to this global role, the Obama administration has also freed itself from the constraints of international law as the President shamelessly declared that he was “comfortable” operating outside of the global legal frameworks that the U.S. itself helped craft.

How is it that the administration can announce to the world its intentions to circumvent, and by doing so, subvert international prohibitions on war? By wrapping itself in the false flag of humanitarian concerns for the suffering masses in Syria. President Obama, the corporate and financial elite’s most effective propaganda weapon since Ronald Reagan, explains to the world that it is only the plight of people in Syria that drives the U.S. decision to attack the country.

No one asks the President to explain to the innocent human beings who are walking around today alive, but who will be the dead and maimed “collateral damage” of this pending attack, why their sacrifice is for the greater good of humanity. →