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Even though this may be biased, etc., it actually is quite worthwhile as another, external perspective on the activities of the US. It's so easy to get caught u
by liedra 17y ago
Even though this may be biased, etc., it actually is quite worthwhile as another, external perspective on the activities of the US. It's so easy to get caught up within your own country & culture that you start to experience cognitive dissonance or turn a blind eye to the bad things that go on. It would be a real shame for the US government or ordinary Americans to dismiss this report from China as a pure propaganda stunt. Instead the US should allow the report to highlight areas in the systems that possibly need reassessing, if only to show that the US is serious about addressing human rights issues everywhere. Of course the counter argument is whether one should take anything China says seriously since you'd just be feeding the machine, etc., but I think that it is beneficial to look at criticism from any background on its merit alone, rather than who publishes it.
Disclaimer: I am not American, I'm Australian living in Europe. I think all countries could benefit from similar assessments from external perspectives.
- _delirium 17y agoThere are ways to do that that are somewhat more credible, though. For example, Amnesty International issues reports on human rights in the U.S., without the baggage of being an official publication of a rival nation-state's PR department: http://www.amnestyusa.org/annualreport.php?id=ar&yr=2009&c=USA http://www.amnestyusa.org/annualreport.php?id=ar&yr=2009... There's some level at which I think you do have to take the source into consideration. Would you really spend a lot of time taking seriously a Greek government report on human rights in Turkey, or a Turkish government report on human rights in Greece? There are probably better places to get that information from.
- liedra 17y agoOh, I totally agree about the use of Amnesty International's reports, but what I'm arguing for is the use of these other (for Western countries, especially non-Western) external perspectives in order to allow for some reflection on the systems and mechanisms we have in place. There's a lot of theory (and practice!) on the power of having an external "shock" to the system on allowing for the reflection required for good governance practices[1], and I don't think human rights governance should be any different. As for your other point, if what the Turkish government says about Greece is true though, does it matter the source? Sure, some claims can be extremely biased, but if (to make up an example) n people actually are locked up without trial per year, then that's a factual statement that can be addressed. In these cases, we need to strip back the propaganda and look at the facts :) [1] If you're interested in a lot of work on reflexive governance theory & practice, there's an EU project that has done a lot of work on it here: http://refgov.cpdr.ucl.ac.be/ http://refgov.cpdr.ucl.ac.be/