We, the veterans of the resistance movements and combat forces of Free France, we call on the young generation to live by, to transmit, the legacy of the Resistance and its ideals. We say to them: Take our place, “Indignez-vous!” [Get angry! or Cry out!].
– Stéphane Hessel
Historically, the most terrible things – war, genocide, and slavery – have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience. We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”
– Howard Zinn
Jeffrey St Clair reminded me that St Paul hated clamour. For him, submission was the great virtue. In Ephesians 4: 31-32 he lumped clamour together with bitterness, wrath, anger, evil speaking, and all malice, as if he were trying to hide outcry, drown out the noise, smother it with all the things we need to clamour against. He was sending out his message in Koine Greek, in an age when clamour was powerful because public speaking and vocal expression were the main forms of social communication. Clamour, in Greek (κραυγή), was a spontaneous outburst or deliberate call for attention. St Paul was no fan of things spontaneous, including sex. As Australian historian Peter Cochrane wrote (personal communication), St Paul also “advanced the abysmal idea that our bodies were ‘vile’ and that sex was an impediment to salvation”. Sex is a clamorous need and, in some languages, “clamour” contains “amour”. This is, of course, anecdotal, but the connections are suggestive because if human bodies are “vile”, he’s not granting them dignity.
After three recent public lectures on human rights, genocide, and politics in general (with quite a lot of young people in the audience on each occasion), I was approached by several under-25s, who didn’t know each other, all wanting to talk more about human rights and what to do. Some came to visit afterwards and it was striking to see how they were all concerned about the same issues, how they expressed disgust at being forced to live in a world where civilisation’s genocides are a routine thing. These intelligent young people feel “tired”, “burnt-out”, “empty” because of the indifference all around them. They’re expressing what Durkheim called anomie (from the Greek anomos “without law, lawless”). This is a situation where expectations flounder, where the social system is broken and lawless, where young people feel worthless, weak, and in deep despair, with a cruel sense of unbelonging because there’s no community. When laws, conventions, promises, and ethics are trashed, there can be no society because there are no shared interests, no empathetic community to embrace those who feel alone.
The upshot of these encounters with young adults is an attempt to form a group where they can be heard and can clamour against the system that’s so impairing their lives as decent, caring people. The group’s still small but it’s early days yet. Ages range from 17 to 92. We held a first meeting with a couple of 50-ish specialists in housing and universal basic income, which are two of the main issues that arose. We older people, are there for support and not to give lessons, and others are willing to consult from various fields if needed. So far, there’s a possibility of a space to meet in one of Barcelona’s cultural institutions. If this doesn’t come off, Clamour could take to the city squares (just as the Indignez-Vous! movement did nearly 15 years ago), and a first public talk by the young people is being programmed for May. Some of them are good writers. They just need places to be published, to shout, to get their indignation heard.
The name Clamour echoes the outrage of Stéphane Hessel whose famous short essay Indignez-Vous! (Time for Outrage!), written when he was 93, inspired the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, and the Indignados movement in Spain. Many years earlier, Hessel was involved in writing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and he understood very well that, for all its flaws, its suggestion of universal human rights is one of the most radical political ideas ever. It seems that the British and American signatories recognised this too as they wanted to replace “universal” with the non-committal term “international” (and we know how many peoples are excluded by the term “international” today) rights. It was only thanks to Rene Cassin, national commissioner of justice and education in the government of Free France in London in 1941, that the “Universal” Declaration was adopted in the UN on 10 December 1948 by 48 out of 58 member states. The positioning of the adjective is revealing. It qualifies not human rights but the Declaration itself. In a globalised age, anybody can make a “universal” declaration in the hope of reaching everybody. If the word “universal” referred to rights, it would necessarily mean liberty equality, and fraternity for everybody. In a just world, the qualifier “universal” would be redundant because “human” is a universal category. As long as rights aren’t universal, “rights” can only be the privileges of some. And the circle of those some is shrinking fast as wealth is ever more concentrated. To give one obscene example, Elon Musk’s fortune greatly exceeds the GDP of his home country, South Africa (population 64.5+ million).
