Freedom House’s recent publication of the further descension into the deprival of human rights of peoples throughout the world should give every American pause.
It is but the latest reminder that we must all keep a watchful eye on the sacred fire of liberty that enkindles every American and human heart from cradle to grave.
The report’s hypothesis is that “the COVID-19 pandemic is exacerbating the 14 years of consecutive decline in freedom.”
Morever, this report puts the global hypothesis in stark context: “Not only has democracy weakened in 80 countries, but the problem is particularly acute in struggling democracies and highly repressive states—in other words, settings that already had weak safeguards against abuse of power are suffering the most.”
The state’s police power is supposed to be its last line of defense for protecting the national interest. The United States has been shown to have ‘weaker’ human rights, alongside much of the African, Middle Eastern, and Asian countries.
This is clearly the 21st Century “firebell in the night” that Thomas Jefferson thought of when Missouri was added to the United States, where “knell to the Union” would come forty-one years later in 1861.
“The new COVID-era laws and practices will be hard to reverse,” said Sarah Repucci, vice president for research and analysis at Freedom House and a coauthor of the report. “The harm to fundamental human rights will last long beyond the pandemic.”
The fact that the people in China, Venezuela, Turkey, Russia, and Zimbabwe have seen a further tilt against their natural rights as human beings shocks the conscience that a pandemic can be harnessed by authoritarian regimes to further suppress their people through silencing their natural rights of consent of the governed.
One has to think of the thousands who are now further marginalized throughout the economically ravaged country of Belarus by a dictator who cares more about the trappings of his illegitimate regime than about the hundreds of thousands whose rights have been all but erased.
Yet, one is also left in awe by the resolve of the protestors in Belarusto unceasingly resist strongman President Alexander Lukashenko and potentially Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
The further abuses by the Communist Chinese government should give the sideliners a reminder on their American foreign policy history.
Freedom House’s report notes that “China at home in an effort to drown out calls for transparency and accountability, enhanced and innovative technological surveillance, crackdowns on individualswithin and outside the country who share information that contradicts regime messaging, and the persecution of potential critics among the domestic elite.”
Just one of many statistics to shock the reader is that “64 percent of experts agreed that the impact of COVID-19 on democracy and human rights in their country of focus will be mostly negative over the next three to five years.”
All told, if one thinks that his or her natural rights which have been infringed are going to come back just as quickly as they were taken, a gentle suggestion: please read American history books, because you forgot how our country was founded.
Michael Cozzi is a Ph.D candidate at Catholic University in Washington DC.
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