The Other Epidemic: Human Rights Abuse and Dehumanization – Professor Alison Brysk

This is a reflection written by Professor Alison Brysk, Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Professor of Global Governance at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for the new series from The Bahá’í Chair for World Peace on Learning During the Covid-19 Pandemic.

For thirty years before the outbreak of the current global health crisis, I have been tracking a different deadly epidemic: human rights abuse.  It is estimated that “death by government” killed at least 150 million during the 20th century in R.J. Rummel’s work. Teaching my human rights class online to COVID-displaced students who may be suffering threats to family, health, education, and economic security, I have been trying to convey how the two epidemics of health and human rights abuse are linked by Paul Farmer’s concept that social patterns of disease reflect “pathologies of power.”

Political repression, patterns of discrimination, and global exploitation make societies vulnerable to diseases like AIDS and tuberculosis among the most vulnerable population in prisons and slums that eventually affect the entire society—and power over access to health care ultimately determines who lives and who dies.  Structural violence is a preexisting condition and co-morbidity of COVID-19. Anti-racism advocates contesting police brutality, racial discrimination, and economic and health insecurity in the United States connect the murder of African-Americans to a broader structural “pandemic of racism.” Worldwide, we are tracking pandemic-related increases in gender violence that are also diagnostic of pathologies of power.

In responses to the current pandemic, the health crisis and the economic crisis plaguing the poorest and weakest countries and sectors are linked by the governance crisis pathologies—authoritarian distortion of democratic accountability for citizen protection, chronic undermining of public institutions, and politicized suppression of crisis response information, officials and medical expertise.  While the U.S. is a worst-case scenario, we see similar pathologies of power driving denial and death in autocracies from China to Iran to Brazil.  The widespread governance crisis seems to reinforce the conclusion of the United Nations’ 1994 Vienna Human Rights Conference—that human rights of different types and across different populations are “indivisible and interdependent.” Civil rights are inextricably linked to social rights such as health care and education, while the distortions of state power and rule of law used to deny rights to one sector of society will inevitably spill over to diminish everyone’s freedoms.

In a recent series of essays following a workshop tracking the new wave of authoritarianism-that took place just before the COVID-19 crisis emerged—a group of global scholars mapped this pattern of indivisible, interdependent rights. We show how nationalist authoritarians in Turkey, Israel, Hungary, the Philippines, Brazil, and India undermine political rights and democracy by manipulating citizen frustrations over a lack of social rights rooted in chronic social inequality and international dependency. Across these very different regions and cultures, publics deprived of basic rights to sustenance and security in the name of the liberal world order are vulnerable to nationalist and religious appeals that scapegoat the stranger and promise solidarity across a fractured society.  These trends have predictably intensified with external threat: under cover of the crisis, Hungary’s Victor Orban has declared indefinite rule by decree, China has censored and imprisoned medical whistle-blowers, while Brazil’s denialist leader Bolsonaro has feuded with local governors desperately seeking to protect their citizenry, fired his health minister, and appealed for military intervention.

More broadly, the study of human rights shows that all forms of abuse—from torture to genocide to discrimination—operate through dehumanization of victims that numbs perpetrators and disables bystander resistance.  Psychologically, we are more prone to Othering as a defense mechanism in conditions of threat, insecurity, and uncertainty. Historically, this tendency to project grief and fear from any form of social crisis into anger at a dehumanized enemy we can vanquish to soothe our pain and anxiety is directed and encouraged by political leaders seeking to reinforce control and deflect blame for the threat or loss: from Argentina to Nazi Germany.

In the current crisis, the Trump Administration’s long-standing encouragement of racism and anti-immigrant persecution are clearly a long-term diversionary appeal to a political base of older white voters to cover inequitable economic policies and power grabs.  But Trump’s scapegoating politics of fear also sharpens a toolbox for divide-and-conquer repression in response to any external threat that arises.

Trump’s tactics tap into America’s tragic legacy of slavery, Jim Crow apartheid, Japanese internment, and anti-immigrant riots and lynchings—each of which has been mobilized by powerholders and elites in times of national crisis. The current crisis is weaponized by Trump’s xenophobic labeling of the “Chinese virus,” nonsensical immigration restrictions, and racist dog-whistle denigration of “urban” epicenter New York.  But a complementary strategy of dehumanization chillingly reminiscent of the Holocaust era is conservative commentators’ open commodification of the lives of the elderly and denigration of the disabled and medically at-risk populations as a threat to the economic security of the majority who should be sacrificed.

The study of human rights also reminds us that social solidarity is the historic pathway to resist oppression and overcome external threats alike. While the acute crisis of isolation, physical and economic displacement, and uncertainty brought on by COVID-19 would be challenging under any circumstances, the countries like the United States that have done the worst are those in which the social contract was already in tatters.  We can compare American society’s collapse and confusion to more deeply democratic, egalitarian, and gender-balanced countries like New Zealand, the Nordic states, Germany, and Taiwan which have come together more successfully to confront the external threat.

In the United States–as in other democracies declining under strongmen like the Philippines and Brazil–public health systems and economic resiliency alike are weak after decades of decline in public resources, corrupt and mismanaged responses to globalization, and unaccountable governance.

The most pernicious effect of the other epidemic is the social atomization of the citizenry–a kind of social AIDS that kills democracy by destroying our immune system of civil society. While Latin American dictators silenced their societies with the terror of forced disappearances, in 21st century America declining access to education, proliferation of distorting media, and fractionalization of cross-cutting social institutions like political parties and faith communities have corroded the common ground of citizenship.

We may have reached a turning point in the June 2020 wave of mass protests sparked by the death of George Floyd and the larger recognition it has begun. It is said that Margaret Mead identified the first sign of civilization as a burial with a healed broken bone–because it demonstrated a society with the resources and vocation to care for the disabled. This suggests that our ability to confront the epidemic of dehumanization will be the key not just to survive the coronavirus epidemic, but to survive as a civilization.

About the Author:

Alison Brysk is the Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Professor of Global Governance at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  She is the author or editor of fourteen books on human rights, including Speaking Rights to Power, From Tribal Village to Global Village, Human Rights and Private Wrongs, and most recently The Struggle to End Violence Against Women (forthcoming with Oxford University Press). Professor Brysk was selected a Fulbright Professor in 2007 (Canada) and 2011 (India), a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in 2013-2014, the International Studies Association Distinguished Scholar in Human Rights 2015-2016, and the American Political Science Association Distinguished Scholar in Human Rights in 2017. She has lectured and held visiting professorships throughout Europe, Latin America, South Asia, South Africa, and Australia.

You can view Professor Brysk’s lecture from the Baha’i Chair for World Peace Conference on The Ethical Foundations of Human Rights here. 

 

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