Human rights organizations became obsolete when persecution turned against whole peoples

Evidence

27 The only guardians of the right of asylum were the few societies whose special aim was the protection of human rights. The most important of them, the French-sponsored Ligue des Droits de l’Homme with branches in all democratic European countries, behaved as though the question were still merely the saving of individuals persecuted for their political convictions and activities. This assumption, pointless already in the case of millions of Russian refugees, became simply absurd for Jews and Armenians. The Ligue was neither ideologically nor administratively equipped to handle the new problems. Since it did not want to face the new situation, it stumbled into functions which were much better fulfilled by any of the many charity agencies which the refugees had built up themselves with the help of their compatriots. When the Rights of Man became the object of an especially inefficient charity organization, the concept of human rights naturally was discredited a little more. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2513

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the later Islamophobia readings on how human-rights discourse fails when exclusion targets collective identities rather than individuals - a recurring mechanism in the field.