Between chaos and tyranny: A journalist defends human rights

It pains Michael Ignatieff to see human rights under siege from multiple directions.

And the earnest journalist — whose angular face grows animated when he speaks of his cherished principles of freedom and individual liberty — is determined to defend them using history as his weapon.

The intellectual crusader — whose studious mannerisms belie a fierce passion for human rights — addressed a wide range of issues pertaining to the subject in McCosh 50 yesterday and in an exclusive interview following the talk. He will speak again today in McCosh 50 on "Human Rights as Idolatry."

"Human rights is a response to the discovery of the abomination that can occur when a country has unlimited power," he said during the lecture. "The spread of human rights indicates progress."

Ignatieff said he believes civil liberties empower civilians to take control of their lives and destinies. "Human rights gives people the agency to stand up when the state tells them to do wrong," he remarked.

The noted writer, historian and broadcaster argued that weak governments pose the most serious risk to human rights today. "The chief threat to human rights comes from chaos or anarchy — a disintegration of state order," he said.

Following his speech, Ignatieff continued to discuss these two political extremes. "I've seen chaos. It can be so terrible that you'd want order at any cost," he said, his thoughtful eyes shifting pensively along the pavement as he strolled toward Prospect House for a post-speech reception.

But he quickly pointed to the extermination of Jews and other minorities during World War II as a product of the other extreme — a tyrannical emphasis on order. "It's a choice I'd rather not have to make," he said of the tradeoff between draconian dictatorship and anarchy.

Ignatieff noted that the twentieth century has seen its fair share of both oppression and chaos. Between 1933 and 1989, he said, "the world was facing tyranny."

But following the end of the Cold War, he suggested, the threat to human rights has shifted. "Since 1989, the challenges have changed once more," he said. "I'm very concerned about chaos."

During his speech, which was sponsored by the University Center for Human Values, Ignatieff proposed a series of guidelines for when the United States should intervene to protect human rights around the world. He said America should consider whether large numbers of people are at risk, if there is a crucial U.S. interest at stake in the area and whether the threat is destabilizing neighboring countries.

Ignatieff also advised politicians to choose their battles on behalf of human rights pragmatically. "We intervene when we can," explained Ignatieff, referring to the United States in the first person despite the fact that he was born in Canada and now resides in London. "If we make promises in the future, we have to be doing it right or we shouldn't be doing it at all."

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He chided the United States for failing to stop the 1994 Rwandan genocide of Tutsis, which resulted in more than one million deaths.

"The failure to intervene has resulted in a state failure in a gigantic part of central Africa," Ignatieff said. He alleged that racism played a role in the U.S. decision not to protect the Tutsis, and pointed out that America dispatched soldiers to the Balkans, but not to Africa.

Toward the end of the question-and-answer session that followed the lecture, bioethics professor Peter Singer rose from the audience to comment on Ignatieff's observations. The near-capacity crowd, which had grown restless as the program stretched toward evening, immediately fell silent.

As Ignatieff walked slowly toward Prospect House, he touched on some of Singer's utilitarian beliefs about the value of human life. "Human rights says there are strict limits to what you can do to human beings," he said. "One of the points of human rights is to protect imperfect agents, like disabled people."