Human Rights Act: What the articles say

[loki]

I came across a handy easy to understand reference on the Human Rights Act that deserves to be placed here as a sticky. So here it is:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/946400.stm

[War Is Crime]

Originally Posted by loki

I came across a handy easy to understand reference on the Human Rights Act that deserves to be placed here as a sticky. So here it is:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/946400.stm

"If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." (Philip K. Dick)

This text has nothing to do with human rights. It is all and exclusively about CIVIL (citizen's) rights! The very first phrase: "(1) Everyone's right to life shall be protected by law." This "shall be" is wonderful! It's as if everyone had no right to life before any laws.

The same goes for the rest of the text. According to this pseudo "Human Rights" Act, Spartacus, who was not a citizen, was not human. Those whose civil rights are suspended "by law" automatically become cattle. Let the "justice" show begin!

[ZingPao]

Originally Posted by War Is Crime

"If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." (Philip K. Dick)

This text has nothing to do with human rights. It is all and exclusively about CIVIL (citizen's) rights! The very first phrase: "(1) Everyone's right to life shall be protected by law." This "shall be" is wonderful! It's as if everyone had no right to life before any laws.

The same goes for the rest of the text. According to this pseudo "Human Rights" Act, Spartacus, who was not a citizen, was not human. Those whose civil rights are suspended "by law" automatically become cattle. Let the "justice" show begin!

I love it when the door opens for a reference to Orwell's 1984.

From the introduction to 1984:

"Another major concern was the way in which language was being twisted and corrupted for political ends. In an essay entitled " Why I Write ", written in 1946, he commented : " To write in plain vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox ", and one of the themes running through Nineteen Eighty-Four is the way in which the State uses language to further political control over the people who speak it. His alarm and disgust at the way some political writers of his time (particularly those who supported and defended Stalin's policies and actions) distorted language in their attempts to justify what Orwell regarded as unjustifiable led him, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, to invent the next logical step for a language twisted and corrupted for political ends: Newspeak. It is based on a theory held by many writers on language at that time, that thought is dependent on the words in which it is expressed and that therefore if a language does not possess words for certain ideas it will be impossible for the people who use that language to hold those ideas. The aim of Newspeak is that all ideas which do not follow the principles of Ingsoc will be impossible to hold, and to this end all the politically undesirable words and meanings are being surgically removed from the language. The aim, as Syme makes clear in the novel, is to achieve politically sound precision of language, so that, as he expresses it, " the vagueness and useless shades of meaning " of the old language will be destroyed, along with the works of the great writers of the past who used it. To Orwell, who believed that anything important could and should be expressed in words which could be understood by ordinary people, the deliberate use of complicated language was one of the greatest sins; the unconscious use of complicated language was even worse, because it meant that the user had lost all contact with the truth of what he wrote about."

[War Is Crime]

Originally Posted by ZingPao

I love it when the door opens for a reference to Orwell's 1984.

Yes... But this time it's not fiction. I have read similar official documents in France and Russia: the word "human" used to mean "citizen's". What upsets me most is that few are those who notice this Newspeak...

[ZingPao]

[War Is Crime]

Originally Posted by ZingPao

Wow! Where does this logo come from? What a wonderful work!

P.S. I'm 55 and never voted in my life. (No, I'm not a penguin, and never lived in Antarctic. )

[ZingPao]

Originally Posted by War Is Crime

Wow! Where does this logo come from? What a wonderful work!

P.S. I'm 55 and never voted in my life. (No, I'm not a penguin, and never lived in Antarctic. )

I'm just slightly younger than you. I have always considered 1984 to be one of the most important books ever written. I never thought I would actually see 1984 to come to be, but here it is.

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

Defend the Rights of All! One Humanity, One Struggle!

December 10 is International Human Rights Day, marking the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The modern conception of rights can only be that rights belong to human beings by virtue of being human. Opposed to this is the conception of the monopolies and the governments which serve their interests, in which privileges are granted to human beings only if they agree to the government’s definition of "universal values" which are distinguished, not by being universal, but by serving the old order, the order which is in such crisis at this time....more