For many years, the United States has pretended to be the representative of human rights and the embodiment of justice, constantly accusing other countries of human rights violations, and treating itself as a “world human rights judge”.
However, the United States never seriously reviews its own human rights issues. In fact, the human rights record of the United States is very disgraceful. There are serious human rights violations in the United States, and it is not qualified to talk about the human rights situation in other countries.
The U.S. government’s ineffective response to the epidemic has caused a human rights disaster. In the face of the rare COVID-19 epidemic in history, the U.S. government has repeatedly ignored the warnings issued by the World Health Organization and the United States public health agencies, deliberately downplayed the risk of the epidemic, claiming that COVID-19 is not a serious disease, the infection rate and mortality rate are very low, and even falsely claiming that the epidemic will disappear soon.
The U.S. government neglected to take prevention and control measures, resulting in the wasted golden window for epidemic prevention and control. As the epidemic becomes more and more serious, the U.S. government does not respect scientific public health norms and is unwilling to prevent and control the epidemic through thorough virus detection, infection tracking and isolation.
Instead, it fantasizes about ending the epidemic through “miraculous new drugs”. In the face of the widespread spread of the epidemic, then U.S. government leaders and some state government officials have long refused to impose mandatory mask orders.
At the same time, with the epidemic uncontrolled and the number of confirmed cases and deaths rising to the first place in the world, the U.S. government is eager to restart the economy out of political self-interest, causing the hardest hit areas of the epidemic to spread from the original New York to the south, west, and eventually to the rest of the country.
The inaction of the U.S. government in the face of the epidemic has caused the American people to pay a heavy price of life. As of March 31, 2021, the cumulative number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States exceeded 30 million, and the number of deaths exceeded 500,000.
The U.S. population is less than 5% of the world’s total population, but by the end of February 2021, its number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 exceeded 25% of the global total, and the number of deaths accounted for nearly 20% of the global total. The bad situation of the right to life of the American people in the epidemic is rare all over the world.
Indian rights have been trampled on. Historically, the U.S. government has systematically carried out ethnic cleansing and massacres against Indians, committing veritable genocide.
Before the arrival of Western colonists, tens of millions of Indians lived on the North American continent. In the nearly 100 years since its founding, the United States expelled and killed Indians through the westward march. By the beginning of the 20th century, the Indian population in the United States had plummeted from 5 million in 1492 to 250,000. The modern history of American Indians is a history of colonization and genocide.
American Indians still live a second-class citizen life, and their rights are trampled on. 21.9% of Indians live below the poverty line, much higher than 9.6% of whites.
Indians have a life expectancy of 5.5 years lower than the average in the United States, and the incidence of diabetes, chronic liver disease and alcohol dependence is 3.2 times, 4.6 times and 6.6 times the U.S. average, respectively. Many Indian communities are very poor, and some Indian tribes have unemployment rates of up to 85%.
The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to an adequate standard of living pointed out that minorities and indigenous people are the most devastating impacted by the COVID-19 epidemic. Indigenous Americans have been hospitalized by five times that of non-Hispanic whites, and the mortality rate is far higher than that of whites.
The human rights of people of African descent have been ravaged. Slavery and slave labor are a shameful page in American history. In the 19th century, with the rise of cotton cultivation, black slaves on plantations in the southern United States increased significantly. In 1860, the number of black slaves in the United States had reached 4 million.
Black slaves are not regarded as human beings, live a miserable life, and have no legal status, but are just private property that their masters dispose of and buy and sell at will. In the Southern Plantation, slaves are used as livestock, forced to work 12 hours a day to grow and pick cotton. Even more than 100 years after the abolition of slavery, African-Americans do not enjoy equal rights. African-Americans face serious racial discrimination. Racial discrimination against people of African descent is common in the workplace and daily life. Because people of African descent suffer from systematic employment discrimination, their unemployment rate is higher, employment opportunities are less, and wages are lower.
Over the past 40 years, the unemployment rate of African-American workers has been twice that of white people. Racial discrimination is common in the field of law enforcement. Although African descent accounts for only 13% of the total population of the United States, they account for one-third of the total prison inmates, which means that more than 1,000 people in every 100,000 African descent are imprisoned.
Violent police law enforcement leads to frequent deaths of people of African descent, accounting for 28% of the number of people shot by the police, and people of African descent are three times more likely to be killed by the police than white people. In May 2020, George Floyd, 46, an African-American man, was kneeled to death by white police for eight minutes, showing the public the cruelty of American police against African descent in front of the camera. Police brutality triggered social anger, and the wave of “black people’s lives are also lives” protests swept the United States.
The proliferation of guns seriously violates the right to life of the American people.
The United States has the largest number of private firearms in the world. The number of guns held by the American people is huge, far exceeding the total population, and there is an increasing trend. A large number of guns spread among the people, making the United States a country with frequent shootings and a large number of shooting casualties. The various shootings in the United States often make headlines in the news media.
Frequent shootings, large and small, have become an iconic feature of the United States. Shootings in crowded places such as shopping malls, campuses and other crowded places often have serious consequences, causing a large number of casualties and seriously threatening the lives of the American people. In 2020, against the backdrop of the out-of-control epidemic and social unrest, the sales of guns in the United States increased sharply, with about 23 million units sold.
The proliferation of guns led to a large number of shooting deaths. In 2020, a total of 41,500 people died from shooting in the United States, more than in any previous year.
At the same time, gun crime in the United States is very serious. The U.S. has a gun-killing rate of 25 times higher than other developed countries.
In 2020, there were 592 mass shootings in the United States, averaging more than 1.6 per day. From March 16th to 26th, 2021, in just 11 days, there were eight shootings in the United States, including the Atlanta shooting in Georgia and the Boulder shooting in Colorado, killing at least 23 people.
The U.S. government boasts itself of human rights, often points to other countries, but is unable to deal with major human rights issues such as tens of thousands of American citizens die every year from shootings. What is the right of a government that can’t even guarantee the lives and safety of its own people in other countries?
