A few words on Human Rights...

Archbishop Demetrios presents me with the Athenagoras Human Rights Award.

I recently was lucky enough to win the Athenagoras Human Rights Award, presented annually for exemplifying “concern for the basic rights and religious freedom of all people.” Past winners have included Presidents Bush and Carter, Mother Theresa, Bishop Tutu, and many world religious leaders over the past twenty years.

The award is given by the National Council of the Order of Saint Andrew of the Greek Orthodox church, and it was given to me in representing the “generations of men and women in the US Armed Forces whose service and sacrifice have upheld the core value of liberty.”

In evening of camaraderie and good spirits, with many from the nation’s Greek-American community present, I had a chance to say a few words about why human rights matter in today’s world. A part of my remarks follow.

~ADM Jim Stavridis

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What a pleasure to be with all of you tonight! I especially like being at a gathering where everyone knows how to pronounce my name … I am also for once not the shortest man in the room. Life is good with Greek friends.

This is an extraordinary award to say the least. I follow, quite improbably, in a line that includes Nobel Peace Prize winners, Presidents, the most reverend and holy clergy of several global religions. I am tempted to quote Billy Joel’s immortal song, “Piano Man” to myself, where he sings, “Man, what are you doing here?”

All I really have to commend myself is a lifelong interest in human rights. Part of why I joined the military was a very nascent sense, shared by many, many people in the military, that might does not make right. And that it is the duty of the strong to protect the weak from harm.

This all began with the Greeks, of course. I won’t inflict Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle and their theories of natural law and natural justice into an after dinner speech, but, as my Grandfather Demitrios would have said, “you can read all that in a book.”

What we do know, sadly, is what a world without human rights looks like. We need look no further than history or literature or worst of all, the daily news.

I recently read the horrific and brilliant book “Bloodlands,” by Timothy Snyder, about the massacres in Europe perpetrated in the apocalyptic 20th century, in which perhaps 60 million Europeans perished in war and its related disasters. While not light reading, I commend it to you as a powerful view of what we must never permit again.

We can of course turn to literature. Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” creates a dystopian future in which a father struggles to survive with his young son in a world grown mad in which no norm of justice or law or shred of human rights exists.
And turning from novel to poetry, I’ll quote the dark but brilliant poem by the great Irish writer William Butler Yeats. He described a world coming apart in 1920 in the poem “The Second Coming” :

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Worst of all, we need only turn on CNN to see modern day slavery and human trafficking, human rights trampled in dozens of countries and regions around the world, and many regimes who deny the most basic of rights to their citizens.
The darkness exists in history, literature, and today’s reality.

What is to be done?

I would argue that we collectively work to create and preserve human rights in all that we do in at least three ways.

First, we should celebrate our victories.

There has been great progress in some areas of the world. The Arab Spring is part of this. War criminals are caught, prosecuted, and incarcerated from the Balkans nightmare of a decade ago. In Latin America, the children of the desaparecidos, the disappeared, from the so-called “dirty war, are recovered and Argentine society returns from the darkness of an authoritarian regime that kidnapped, tortured, and killed its own citizens. Central America is pursuing human rights violators in several nations with determination.

Second, we must believe. The long throw of human history is on the side of human rights. Look at Libya today, struggling to throw off forty years of awful dictatorship, torture, imprisonment, and impunity at the hands of the Kaddaffy family.

Much of what has happened in the Arab Spring comes from the hearts of those who believe in freedom, and used social media to remake a world. Their belief carried the day. We must believe in what is right.

And third, we must act. There are times when force must be part of achieving human rights. The NATO campaign in Libya, conducted under UN Security Council Resolutions, helped achieve freedom and human rights.

Likewise, when we sent Hospital Ships to Latin America and the Caribbean while I was at US Southern Command, we treated hundreds of thousands of patients, giving them the right to medical care.

When we create centers for human rights studies with partner militaries in Central and South America, and in Eastern Europe, and in Afghanistan we can help train Security Forces to respect their citizens and become a force for good in their society.

In all of these ways, we pursue President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s four freedoms – a good set of goals:
Freedom of speech and expression

Freedom of worship
Freedom from want
Freedom from fear

None of this will be easy. It will be a long voyage.

But if we celebrate our victories … believe in our cause … and act upon our principals … we can and will succeed.

I will close with the valedictory words of Nikos Kazantzakis, the author of “Report to Greco” and “Zorba the Greek,”

I want nothing
I fear nothing
I am free

If we can help create a world without want, a world without fear … we will have created a world where we are free. That is the most important, undeniable, and central human right of all – freedom.

Freedom, in the end, is the right to be human.

I thank you for this award, and I humbly accept it on behalf of the brave men and women of the US Armed Forces, volunteers all, who defend our freedom every day. God bless you all …