Seventy-seven years on, we need to clamour for universal human rights in the awareness that, in this age of ecocide, the basic human right to physical existence depends on the right to exist of all life forms in the human habitats on this planet. Perhaps we need a new name, something like a Declaration of Universal Rights on Earth. Ecocide, defined by the Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts”, is surely something to clamour against because, if the UDHR is the only transversal rights narrative we have, the other side of the coin, ecocide, is the transversal crime that will affect everybody. The billionaires may feel safe in their bunkers with biotech replacing their organs and computers swaddling their minds forever-and-ever-amen, but they’ll be living in a sad world without elephants. It’s up to the rest of us to clamour for the lives of elephants, bees, and the little nesting turtledove that visits my balcony plants every day because all our fates as living creatures are interconnected. But what should we clamour against and for, and how?
The idea of the Barcelona Clamour group is to clamour for the human rights that were promised in the UDHR; for a universal basic income to guarantee the right to material existence for everyone, the basic condition for all the other rights; and to clamour against ecocide, an even worse crime than genocide, which is supposedly “the crime of all crimes”; clamour against billionaires and oligarchs whose antihuman, antilife political-economic systems are the basic cause of all the grief; and against abuses of AI, biotech, and fake news, today’s ideologies and mechanisms of repression. This very general framework is just an attempt to keep in mind the interrelationships in these five areas of concern. The connection between a specific issue like housing doesn’t exist in a vacuum but is connected with wider issues and the basic questions that should always be asked: what?, when?, where?, how?, why?, who?, whom?, and how much? In Spain the average age of emancipation is 30.3 years. Young men and women aren’t allowed to be adults. According to a recent survey, 35+% of young Catalan men and 27% of young women would accept a dictatorship. One respondent expressed the relationship between real-estate violence and antisocial political detachment, or the alienation of anomie, when he replied, “Why would I want democracy if I can’t pay my rent?”
A glance at Gil Duran’s summary of MAGA/Tech authoritarian ideology also illustrates overlaps. The tech allies of government leaders like Trump detest democracy. “They are actively trying to build these weird little dictator cities all over the world…” They want control over governments. They believe in imminent social collapse and are part of the cause of social collapse. They’re mostly rich, white, anti-public males. Governments and elected leaders lie, blatantly and on a tremendous scale, for and with these outrageously rich techno-oligarchs. This means that there is no social contract at government level. So, the only real social contracts can be made in grassroots organisations, large and small. Like Clamour. But clamour is needed everywhere and urgently if we don’t want to live in an anomic world built on lies, where genocide and ecocide are routine (and will therefore get worse).
The signatories to the UDHR promised to respect “the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” as “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”. In Article 25.1 they aver that, “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family”. They didn’t offer mechanisms for achieving this but the obvious good start would be a universal basic income, as a human right, which is how it’s defined in Article 1.3 of the Universal Declaration of Emerging Human Rights, Monterrey 2007.
The right to basic income, which assures all individuals, independently of their age, sex, sexual orientation, civil status or employment status, the right to live under worthy material conditions. To such end, the right to an unconditional, regular, monetary income paid by the state and financed by fiscal reforms, is recognised as a right of citizenship, to each resident member of society, independently of their other sources of income, and being adequate to allow them to cover their basic needs.
If this basic right isn’t met, none of the other promises of rights can be honoured.
If, as the Preamble declares, “freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people”, how can the common people enjoy these freedoms if they’re being murdered, starved, and displaced? If “it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law”, how can there be rule of law in political systems based on lies?
Article 1, the one about fraternity, has the beautiful sentiments that, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” It was patently true, even back then in 1948, that human beings aren’t born free and equal, and neither was there any spirit of brotherhood in those Cold War years. The language is masculine and the premise is false. But the baby shouldn’t be thrown out with the bathwater. This was more than hot air. It was a promise, a formally made promise of a friendlier, more sustainable world, a matter of “reason and conscience”. If “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”, then they should be “free and equal in dignity and rights” throughout their lives, every single day.
