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Gattaca dystopia: future, present or the past?
It’s hard to work out if the 1997 movie Gattaca presents a vision of triumph or failure of humanity. It presents a dystopian future which echoes the dystopian elements of our present and past. In this future, people are judged solely by their genetic scorecard. Those whose parents do not engineer them for success before birth are marked out as an underclass fit only for menial tasks. Those who try to cross the genetic border are ‘de-generates’ and ‘invalids’ – a criminal other. The “genoism” (discrimination) that arises from the use of genes to judge human worth, echoes the race science of Nazism and early 20th century eugenics in…
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We have to bring the world together and learn to live as one
Sometimes our musicians capture in few words ideas at the heart of human rights. This article is dedicated to the song “United”, which was produced by a group of musicians “Playing for Change”. They wrote the song in cooperation with 7 billion actions, bringing together musicians from around the world. Where some might see the figure of 7 billion as a cause of alarm, these musicians see 7 billion human hearts. As 7 Billion Actions say on their webpage: 7 Billion Actions is connecting people and creating positive change through the universal language of music. Music has the power to break down boundaries between people. Music transcends geographical, political, economic, spiritual and ideological distances, uniting people…
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The Duty of Kindness and Sympathy Towards Strangers and Foreigners
It is hardest to write of those things about which we feel most deeply. Today I wish to write about someone whose words and life have profoundly influenced and inspired me. That person is Abdu’l Baha: the son of the founder of the Baha’i Faith and its leader from 1892 to 1921. I wish to address particularly what Abdu’l Baha had to say about the issue of ‘foreignness’. One hundred years ago, on 16 and 17 October 1911, he gave his first recorded talk to the people of Paris. The theme of his talk was “the duty of kindness and sympathy towards strangers and foreigners”. What did Abdu’l Baha see…
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Would you have me argue that all human beings are equal?
Frederick Douglass was a remarkable worker for human rights. Although he lived more than a century ago, his thoughts remain pressingly relevant. He began life as a slave, but winning his own freedom, he fought not only for abolition of slavery but also gave his support to other human rights causes, such as the emancipation of women. Born in 1818 in Talbot County, Maryland, he was separated from his mother at an early age, he writes, as was typically done with slave children. His father, he believed, was his mother’s master. Even though it was against the law for slave children to be taught to read and write, Sophia Auld the…
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Una visión de un mundo nuevo: Oración de Eleanor Roosevelt
Eleanor Roosevelt fue el primer Presidente de las Comisión de Derechos Humanos de las Naciones Unidas. Su trabajo, con sus colegas, condujo a la adopción en 1948 de la Declaración Universal de los Derechos Humanos. A continuación, según su hijo, es una oración que decía cada noche: Padre nuestro, que ha creado una inquietud en nuestros corazones y nos hizo a todos los buscadores de lo que estamos plenamente nunca puede encontrar, nos permita estar satisfechos con lo que hacemos de la vida. Dibujar nosotros desde contenido de la base y fijar nuestros ojos en los objetivos de la medida. Nos mantienen en tareas muy difícil para nosotros que nos…
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Bartolomé de las Casas: Un trabajador de principios de los derechos humanos
Bartolomé de las Casas es uno de los notables en la historia que surgió en el comienzo mismo del movimiento moderno de derechos humanos. Un gran humanista, se enteró de los derechos humanos en su encuentro con el pueblo de América Central y del Sur durante el siglo XVI durante la invasión europea de las Américas. Él utilizó su cargo como fraile dominico y más tarde obispo de defender los derechos humanos de los pueblos indígenas de las Américas. Las Casas llegó a las América como parte de las expediciones coloniales de España, llegando en 1502 en La Española (hoy Haití y la República Dominicana), en el comienzo del encuentro…
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Bartolome de las Casas: An early human rights worker
Bartolome de las Casas is one of those remarkable people in history who arose at the very beginning of the modern human rights movement. A great humanitarian; he learnt human rights in his encounter with the people of Central and South America during the sixteenth century European invasion of the Americas. He used his office as Dominican friar and later Bishop to uphold the human rights of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Las Casas came to the America’s as part of the colonial expeditions from Spain, arriving in 1502 in Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), at the very beginning of the encounter between the Europeans and the people of the Americas.…
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Love Your Mother
Pictures of planet Earth “our home planet” capture our imagination. This one commemorates Earth Day and its message is simple: we need to love the planet we live on. It’s easy to take our ability to see the whole Earth for granted and to forget that until the ‘Space Age’ at the end of the 1960’s we had simply never seen it that way: we’d never got the whole thing in perspective. “The Blue Marble”, the photograph that appears in our logo, was taken in 1972 by Harrison Schmitt, one of the astronauts of the Apollo 17 mission. Robert Poole is his book Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth describes it as ‘A photographic manifesto for…
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More than one thousand deaths since 2000
On 15 December 2010, 50 people are believed to have drowned when their asylum seeker boat was smashed, only metres from safety, on the shores of Christmas Island. Some of the bodies of those who died will never be recovered. In protests by asylum seekers that followed, children held in detention are seen holding up placards asking: “The children died. Why?” [1] Yet the children and adults that died on 15 December are (horrifically) only a small fraction of deaths associated with “border security”. Sometime in 2010, the known number of deaths associated with Australia’s border controls passed 1000. This number in turn is only a small fraction of the known global toll associated with similar border security policies which are playing out on borders…
