Traditional Liberalism

A solid and interesting report , in the Times of London, on the walking disaster of Human Rights Watch.

How does an organization that began as “Helsinki Watch,” dedicated to revealing human-rights abuses behind the Iron Curtain, turn into an institution so ragingly anti-Western that the head of its division monitoring the abuse of homosexuals becomes furious when someone reveals the anti-homosexuality of Iran—a place where people are actually imprisoned or killed for their homosexuality? If it’s not Israel or the United States, it doesn’t count.

We could set up a new and more sane human-rights organization—I’ve encountered people urging First Things to undertake this, and even suggesting fund-raising sources—but before any such thing is done, we’d need to understand why every old liberal organization seems to have made this transition from liberal to radical.

Look. We are the actual liberals here—the traditional liberals, if that makes any sense: the inheritors of the old sense of things—and all we want is a solid, old-fashioned kind of liberal institution. One that is pro-life, in the full sense of the word: pro-human, both realistic about the actual economic workings of the world and committed to expanding the community of care. One that is like the best of the anti-racist organizations of the 1950s, drawing on the deep roots of religion to guide us in knowing when to act, and when to refrain from acting, against the powers of the earth. One that has a clear understanding of totalitarianism’s great threat to the human spirit.

But what does the left now offer us? Human Rights Watch and all its ilk, embracing the totalitarianism it once existed to oppose.