Christian anticommunists like Malik wrote the UDHR’s dignity language

Evidence

Here, too, the neoliberals were close to conservative Christians. Such views were echoed by the Lebanese UN delegate Charles Malik, who drafted the Universal Declaration’s preamble with its ringing assertion that the ‘inherent dignity of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world’. For Malik, who insisted on the inclusion in the UDHR of ‘religious ciphers’ such as ‘inherent’, ‘inalienable’, ‘endowed’, it was ‘Western civilization’ that contained at its core ‘the truest reality of human dignity’. In contrast, he argued that ‘certain elements in Islam admit of an interpretation that accords with Communism’. Malik singled out the ‘blind fatalism of Marx’, and called on the West to take action to ensure that the ‘alliance between Communism, radical nationalism, anti-Westernism, xenophobia and religious reaction and fanaticism need not be the last word’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 126

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s earlier work on how ‘immodesty’ panics and human-rights discourse were weaponized; also parallels the anticommunist moral framing seen throughout this book. — connects to: The UDHR’s cross-cultural legitimacy rests partly on a hagiographic misreading of Malik — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 129; The UDHR preamble’s religious language encoded Western-civilization claims against Islam and Communism.
• DEFINE: Shows that ‘dignity’ and ‘inalienable’ in the UDHR were inserted by a Christian anticommunist as ‘religious ciphers,’ reframing what those terms meant at origin.

Broader Connections

• The UDHR’s cross-cultural legitimacy rests partly on a hagiographic misreading of Malik #responds-to (0.82) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 129
• The UDHR preamble’s religious language encoded Western-civilization claims against Islam and Communism. #corroborates (0.70)