When Ideals Meet Tanks
A Brief History of Human Rights
When Ideals Meet Tanks: A Brief History of Human Rights*
By Ivan Karadanov,
11th Grade Student
iv.karadanov@gmail.com
In a state of nature, rights do not exist. The strong dominate the weak, often with lethal consequence. But 10,000 years ago humans created a society which guaranteed more safety and better chances for survival for its members. Another 7,500 years passed until the ancient Greeks developed philosophy and the art of abstract reasoning. Plato, in his work “The Republic”, dreamed of an ideal society where all men (excluding slaves and women) were citizens with high morality, honor, and a sense of justice [1]. Another 1,500 years passed before the great minds of the European Enlightenment: John Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau rediscovered the ideas of human rights calling them “natural” and it was not surprising that the slogan of the French Revolution was “liberté, égalité, fraternité” [2–5].
In modern history, the first country to adopt and protect human rights officially in its constitution was the United States of America [6]. Similar to Plato, none of the Fathers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights found it strange to have on the one hand, a proclamation that all men are born with the right to be free and happy, and on the other hand to have Black slaves who did not have any rights. This strange situation lasted for many years, the U.S. Civil War solved only a small part of the problems making the Black men free, but they still had to use separate buses. Years had to pass and many suffering and humiliation to be endured until in 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. organized the March on Washington, where he delivered his iconic “I Have a Dream” address [7]. His moral leadership was pivotal to landmark reforms, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 [8–9]. But even today there is still a long way to go until people of all races and religions start living in a real brotherhood.
My personal understanding is that the theme of human rights always becomes especially relevant after historical circumstances that bring great destruction, misfortune, and suffering to a large part of the population.
In the 20th century these were the two consecutive wars, called by historians the First and Second World Wars, which caused over 90 million deaths [10–11]. Never before in history had human life seemed to count for so little. The Nazi regime built concentration camps that murdered millions of Jews [12]; the U.S. used atomic bombs against Japan [13]; and the Soviet Union operated camps in which countless prisoners perished, including many of its own citizens [14]. The word “rights” ceased to exist for decades and the destruction was enormous.
This is what led to a major change in political thinking. After the Yalta Conference in 1945 the foundations of the new world order were laid, a decision was made to create the United Nations (UN), designed to peacefully control the emerging interstate conflicts [15–16]. Three years later, the UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and established a permanent Commission on Human Rights, chaired initially by Eleanor Roosevelt [17–18].
We can state with certainty that the first years after the end of the Second World War were probably the most promising period for the defense of human rights in the entire history of mankind.
The onset of the Cold War, which we associate with the creation of the two blocs - NATO and the Warsaw Pact - unfortunately led to the gradual weakening of the protection of human rights and to their steady decline [19–20]. At first this came through the so-called “proxy” wars between East and West - Vietnam and Korea, fought in East Asia [21–22]. We cannot claim that drenching civilian populations with napalm accords with the spirit of the UN Charter [23].
Generally speaking, in every war, regardless of its nature or cause, the first thing to suffer is truth, and the second is human rights, with violations always committed by both sides.
The second stage of the deterioration of human rights during the Cold War was the creation of national laws that further restricted the right to freedom, to free speech and association, the right to private property, and free enterprise. In the U.S. this was the era of McCarthyism, when many free-minded citizens lost their jobs and their liberty [24]. In the countries of the Warsaw Pact, repression came less through changes in legislation than through its noncompliance. Let us recall that when, in the 1960s, the citizens of Czechoslovakia and Hungary tried to exercise these rights, their efforts, their freedom, and, not infrequently, their lives were crushed beneath Soviet tanks [25–26].
The third stage in the deterioration of human rights during the Cold War is linked to their mass trampling in the countries of the Third World. A small clarification: the Cold War was not only the overt confrontation between the NATO states and those of the Warsaw Pact. The war was waged on many fronts and was multilayered. It first flared in East Asia - in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Korea - where millions were killed under the cloak of one ideology or another. After the revolution in Cuba, it shifted to the American continent. It is difficult to assert that in Cuba, Nicaragua, or Venezuela the communist authorities exhibited a rigorous commitment to human rights, despite the singing of “Bandiera Rossa” and the slogans shouted in the plazas. On the other hand, the many counterrevolutions organized by dictators in Central America, such as those in Guatemala or Chile, supported by U.S. intelligence services, can hardly serve as models to emulate either [27–28]. In the end, the Cold War was carried into Africa, where we witnessed some of the ugliest scenes of violence from regimes backed by both sides. The examples are numerous: repression in Angola, Ethiopia, and Egypt, supported by Moscow, or apartheid in South Africa, indirectly supported by Washington [29–32].
While Cold War–era human-rights violations are numerous, a comprehensive catalogue is neither feasible nor necessary. The most important observation is that every deterioration in relations between states or blocs of states leads as a rule to the trampling of human rights, while military escalation brings about their complete annihilation.
After the end of the Cold War, which we associate with the fall of the Berlin Wall, respect for human rights once again gained momentum. In the countries of Eastern Europe, and even across the former Soviet Union, democratic regimes took root. New constitutions and laws were adopted to guarantee the human rights of all citizens. In the Western world a series of new laws were enacted to safeguard the rights of minorities and of people of different races, sex or faith. Even in much of the so-called Third World, democratic regimes respectful of human rights were established, for example India, Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil and Argentina [33].
The positive trend did not last long. On a bright autumn day, 11 September 2001, two airplanes struck the towers of the World Trade Center in New York, a third struck the Pentagon and a fourth crashed in Pennsylvania [34]. The U.S. President at the time, George W. Bush, declared a war on terror and hastened to organize yet another war in Asia, this time against Afghanistan. Worse than the war itself were the measures adopted within the U.S., where under the pretext of combating terrorism, a series of laws were passed that in essence violate the First Amendment to the American Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Patriot Act allows the government to expand surveillance and data access, infringing the privacy of correspondence and the right to a private life [35]. The right to liberty and to a fair trial was likewise severely curtailed, for the government could restrict it at its own discretion at any moment with vague explanations and without judicial oversight. The creation of the illegal prison at Guantánamo Bay and its continued existence have dragged human history back, at the very least, to the Dark Ages of the medieval world [36–37]. The “bright” example set by the U.S., curtailing human rights in the name of security, was followed by much of the “democratic” world to the approving gaze of authoritarian regimes.
Unfortunately, in recent years we have witnessed yet another deterioration in the state of human rights and the danger of a new, or the continuation of the old, Cold War, which would only deepen that decline. The ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza stand as examples of the blatant, crude, and cynical trampling of human rights [38]. The path of violence cannot be the civilized choice of the twenty-first century; and if it is not halted, even darker and more dangerous times await us all.
References:
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*This paper was written for Crimson Education Academic Essay Competition 2025