Columbia University Professsor Samuel Moyn’s talk about how human rights have been considered in relation to the Holocaust brought the Numen Lumen Pavilion to capacity March 13. Moyn said the Holocaust created a platform to discuss civil rights.
Moyn divided the history of human rights thought into three time periods. The first, which he called the “welfare stage,” began in the 1940s when Franklin Roosevelt used the term “human rights” in his State of the Union Address.
“When human rights began to be talked about in World War II, it had nothing to do with the atrocities or the fate of the Jews,” Moyn said. “In fact, FDR had little interest in the fate of the Jews. It didn’t motivate him to enter the war.”
Moyn said that, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted after World War II, its founders gave little thought to the war, and that the declaration was rooted in the Great Depression.
Moyn calls the second phase of human rights discussion the “anti-colonialist stage.” This stage of thought, he said, is considered the middle of human rights history.
People from this school of thought were supporters of decolonization. Human rights, to them, meant curtailing imperialism and strengthening sovereignty.
“The nations of Africa had just spent a hundred years under the European thumb,” Moyn said. “The first and most important human right was self-determination. They wanted high and strong borders to keep the great powers at bay.”
Moyn said human rights today follow the humanitarian model. Instead of focusing on welfare at home, human rights activist are concerned about atrocities abroad. Sovereignty mattered less, and people mattered more, he said.
This was a drastic shift from the welfare stage because, in the 1940s, people either didn’t know or didn’t care about the Holocaust. After World War II, Moyn said, survivors were largely non-Jewish, and Jewish survivors seldom spoke about their experiences.
“If you go into the street today and ask someone what World War II was about, almost immediately, they would say the Holocaust,” he said. “In the forties, almost no one would say that because they didn’t know or care about the Holocaust.”
The rise of Holocaust memory transformed the idea of human rights, he said, and this can be considered a good thing.
“We have a different solidarity. It’s not limited to our fellow citizens. Human rights get us to empathize with people because they are humans,” Moyn said.
But Moyn also made the point that it’s come at a cost. Being charitable to the entire human race, compared with a welfare state, can be pricey. He said while Holocaust memories made us think about international tragedy in general, it has compromised our idea of welfare.
“We worry about the state getting too big, costing too much, too much providing welfare, making people lazy by providing too much welfare,” he said. “But we’ve had another crisis and depression and haven’t responded in the same way.”
Senior and Jewish Studies minor Diana Abrahams recognized the difficulty in balancing state welfare and helping people abroad.
“I think that there could be a lot of discussion of global aid versus national aid,” she said. “There’s a lot of value in both.”
Moyn acknowledged that this topic of discussion is specific but he said he hoped it contributed to the way students think about human rights in relation to history.
“The hope is they take away that human rights are not a result of the Holocaust, but because of the Holocaust, we can talk about them,” he said.