The “Family of Man”

After World War II which had been preceded by the First World War, the “World” was ready to take a break from hostility. In the postwar period the United Nations was used to create the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948 to prevent ethnic squabbles such as the ones that caused the war. But what led them to make this change? There are different views depending on how cynical you are. The more positive version is just that individuals were driven to make positive change and usher in a new era. The negative viewpoint is that people were disgusted by the abject cruelty that occurred to other human beings  during the Holocaust and wanted to prevent this cruelty from ever being used again. I tend to agree with the negative, people tend not to want change unless there are problems (“why fix what isn’t broken”). However Mark Mazower in his “The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933-1950” argues that neither is true. The negative viewpoint is false because most of the general public had no idea of the horrors of the Holocaust and images of the ruins of Hiroshima were censored by the State Department. The positive viewpoint is partly true because there were individuals who campaigned for human rights and were successful but they were only successful after the people in power changed their minds and agreed with them. After World War I the League of Nations agreed to welcome new Eastern European countries into their “European community” as long as they respected the rights of their religious and ethnic minorities. However this standard was only held to the losers of the war and not the victors. The United States would still continue its policies of segregation and England would continue to persecute Catholics and Chinese. The postwar world was clearly under the control of the victors and the “losers” would just have to do as they were told and not argue back.