The UDHR preamble’s religious language encoded Western-civilization claims against Islam and Communism.

Evidence

For the neoliberals, communism was not simply a competing European political movement; communism was ‘a pseudo-religion within the shell of the Russian state, a sort of secularized Islam’, in Roepke’s words, communists were emissaries of an empire bent on world domination. With this ‘Communist Pseudo-Islam’ there could not be ‘one world’, but only a mobilisation of Europe against the threat of fanatical hordes from the East. This assimilation of communism, totalitarianism and Islam recurred frequently in the writings of the neoliberals, who drew on orientalist tropes of inassimilable otherness to discredit their adversaries. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 125 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

From a neoliberal perspective, the UDHR’s adoption of social and economic rights seemed evidence of a desire for security, which would enable the state to usurp the traditional role of the family. But many of the UDHR’s drafters were concerned to uphold the family as what its Article 16 (initiated by Charles Malik) calls ‘the natural and fundamental group and unit of society’. The pacifying, governmental approach of Roosevelt’s New Deal deeply informed the social and economic rights in the declaration. Just as Roosevelt sought to avoid ‘talking politics’, the drafters sought to detach social and economic rights from political challenges to the exploitation of labour, the existing division of labour and the reproductive role of the nuclear family, and transform them into minimalist guarantees for the most needy. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 180 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Neoliberal theorists conflated communism with Islam as an orientalist enemy. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 125; Communism and liberal democracy shared a common modern secular language; America recycled its Cold War enemy frame from Communism to Muslims. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes…, 667 (+6 more)

Related

• The UDHR’s freedom-of-conscience article carried anti-communist and anti-Islamic ideological freight. (similarity 0.87)
• The UDHR’s social and economic rights were designed to pacify, not radicalize (similarity 0.87)
• Christian anticommunists like Malik wrote the UDHR’s dignity language (similarity 0.84)
• The UDHR’s drafters largely agreed that unrestrained markets bred conflict, not civility. (similarity 0.83)
• The UDHR’s social and economic rights were sharply opposed by early neoliberals as totalitarian. (similarity 0.83)
• Neoliberals rejected universal human-rights consensus as a civilisational regression toward tribal morality. (similarity 0.81)
• UDHR social rights were compatible with market order, not a threat to it (similarity 0.81)
• Neoliberal theorists conflated communism with Islam as an orientalist enemy. (similarity 0.81)
• The UDHR’s would-be critics objected to its drafting, not its universality (similarity 0.80)
• The US religion-versus-communism strategy failed because Islam did not compete with communism for elites (similarity 0.79)
• Neoliberals saw economic rights as a path toward totalitarianism (similarity 0.79)
• Post-UDHR human-rights activism narrowed from economic to civil rights in tandem with neoliberalism (similarity 0.79)
• The UDHR’s drafting was a pluralist debate, not a Western imposition. (similarity 0.79)
• The UDHR encoded development hierarchy into universal human rights (similarity 0.78)
• The UDHR’s flexible social rights language proved compatible with neoliberal poverty management (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberal theorists conflated communism with Islam as an orientalist enemy. #corroborates (0.82) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 125
• Communism and liberal democracy shared a common modern secular language #qualifies (0.75)
• The UDHR’s social and economic rights were designed to pacify, not radicalize #complicates (0.74) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 180
• America recycled its Cold War enemy frame from Communism to Muslims. #contradicts (0.72) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 667
• Practicing Islam functionally replaced Communism as the most threatening subversive activity #complicates (0.72) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 476
• The UDHR’s drafters largely agreed that unrestrained markets bred conflict, not civility. #qualifies (0.72) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 37