[Editorial]
Does America ever realize they are (unbelievably or helplessly!) hypocritical and self-righteous?
It seems never! Why? Throughout five centuries-old history of cowboy colonization against native populations of the Americas and sovereign nations around the world, they seem never been able to realize how unbelievably hypocritical and self-righteous they are.
They seem even never been able to understand what hypocrisy and self-righteousness really mean. They seem never repent their habitual, horrible and vicious wrongdoings. For they have ever continued that acts of hypocrisy and self-righteousness over and over and over again.
Or, if ever done any repenting, it might have been done in their tongues only, not in acts! Their hypocrisy and self-righteousness seem like their habitual acts as an unconscious culture.
In others’ eyes, their habitual acts of hypocrisy and self-righteousness often make many around the world “feel like vomiting.” The culture of hypocrisy and self-righteousness is sort of unconsciously built in their immoral psyche.
So they seem never realize what they are really doing things which others say “hypocrisy and self-righteousness.”
They believe they are doing always “right.” Or, as they always claim (most distinctively as former president G. W. Bush did!), they are “good,” while others “evil.” Or, as they also always claim, they’re doing it for others or for the world (not for themselves)!
However, the world’s majority people call it “hypocrisy and self-righteousness.” This culture of hypocrisy and self-righteousness is one of the most typical/negative characters of Western/Christian fundamental religious beliefs.
Many in religious studies argue the destructive culture of hypocrisy and self-righteousness is fundamentally interrelated to/with Western (Christian) philosophy of dichotomy or dualism.
The most typical dualistic way of thinking is dividing or judging people as “I am good, while others evil.”
It seems they often, if not all the time, lack the capacity of critically reflective way of thinking, i.e., how others think which might be different from how I think. Or how others look at things different from how I look.
Many argue this utterly simplistic (“black and white”) way of thinking or judging people has endlessly resulted disastrous outcomes in human history. They are Western/American colonialism, imperialism, most distinctly capitalism, i.e., the “profit-centered” or “maximum profit-oriented way of thinking.”
Colonialists’ dualistic way of thinking might also lack the capacity of being empathetic. According to an English dictionary, being empathetic means the following: “sympathetic, compassionate, feeling, concerned, kind, kindly, kindhearted, considerate, caring, gentle, [and] benevolent.”
These dictionary meanings of being empathetic seem well fit to describe, in quite opposite sense, the history of indescribably horrible genocides and destructions which have never been stopped throughout the history of centuries-old Western/American military interventions, invasions and colonization of many sovereign nations around the globe.
US State Dept’s Annual “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices”: Extreme Form of Hypocrisy and Self-righteousness
As usual each year, on April 8th, US State Dept issued its 2010 “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.” This so-call “human rights report” has become a quite controversial issue. For a number of years, US government has continued to publish its utterly dualistic (simplistic) way of unilateral reports on 90 some countries’ human rights conditions. It is an “extreme form of hypocrisy and self-righteousness.”
Why? As world’s majority populations criticize, particularly as Chinese government’s comprehensive report on US human rights situations plainly shows, America’s domestic human rights condition is one of the worst conditions in the world [See the following site for the full text of Chinese government’s 2010 report on US human rights situation: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2011-04/10/c_13822287.htm ].
It may not need to further argue whether US’s human rights condition is the worst or not, if one critically looks at their domestic situation of human rights as a whole, particularly from the eyes of women, children, poor, and non-white populations, as the above-recommended full text which is based upon America’s own media reports witnesses.
Not only how worse its own domestic human rights conditions are, however, as this article already argued above, but also America’s centuries-old history of colonization of native populations in the Americas and many numbers of sovereign nations around the globe have continuously violated or destroyed other peoples’ human rights.
Of course, it’s also a well-known fact that they violated not only other peoples’ human rights as a whole but also their fundamental rights of national sovereignty, independence and self-determination.
However, they didn’t do this unforgivable act of ongoing “crimes against humanity” and “war crimes” in the cases of “over 80 million Native American populations,” tens of millions of black people through the notorious “Black Slave Trades” for centuries, Chinese, Korean, and many other nations’ “slave immigrants” and countless number of other sovereign nations’ populations around the globe in the past only.
They do it still today! As they’ve done in the past, today they still do it. They severely violate other peoples’ human rights conditions in the form of military invasions.
Today they do it against Libya in addition to Afganistan, Iraq, Pakistan and a number of other sovereign nations.
It’s indisputably well-known and -documented facts that tens of millions of innocent civilian population’s human rights are horribly violated. No! Not only their human rights as a whole, but also their own lives, their loved ones, their sisters and brothers, their parents, their sons and daughters, their friends and their neighbors are killed, maimed, or wounded, or simply put it, destroyed!
However, they still claim they are doing it for the world by arguing, according to the US State Dept’s website information, their human rights “reports cover internationally recognized individual, civil, political, and worker rights, as set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
This is the very reason why many in the world criticize their so-called “human rights” reports on others are utterly “hypocritical and self-righteous”!
It seems they think robbing other peoples’ human and natural resources, killing innocent others, and enslaving different colored or poor people are “good” things to do in their “human rights” concept. Hope not!
Dr. Kiyul Chung is Editor-in-chief at the 4th Media and a visiting professor at Tsinghua School of Journalism and Communication.