The broken promise of Article 2—“no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty”—has led, on migrant routes to Spain alone, to the deaths of 10,457 in 2024 alone. One could almost talk about “genocide of the vulnerable”. Data from May 2024 show that over 120 million people have been uprooted from their homes and land due to persecution, violence, war, or human rights abuse. No distinction shall be made. Really? Any Afghan refugee, for example, would beg to differ. And would add that the promise of Article 3, “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and the security of person”, is also broken, though it could so easily be honoured in great part by introducing a universal basic income (paid for by taxing the rich).
Article 4 proclaims that, “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude”. Yet, about 50 million people are currently living in modern slavery. Evidently, in any decent world, “no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”, but it’s happening all the time, especially to immigrants, refugees, Indigenous peoples, and the most vulnerable groups everywhere. Refugees have this dreadful status forced on them when their homes, their lands, their livelihoods have been snatched from them and destroyed, even though Article 17.2 assures that, “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property”.
Related with this is the fact that when people seek asylum they’ve already been gravely illtreated before the asylum seeker abuse begins, so Article 14.1, “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution” breaks two promises: about the right to seek asylum and the right to enjoy asylum (from Latin, “place of refuge, sanctuary”, and Greek (asylos) “inviolable, safe from violence”). Broken promises destroy people and destroy social life because they destroy the meaning of words.
In any society based on a social contract, it’s evident that everyone should have “the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law”, as Article 6, spells out, while Article 7 rules that, “All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination”. Article 8 enshrines, “the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law”. Article 28 famously refers to the international system: “Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized”. But if governments are routinely violating their own and international laws, and when national tribunals aren’t “competent” because they’re corrupt, when governments commit or help others to commit genocide, then no person can feel that he or she has the protection of and right to recognition before the law. Governments must be held to account in accordance with their own laws and the covenants they signed. While they don’t honour these promises, there can be no world “order”. We need to clamour for an international system that makes this planet a safer, more friendly place for every single one of its living inhabitants.
Now, when forest guardians and Indigenous peoples are trying to defend their land, sea, rivers, prairies, steppes, mountains, lakes and many other natural formations and, in doing so, are fighting ecocide that is affecting the entire planet and all human beings, and when protesters are being illtreated, arrested, and killed, arbitrarily and everywhere, we’re told by Article 9 that, “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile”. “Exile” for many people who live in harmony with their habitat, their cosmos, means death. Reading that promise and knowing the reality, which has been pushed to the extreme of genocide (as in West Papua) and general indifference to it, is enough to make one weep. But clamouring is more effective than weeping.
Now that the Silicon Valley techs and billionaires are wielding power everywhere, openly and secretly, with wholesale online attacks like those from the “virtual militia” of the Bolsonaro government’s “hate cabinet”, and countless other manifestations we can’t even know about, the pledge in Article 12—“No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation”—is insulting, to put it mildly, when governments themselves are honing their skills in arbitrary interference, in the most damaging ways. “Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks”, we’re told, but when there’s no separation of powers, the law will only give protection to the powerful.
The last straw in all the broken faith is summed up in Article 30. “Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein”. This and all the other broken promises mean not just turning a blind eye but intent by governments to commit the crimes they’ve pledged to protect citizens from. Do we really want this autocratic, destructive anomie, the broken promises, broken societies, the “destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth” in the UDHR? “Give a thing and take a thing, an old man’s plaything.” This refrain from my childhood has taken on the meaning of broken promises on a worldwide and very grim murderous scale. The promise of human dignity was given and immediately snatched away. When freedom, justice, and dignity are denied us, the only way of achieving them is fighting for them, clamouring for them. And then we nurture other values like solidarity, ethics, friendship, and respect for all living beings.
Clamour! Clamour! Clamour!
