Next time you bleat about your right to something think about what’s being done in your name in the Mediterranean

My opinion piece published by The Irish Times today:

“The conception of human rights based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships – except that they were still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.”

When the political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote these words in ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ in 1951 she was making no abstract claim.  Continue reading →