Afghanistan's borders are arbitrary, drawn to meet 19th-century political needs rather than to respect ethnic or religious patterns.
Stephen KinzerRead
Want to depose the government of a poor country with resources? Want to bash Muslims? Want to build support for American military interventions around the world? Want to undermine governments that are raising their people up from poverty because they don't conform to the tastes of Upper West Side intellectuals? Use human rights as your excuse!
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote criticizes the use of human rights as a pretext for geopolitical interventions.
Stephen Kinzer's quote emphasizes how the notion of human rights can be manipulated to justify political actions that serve the interests of powerful nations. It highlights the hypocrisy in using human rights rhetoric as a cover for undermining governments that strive to improve the lives of their citizens, particularly when those governments do not align with Western ideologies or interests.
Themes
Human RightsInterventionPoliticsHypocrisyPower
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech addressing the complexities of foreign aid, this quote can illustrate the potential misuse of human rights rhetoric.
More from Stephen Kinzer
All quotes →Guerrilla leaders win wars by being paranoid and ruthless. Once they take power, they are expected to abandon those qualities and embrace opposite ones: tolerance, compromise and humility. Almost none manages to do so.
Stephen KinzerRead
Rwanda has emerged from the devastation of genocide and become more secure and prosperous than anyone had a right to expect.
Stephen KinzerRead
Accepting that Arabs have the right to elect their own leaders means accepting the rise of governments that do not share America's pro-Israel militancy.
Stephen KinzerRead
After installing friendly leaders in Iran and Guatemala, the United States lost interest in promoting democracy in either country.
Stephen KinzerRead
Every nation, like every individual, would like to believe it owes 'no apology' to anyone. Adults realise, however, that few among us are purely innocent or utterly blameless.
Stephen KinzerRead
Similar quotes
Look: I don't want to live with a nuclear Iran. I would like to make it uncomfortable for them to seek it.
Zbigniew BrzezinskiRead
In the old days people never bothered about what others did, so long as they were free to do what they liked themselves. Today, one cannot sneeze without being corrected, let alone enjoy oneself. That's what politics have done to our society
Tunku Abdul RahmanRead
None of this is fair to you. And should it continue, it will make it more difficult to keep attracting the kind of driven, patriotic, idealist Americans to public service that our citizens deserved and that our system of self-government demands.
Barack ObamaRead
The [Israelis] believed - they were possessed of an absolute certainty and conviction - that 'terrorists' were in Chatila. How could I explain to them that the terrorists had left, that the terrorists had worn Israeli uniforms, that the terrorists had been sent into Chatila by Israeli officers, that the victims of the terrorists were not Israelis but Palestinians and Lebanese?
Robert FiskRead
I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this - who will count the votes, and how.
Joseph StalinRead
The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder.
Frederic BastiatRead