Denying Human Rights: A How-To Guide

I wrote a paper for my English class that I wanted to share.
The paper is seven or eight pages long, but that is too much for your average blog post.
So, I decided to cut it into smaller pieces and post it over the next few days. Consequently, as you read any of the posts on any given day, there may be a contextual flow of thought that is not readily perceived.
I encourage you, however, to keep reading (and sometimes re-reading) the subsequent posts (and prior posts) as it will become clearer as you go.

Please enjoy.

Denying Human Rights: A How-To Guide

It is not true that all human beings have fundamental human rights.
Have you been to Darfur lately? In Darfur, government sanctioned ethnic cleansing occurs daily. Remember a place called Rwanda? Same story there. How about Kosovo? If these place names don’t jog your memory, maybe 1940’s Germany and Adolf Hitler or Russia and Joseph Stalin will be more familiar examples.

But, one might object that there is a difference between “is” and “ought.”
In other words, just because a situation “is” a certain way, doesn’t mean it “ought” to be that way. Someone who holds this point of view would say that while certain basic and fundamental human rights really do exist and “ought” to be honored among human beings, it, unfortunately, “is” the case that they are not granted to all human beings at all times.
This is not a problem with rights but a problem with humans. And it is not whether these rights are or aren’t granted that determines when and which human beings get them. Human beings should have these fundamental rights simply because we are human beings.
This person would also certainly agree to the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic rights, meaning that human beings have intrinsic rights by virtue of being human and that these rights are not somehow added to us from some outside source (extrinsically).