These remarks were given by Larry Cox at the Global Strategy Meeting of the International Network for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ESCR-NET), held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, November 13-19 2016.
I have been asked by the Social Movements Working Group (movements in Nigeria, Philippines, Colombia, Pakistan, South Africa, Guatemala, India, Brazil, Kenya, Trinidad and Tobago, United States, Honduras, Sri Lanka, among others,) to speak about what we can and must do together if we are ever to win our struggle: To stop the forces and global systems that everywhere are destroying lives and communities and threaten to destroy our very planet.
But first I need to talk from my heart about what has just happened in my country but to all of us: An event that has made so painfully and devastatingly clear why it is so very urgent to do all we can to unite ourselves and to unite all those we work with and for, who suffer from the violation of our rights.
The election of Donald Trump was a horrific set back for human rights. The presidency of one of the world’s most powerful countries – a country whose first lady once chaired the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – was given to a man who has openly and repeatedly called for torture, extrajudicial killings, and war crimes. A man who brags about his ability to assault and denigrate women, who won the enthusiastic support of white supremacists and neo-fascists. A man who made the central focus of his campaign the demonization of immigrants and Muslims.
His election is a massive defeat for people in the U.S. fighting for their rights and better lives. Attacks on the poor and vulnerable are already intensifying and more people will continue to suffer and even die unnecessarily. And because the United States is an imperial power, this is a defeat for human rights not just there but everywhere. We can already see how his election will strengthen and embolden dictators, human rights violators, and the political movements drawing on hate everywhere.
So how could this happen? There are undoubtedly many reasons but one core one is this: Donald Trump was able to exploit the deep divisions that exist among those who objectively share a common interest in having their full human rights respected. In the United Stares nearly half the population is either low income or living in poverty and the largest number of the poor are white. For decades these groups saw their income stagnate or decline while a small minority got obscenely wealthy.
But the poor and working class in the United States have long been divided by race. This division – deliberately created and long used – made it possible for Trump to speak forcefully about the pain and fear for the future of poor and working and struggling middle class whites while turning that anger against poor people of color, against immigrants and Muslims, rather than against the system responsible for their common pain: The same system that made Donald Trump a billionaire.
That system, as we know, is not a national but a global one. Whatever you call it, everywhere it drives the violations of human rights for the many while it serves to channel unprecedented wealth and power for the few. And those everywhere who benefit from this global system count not just on divisions within each country but global divisions to protect their privilege and power.
These are the old divisions of geography, nationalisms, religions, conquests, and cultures. They also count on newer divisions caused by the way many activists separate themselves by different issues and by different organizations that compete for funding and status. We must do everything we can to overcome these divisions if we are ever to effectively fight the Donald Trumps and the other anti-human rights forces that are growing more powerful in our world.
Creating unity, even genuine cooperation, is, as we all know, extremely difficult. But we already have points of unity on which we can build.
And the first and most important of these is the one that has brought us together here: human rights, the human rights each of us have equally. This is a framework that makes unity across all the divides possible. That is why governments fear it. They don’t attack, imprison and kill human rights defenders – as they are now increasingly doing – because we are weak but because they know the power of this idea is strong and the unity it offers to those oppressed is dangerous to an indefensible system.
So we must make asserting and reclaiming human rights a first priority in this time when they are under attack and increasingly marginalized by governments and other dominant institutions. But to reclaim human rights we must remember the source of their power. We have to remind ourselves that that power never came from declarations and treaties. It certainly never came from the UN or from individual governments who found it easy for decades to ignore the noble words they agreed to on paper.
The history is clear that governments took human rights seriously only when they were forced to do so by the movement of people fighting for those rights. It was the truly global struggle of people from all countries that has given those rights their power. This is the revitalized and expanded global movement that we desperately need now.
And we can build that movement because however fragile human rights may seem from the vantage point of the UN or individual governments, the power is still there. We see that power in the many struggles that are taking place all over the globe, in our different countries. The failure to connect these struggles limits their power by making it easier for those who run the system to play one against another. So the second point is that we have to begin not just to connect our struggles rhetorically but actually: To understand them as part of one larger struggle not just in thinking but in practice.
And to do that means listening to and supporting the leadership of those who are most suited to lead these struggles—the poor, the disposed and the marginalized. Because they live the violations they have the most powerful voice in fighting them. They can destroy the lie that people are poor because they are weak or backward and not because they are oppressed.
While the poor and dispossessed are the leading force, not just them but every sector of our society is needed in this movement. But to draw in as many people as possible it isn’t enough to just fight against the many horrific violations taking place. We also need to put forward a convincing vision of the kind of world we are fighting FOR: A world were there is enough for everybody, a world that is free from both want and fear. We need to put into concrete terms the vision of a society based on human rights, to make the case that such a world really is possible. We need to put forward realistic alternatives to the kind of economic and development models that people see destroying their lives and their world.
Can we do this? Can the events like the one that just took place in the US and the equally horrific events taking place every day around our planet finally shake us out of the comfort of doing things the way we have always done them? Can we, in the name of human rights and the struggle to realize them, take the risks necessary to build the unity that can challenge the systems that violate those rights?
I believe we can. I know it is possible. I know this because what we see again and again in history, what I have seen in my own lifetime, are movements arising and uniting people around values that are deeper and more powerful than all the tools used to divide us: Movements winning victories against even the most brutal and deeply embedded economic, racial and patriarchal systems of oppression, which we were told would outlast us all. I know it because even in the past few days we are seeing growing resistance to the newest efforts to hold up a failing system at the expense of humanity.
If we are bold enough to build on that resistance we can unleash what, in the context of the Poor People’s Campaign and the last years of his life, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King called “a new and a unsettling force” that can shake the complacency of our world and begin creating a new one.