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Even Democrats might find it hard to imagine, but the “leader of the loose world” would gain benefits from the United Nations.
By Peter Beinart
Contributing Opinion Editor
Belarus’s valid president, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, gave the impression through a video last month to the United Nations Human Rights Council. His country’s August election, he said, were “stolen. “
Despite the objections of a representative of the Belarusian government, who said she had no right to confront the body, Ms. Tikhanovskaya implored the United Nations to act. “Defending democratic principles and human rights does not interfere with internal affairs,” he insisted. “is a universal of human dignity. “
No one knows what Donald Trump’s Covid-19 diagnosis will look like in his presidential campaign, however, before he got sick, he continually warned that he would not settle for the effects of the election if he lost. In this case, Joe Biden deserves to stick to Tikhanovskaya’s. example and call the global for help.
For many Americans – educated to regard the United States as the herbal leader of the “free world” – it can be hard to believe that they are asking for foreign intervention opposed to tyranny in our own country. But as historians like Gerald Horne and Carol Anderson have detailed, there’s a long history of black Americans doing just that.
From 1845 to 1847, Frederick Douglass made more than 180 speeches imploring the British public to interfere in opposition to American slavery. After World War I, when President Woodrow Wilson revealed the fourteen numbers he hoped would shape the postwar world, the National Equal Rights League, led by William Trotter and Ida Wells-Barnett, called on the Paris Peace Conference adopt a 15: elimination of civil, political and judicial distinctions based on race or color in all nations.
After World War II, sociologist WEBDu Bois has published a 94-page pamphlet that the NAACP presented to each ambassador to the new United Nations. “People of the world,” he said, “we black Americans, remedies in America is not just an internal factor in America, it is a basic challenge of humanity, democracy.
In 1951, artist-activist Paul Robeson presented UN officials with a 200-page document alleging that America’s recourse to its black citizens violated the organization’s anti-genocide conference. In 1964, Malcolm X called on Africa’s new independent governments to “recommend an immediate investigation. “American racism through the United Nations Human Rights Council.
Last June, relatives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile and Michael Brown approved a letter asking the council to “urgently convene a special consultation on human rights in the United States. “
Joe Biden is not W. E. B. Du Bois, he lets Malcolm X, but the party he leads now faces chronic racist deprivation of voting rights. The more the Democratic Party becomes a vehicle for the political empowerment of black people, the less their votes count.
Democrats will now have to win the popular vote through three, four or even five percentage points to be sure of winning the Electoral College. They will have to succeed in that margin in the face of fierce Republican effort to ensure that many Democratic polls and even if they triumph over any of the obstacles, Trump may not give in.
This is why Du Bois’s call to go global remains so relevant. By warning black voters, the United States continues to violate the democratic principles that it helped enshrine in foreign law. in Europe he indexed a long list of undemocratic practices, ranging from disenfranchisement of former prisoners to failure in the District of Columbia Congress to discriminatory voter identity laws, and concluded that Array critically, the US elections ” they violate OSCE commitments and foreign criteria on universal and equivalent suffrage. ‘
What Trump is doing this year, said election tracking expert Judith Kelley, dean of Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy at the Boston Globe, is the kind of activity that foreign election observers “would move to countries. “mass reports and say, “Red flag!”
Democrats deserve to spend the next few weeks to make sure that the OSCE project, while banned in many states, especially in the deep south, can do just that. Second, if Trump and his allies prevent the counting of votes, or forget about them altogether, Democrats deserve to use the O report. S. C. E. as evidence in an appeal to the same framework in which Ms. Tikhanovskaya made her own: the UN Human Rights Council.
They also file a complaint with the Organization of American States, a regional body that committed to “react temporarily and jointly to protect democracy” and which in 2009 used the mandate to suspend Honduras after its government took a coup.
For professed political realists, this would possibly seem ridiculously naive. In practice, the foreign benefactors of the United Nations and the Organization of American States are virtually powerless to the world’s toughest government.
But that’s not the problem. If the pleasing appearance of foreign bodies replaces the final results of the election, it may simply replace the Democratic Party itself. Today, many prominent Democrats remain captivated by the same myths about American exceptionalism that black activists have long disputed.
Systematically exempt the American habit from foreign criteria to which other countries adhere. If, for example, China were to send drones to other countries to carry out extrajudicial executions not only of suspected terrorists but also of government officials, Democrats would denounce it as a serious violation of the “rules-based external order. “They defend.
But when Trump’s leadership murdered Qassim Suleimani, one of Iran’s top officials, in January, Trump Biden said he “deserved to be brought to justice” and that he simply became involved in the practical effects of the assassination. foreign law only once.
Americans are not inherently virtuous enough to be able to safely forget about the ethical field of foreign surveillance. Wells-Barnett, Du Bois and Robeson understood this from a brutal and direct experience. Now that Biden and other white Democrats enjoy deprivation. your voting rights, you should also be informed of this lesson.
Peter Beinart (@PeterBeinart), professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, is editor of Jewish Currents and a member of the Foundation for Middle East Peace.
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