Frederick Nietzsche predicted that God was dead, and barbaric brotherhoods like Fascism and Communism would take the place of religion. In the 21st century, this new barbaric brotherhood is calling itself human rights. Its goal is power and wealth, but the pretence is morality.

Scottish writer Charles Mackay (1814 – 89) may be unknown to the present generation but his 1841 book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and Madness of Crowds, in which he gave vivid accounts of crowd hysteria from financial bubbles to major historical events like the Crusades and witch-hunts, has remained an enduring classic. The first two chapters of the book on the Mississippi Scheme and South Sea Bubble are required reading for students of finance at American universities.

To lovers of literature, his daughter, Marie Corelli, who wrote sentimental novels like Vendetta, Thelma and the like, might be better known, but in his 1852 edition, Mackay accurately described how fads begin: “Whole communities suddenly fix their minds on one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it… We find one nation suddenly seized… with a fierce desire of military glory; another as suddenly becoming crazed upon a religious scruple; and neither of them recovering its senses until it has shed rivers of blood and sowed a harvest of groans and tears to be reaped by its posterity.”

Among Mackay’s main themes were the Crusades and the Witch Hunts of Europe, both of which were driven by Christian zeal. In our own time, secular ideology seems to have replaced religious zeal; but this has not prevented horrors from being inflicted on innocent people in the name of Communism, Fascism and the like by Stalin, Hitler, and Mao. Frederick Nietzsche called such secular belief systems ‘barbaric brotherhoods’. Even democratic America has had its mad period marked by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his Communist witch hunts. Present day history books don’t like to mention that his anti-Communist crusade had considerable public support, otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to intimidate US presidents like Truman and Eisenhower to soft pedal their objections to his investigations.

Today, the human rights fad has taken the place of Christian zeal and Stalinist and McCarthy witch hunts. We have self-appointed moralists of what Narendra Modi called ‘a few fringe NGOs with an axe to grind’ pursue human rights for power and profit. It is no coincidence that these supposedly secular human rights organizations are dominated by Christian and Evangelical outfits; they have the experience, resources and the influence. Their targets are invariably mild and tolerant regimes like India, never powerful and intolerant ones like China or Saudi Arabia that are likely to hit back. So what on surface may seem like a pursuit of humanistic goals is often driven by a lust for power and wealth with minimal risk to themselves.

It was no different with the Crusades. The Knights Templar, which began as a heroic order in defence of Christianity, were experts at extortion and fund raising and became the first international bankers. It is no different today: individuals and organizations pursuing human rights agendas are first and foremost skilled at fund raising and influence peddling with private donors and government agencies. But no one working in the name of human rights likes to talk openly about money and power so they assume a self-righteous posture. This is the reason that human rights activists are always speaking in high moral tones and never miss an opportunity to criticize people and organizations trying hard to maintain stability and balance in the real world. Their main goal is publicity through self-righteous posturing.

American commentator Emmett Tyrrell called it moral exhibitionism. To become a human rights activist, it takes no accomplishments beyond striking moralistic poses and finding fault with others. A closer look at some of them shows them to be quite anti-humanist when it comes to their own lives and interests. A good many of them are little more than poseurs and publicity hounds. We can look at a few of them to see this truth.

With the loudest ‘human rights’ voice of our time, the most brazen publicity seeker is probably Arundhati Roy. Born in Shillong, Meghalaya to a Keralite Syrian Christian mother - the women’s rights activist Mary Roy - and a Bengali tea planter, Arundhati (nee Margaret) Roy has consistently taken positions against the interests of the Indian state: all in the name of ‘human rights’. These include her support for the Kashmiri separatists and more recently the Naxalites/Maoists. She raised questions even over the culprits who attacked Parliament, leading to the death of security personnel - all, yet again, in the name of human rights!

From indentured labour to slave trading

Until made financially stable by the fortuitous success of her novel The God of Small Things, she worked at various jobs, including running aerobics classes at some hotels in New Delhi. In other words, she was a struggling nonentity trying her hand at a hundred different odd jobs until she hit the jackpot with the Booker Prize. She is among those who think that receiving an award, any award from a Western, white country makes one morally superior to others. This allowed Roy to turn herself from a struggling writer to a moral preacher to the world.

