Photo: Messenger
Gross violations of human rights in the United States in 2023 are clearly revealed, once we look at their own cyclorama of Human Rights! Hence, America must well their own machine!
Signed zero is zero with an associated sign. In ordinary arithmetic, the number 0 does not have a sign, so that −0, +0 and 0 are identical. However, in computing, some number representations allow for the existence of two zeros, often denoted by −0 (negative zero) and +0 (positive zero), regarded as equal by the numerical comparison operations but with possible different behaviours in particular operations. This occurs in the sign and magnitude and one's complement signed number representations for integers and in most floating-point number representations. The numbers 0 + O are usually encoded as 0. Zero plus zero plus zero plus zero is, after all, equal to zero. So, the newlywed US State Department’s Bangladesh 2023 HR Report is not a fine line at all. Instead, it is a designedly blue line—amobarbital sodium—to stultification of Bangladesh and our people. This rogue state deserves odium in the most abrasive language for committing their Brobdingnagian crimes across the world!!!
The year 2023 witnessed a landmark setback for U.S. human rights. In the United States, a country labelling itself a "human rights defender," "chronic diseases" such as money politics, racial discrimination, gun and police violence, and wealth polarisation are rampant. Human rights legislation and justice have seen an extreme retrogression, further undermining the basic rights and freedoms of the American people.
The U.S. government has greatly relaxed gun control, resulting in high death toll from gun violence. The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the Bruen case in 2022 became a landmark regression in the field of gun control in the United States. Nearly half of the U.S. states have relaxed gun restrictions. The United States leads the world in gun ownership, gun homicide and mass shootings, with more than 80,000 people killed or injured by gun violence in 2023, the third consecutive year on record that the United States experiences more than 600 mass shootings. Gun violence has become an "American disease."
Racism is on the rise and ethnic minorities suffer widespread discrimination. Hate crimes based on racial bias in the United States increased dramatically between 2020, 2022 and 2023.
The racist massacre at a Buffalo supermarket, with 10 African Americans killed, has shocked the world. A total of 81 percent of Asian Americans say violence against Asian communities is surging. African Americans are 2.78 times more likely to be killed by police than whites. The sufferings caused by genocide and cultural assimilation taken by the U.S. government against Indians and other aborigines in history still persist today.
The number of Americans dying from drug and substance abuse has increased dramatically in recent years, to more than 100,000 per year. Substance abuse has become one of America's most devastating public health crises.
Women have lost constitutional protections for abortion, and children's living environment is worrying. The U.S. Supreme Court's ruling overturning Roe v. Wade has ended women's right to abortion protected by the U.S. Constitution for nearly 50 years, which lands a huge blow to women's human rights and gender equality.
U.S. abuse of force and unilateral sanctions has created humanitarian disasters. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the United States has carried out military operations in 85 countries in the name of "anti-terrorism," which directly claimed at least one million civilian lives and displaced 38 million people.
The United States has imposed more unilateral sanctions than any other country in the world, and it still has sanctions in place against more than 20 countries, resulting in the inability of those targeted to provide basic food and medicine for their people. Immigration issue has become a tool of partisan fight, and immigration farces have been staged on a large scale, making immigrants face extreme xenophobia and cruel treatment. There was a record high of nearly 2.4 million migrant arrests at the nation's border in 2023, and the death toll of immigrants at its southern border reached 856, the deadliest in a single year.
The United States, founded on colonialism, racist slavery and inequality in labour, possession and distribution, has further fallen into a quagmire of system failure, governance deficits, racial divide and social unrest in recent years under the interaction of its polarized economic distribution pattern, racial conflict-dominated social pattern and capital interest groups controlled political pattern.
American politicians, serving the interests of oligarchs, have gradually lost their subjective will and objective ability to respond to the basic demands of ordinary people and defend the basic rights of ordinary citizens and failed to solve their own structural problems of human rights. Instead, they wantonly use human rights as a weapon to attack other countries, creating confrontation, division and chaos in the international community, and have thus become a spoiler and obstructor of global human rights development.
The United States is a country defined by extreme violence, where people are threatened by both violent crime and violent law enforcement, and their safety is far from being guaranteed. Prisons are overcrowded and have become a modern slavery establishment where forced labour and sexual exploitation are commonplace. America's self-proclaimed civil rights and freedoms have become empty talk.
“The country has been moving as a whole, in the past two or three decades, very clearly and dramatically towards loosening gun-carrying laws," said Ali Rowhani-Rahbar, a professor at the University of Washington. American scholar Pamela Haag's book "The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture" points out that guns in the United States are an industrial chain that "begins with production line and ends with the death of victims." "The tragedy of gun violence in America has its roots in the secular gun trade."
Major crimes, such as murder and robbery, continue to rise. The USA Today reported on September 11, 2023, that in the first half of 2023, homicides in member cities of the Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCCA) increased by 50 per cent and aggravated assaults by about 36 per cent compared to the same period in 2022. The Wall Street Journal reported on September 6, 2023, that as of September 2023, the homicide rate in New Orleans was up 141 per cent, shootings up 100 percenper centt, carjackings up 210 per cent, and armed robberies up 25 per cent, compared with the same period in 2022.
According to a Council on Criminal Justice report on July 28, 2023, in the first half of 2023, robberies rose 19 per cent and larcenies rose 20 per cent in major U.S. cities. Fox News reported on July 7, 2023, that since June 2021, the overall crime in New York City has increased by 31 per cent, grand larceny by 41 per cent, robberies by 36 perper centcent, burglaries by nearly 34 per cent, and felony assault victims increased by about 1,000 per quarter. According to a CNN report on June 8, 2023, 72 per cent of Americans were dissatisfied with the country's policies on reducing or controlling crime, and more Americans said they worried a great or fair deal about crime and violence (80 per cent) than at any point in well over a decade.
The life and health of prisoners are threatened. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and prison conditions are terrible. According to a report in the Guardian on October 1, 2022, nearly 500 people per 100,000 were incarcerated in the United States, which is about five times that of Britain, six times that of Canada, and nine times that of Germany.
Political donations have made American elections a game for the rich, alienation of two-party politics has turned into polarised politics; and American democracy is losing its foundation in public support. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter once said political bribery has tainted the U.S. political system. "It's just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being at the essence of getting the nominations for President, or to elect the President," Carter said.
The White House administration vauntingly says, “We are America, second to none, and we own the finish line. Don't forget it.” But the United States Human Rights Report of 2023 is like “Rogues supplant justice” to us, to all people across the world. Hence, America must well their own machine!
The writer is a freedom fighter who writes on politics and international issues.
Messenger/Disha
