The Shattered Illusion of Human Rights
Constantin von Hoffmeister
Eurosiberia
The French New Right thinker Alain de Benoist, unafraid to confront the abyssal truths that our so-called civilization dares not face, delivers a clinical dissection in his book Beyond Human Rights. It is not merely a critique but an incantation that unveils the unspeakable void behind the established justifications of so-called “human rights.” He beckons us to peer into the eldritch depths where the facade of human dignity disintegrates, revealing a cosmos indifferent and malevolent. His dreadful revelations can be encapsulated in several horrors:
Human rights, he reveals, are indefensible relics of a bygone era. The ancient talismans — invoking God, nature, and reason — have lost their potency. The notion of a divine creator fashioning humans in his likeness and bestowing upon them unique dignity is now the belief of a dwindling cult. Normative conceptions of nature crumble into dust, unable to sustain the illusion of a harmonious ideal or else painting only a brutal, survivalist order. And reason? It does not inexorably lead to the belief that all humans are entitled to equal rights. As Lovecraft might claim, mankind’s conceit is an affront to the ancient cosmic order, a mere flicker in the yawning chasm of infinity, where no such rights or dignities exist.
Universal human rights? They are more akin to a cultural hallucination, an insidious delusion spawned from the ancient and arcane traditions of the Stoics and Christians, yet alien to the vast, non-European realms of existence. This is not mere happenstance but the result of the human rights doctrine being fundamentally anti-political — supplanting the political with the juridical and moral — and intensely individualistic, exalting the individual above the community. Alien cultures gaze upon this with bewilderment, sensing the inhumanity in this misplaced idolization of the self.