Her record before the Booker was undistinguished. She was a struggling writer trying to make ends meet, but turned herself into a moral authority because of the accident of the Booker Prize. In reality, there is no greater hypocrisy than a Booker Prize recipient posing as a champion of human rights. Here is a little history about that award that the public needs to know. It is far from edifying.

It was originally called the Booker-McConnell Prize after the company Booker-McConnell began sponsoring the event in 1968, and became commonly known as the “Booker Prize” or simply “the Booker”. Among other interests, it operated the sugar industry in Guiana (British Guiana before independence in 1966). Booker-McConnell had a long history of exploitation of sugar workers through the indentured labour system. At its peak it controlled 75% of the sugar industry in British Guiana and was so powerful that a common joke was to refer to the country as ‘Booker’s Guiana’. In 1952 Jock Campbell took over the Chairmanship of the company. After centuries of exploitation, Jock Campbell began to treat his workers as human beings providing basic benefits for sugar workers.

Shockingly, his company was involved in slave trade in a major way. It was John Campbell (Senior), Jock’s great-great-grandfather, ship owner and merchant of Glasgow, who, towards the end of the 18th century, first established the fortunes of the Campbell family in the West Indies, through the slave trade. By the 1780s they were supplying the two most important British exports to the West Indies, herring and coarse linen goods. Among the principal beneficiaries of this booming trade were John Campbell (Senior) and Company, which supplied merchandise to the slave plantations along the coast of Guiana, then in Dutch hands.

Slave merchandise

It was in this role of supplier that the company first began to acquire plantations along the Essequibo Coast of Guiana, from planters facing bankruptcy. Jock Campbell (Junior) had the decency to admit that his ancestors had been de facto slave-owners. (They acquired slave plantations from bankrupt owners.) The younger Campbell himself abhorred slavery, and it was in fact the urge to make good the misdeeds of his family that was the catalyst for his own reformist ideals.

Where Campbell suffered from a deep sense of guilt, Arundhati Roy is too morally obtuse to see that as the recipient of an award instituted by a slave-trading company, she shouldn’t be talking about human rights. Hypocrisy is too weak a word for such a charlatan, but without such posturing she cannot get public attention, which is her lifeblood.

Arundhati Roy is not an isolated case. Girish Karnad, another Karnataka based ‘humanist’ mouthing Leftist causes was a Rhodes scholar. Why should one be flattered by being given a scholarship instituted by Cecil Rhodes, a pathological racist who made a fortune in diamond mining in South Africa, exploiting slave labour. Until recently non-whites were forbidden from applying for the Rhodes scholarship.

But such mismatch between image and behaviour is not limited to fringe figures like Girish Karnad and Arundhati Roy. Sonia Gandhi, probably the most powerful politician in India, recently defiled the name of Mahatma Gandhi by accepting of the Order of Leopold instituted by the Belgian royal family. The name Leopold, King of the Belgians, is synonymous with the worst excesses of European exploitation of Africa. Leopold, the king whose name the award carries, was a slave merchant who rivals Hitler as a mass murderer.

The main premise of these human rights pretenders - there is no other word for it - is that some recognition, deserved or not, and a self-righteous attitude makes them morally superior to the rest of humanity. They have to do no work at the grassroots level needed to improve the lot of the less fortunate but only engage in rhetoric and self-righteous publicity stunts. Of course, they always choose their targets carefully, making sure that they don’t provoke real evil-doers like the Jihadis. What the Roys and the Karnads, not to say Sonia Gandhi, want is public recognition as saints, and not the risk of martyrdom.

A fact I have noted about many human rights workers is their academic mediocrity to non-existence in some cases (Karnad may be an exception). I have personal knowledge of it, including some closely related to me. They are often beneficiaries of the indulgent ego of wealthy persons, like Human Rights Watch, which is a child of George Soros who made billions in global currency trading and manipulation.

Human rights itself, if we go by what we are seeing in its name, is just another barbaric brotherhood.