William F. Schulz's Remarks at the Welcoming Plenary

When I was growing up here in Pittsburgh in the 1950s and 60s, I was truly afraid of only two things: I was afraid of nuclear war and I was afraid of Tony S.

It is actually something of a wonder that I didn't have far more fears. I had two of the world's best, most loving parents but both of my parents had a rather apocalyptic view of the world. My father, though he lived to be almost 80, was always certain that he would die at any moment of either a heart attack or a bowel obstruction and so spent a great deal of time feeling his own pulse and consuming massive quantities of bran cereal. My mother, who had a wide variety of phobias, was particularly afraid of driving through tunnels, which is a most inconvenient fear to have in a city like this one, surrounded as it is by mountains. My mother was convinced that some tunnel engineer somewhere had forgotten to install a key support beam and that her car would inevitably be the one buried under the mountain when the flaw in the tunnel gave way.

But I was only afraid of nuclear war and Tony S. I was afraid of nuclear war because my parents had informed me that, when war came, Pittsburgh's steel mills would the first thing the Russians bombed. "But don't worry," they said reassuringly, "we'll all be dead in an instant and you won't know the difference." It was not until our teachers instructed us that we were to duck and cover under our wooden school desks in the event of nuclear war and that that would protect us from the radiation-it was not until this comforting news that my fear of nuclear catastrophe began to abate.

But that left Tony S., the neighborhood bully. I spent a great deal of time trying to avoid Tony and his gang, who had a particular distaste for nerds. Since I fit that category to a T, I was constantly in grave peril. One time in fact Tony caught me with a left hook to my chin that persuaded me on the spot to become a minister. Tony's motto might have been the same as that of the Roman emperor Caligula: "Oderint dum Metuan," "Let them hate as long as they fear." I learned years later that Tony had fulfilled his lifetime dream: he had become a Pennsylvania state trooper.

I've been thinking about Tony, Caligula and that motto a lot the last few months because a year and a half ago it was the terrorists whose motto might have been, "Let them hate as long as they fear" but today it is the United States that has become the world's bully.

Every year when we meet together at these AGMs, we wring our collective hands at all the horrors going on around us in the world. But this year is different. This year we are witnessing not just a series of brutal but fundamentally independent human rights violations committed by disparate governments around the globe. This year we are witnessing something far more fundamental and far more dangerous. This year we are witnessing the orchestrated destruction by the United States of the very basis, the fragile scaffolding, upon which international human rights have been built, painstakingly, bit by bit by bit, since the end of World War II. Little did we know, when the towers fell on September 11, 2001, that human rights too had been sent plunging to the ground. We didn't know it but many of those surrounding George Bush knew it and they were very, very glad.

Throughout American history, the United States has frequently been tempted to think of itself as the World's savior, its Messiah. The Puritans called their experiment in the New World "a city set on a hill," a beacon, a model, for all others to follow. The Declaration of Independence did not speak just for the colonists; it was all men-everywhere-(if not women of course) who were created equal. The Civil War may have freed the slaves but, when it was over, America's next frontier, its Manifest Destiny, was to spread so-called "civilization" across the continent, slaughtering thousands of Native Americans in its wake. And then that Manifest Destiny began to work its way across the seas to places like Puerto Rico and Hawaii and the Philippines-the Philippines where William Howard Taft, then serving as Governor of the territory, assured everyone that America knew best for what he called "our little brown brothers."

But then came the World Wars and, after the second of them, a new concept was born, the idea of universal human rights, that virtue was not any one nation's alone to propagate, that a just society was everyone's responsibility, everyone, working together. In many ways the United States was a champion of that new concept. The Nuremberg trials, the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the birth of Amnesty International, the adoption of international human rights treaties, the creation of international human rights courts, the growth of human rights in countries from Poland to Argentina, South Africa to South Korea, the establishment of war crimes tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the decision of the British courts to extradite Augusto Pinochet, the decision of the Belgian courts to assert universal jurisdiction and convict four Rwandans of genocide, the creation of an International Criminal Court…painstakingly, step by step by step, the world was making a slow, halting but inexorable, inevitable, unstoppable march toward a universal culture of respect for human rights, toward a just and equitable world, defined not by any one country alone but by the whole world, the global community.

But look, my friends, if you think you are the Messiah, if you think you know best, then such a vision, a vision of everyone having a say, of everyone's opinion being respected, well, such a vision is simply too much, too dangerous, too glorious, and so it very simply had to be destroyed. When the towers plunged to earth, that provided the perfect excuse for those who feared that vision to try to bring human rights to ruin as well.

I may have been naïve but I never thought I would see the day when the United States would not just refuse to ratify a human rights treaty-we have done that many times-but actually remove a President's signature from one, as this administration did with the International Criminal Court. I never thought I would see that day. I never thought I would see the day when the United States would once again unapologetically round up immigrants simply because of their ethnicity or their religion. That happened during the First World War. It happened during the Second. But surely not again. I never thought I would see that day. I never thought I would see the day when the United States would shred the Geneva Convention, as we are doing at Guantanamo Bay. I never thought I would see the day when the United States would deny a US citizen the most fundamental right in our justice system, the right to consult an attorney. I never thought I would see the day when the United States would simultaneously thumb its nose and its third finger at the United Nations and rush into an aggressive war opposed by the vast majority of the citizens of the globe. And I surely never thought I would see the day when the United States, the great champion of human rights, would unabashedly torture suspects in its custody, chaining them to ceilings, depriving them of food and medicine, holding them in freezing rooms and painful positions for hours on end. I never thought I would see this day.

But see it I have and so have all of you. Indeed, a few people rejoice that this day has come. A lot of people who currently run this country have never liked human rights, have never respected the United Nations, have never trusted the international community. And those people, when they learned of the calamity of 9/11, seized the opportunity to try to turn back that inexorable march toward a human-rights respecting world. They have tried to strip human rights of its power. They have tried to deprive other countries of their dignity. They have tried to stamp the whole globe "Made in America."

But you and I are here in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania this weekend to say, "You will not succeed!" Human rights are far stronger than your narrow, dangerous ideologies. You will not succeed. Justice is far more powerful than your tough words and racist policies. You will not succeed. And the future is far more resilient than the fear you exploit and the world domination you crave. You will not succeed. You will not succeed in demonizing refugees. You will not succeed in dividing the world against itself. You will not succeed in replacing the promise of life with the culture of death. You will not succeed because Amnesty International will not let you.

Every one of us, working together, we will not let you. The AIUSA staff will not let you. If you are a member of our outstanding staff, stand up and stay standing. Our community groups will not let you. If you are a member of a local group, stand up and stay standing. Our student groups will not let you. If you are a member of a student group, stand up and stay standing. Our networks will not let you. If you are a member of a network, stand up and stay standing. Our donors and supporters will not let you. If you are a donor or a supporter of Amnesty, stand up and stay standing. All those who care about human rights and the future of this planet will not let you. Now give yourselves a huge round of applause.

And the reason we will not let human rights be trampled is because we have a far better vision. Not of asylum seekers imprisoned when they flee for their lives to America but of prisoners of conscience freed after they have dared to speak the truth. Not of electricity coursing through the veins of juveniles but of hope streaming into the hearts of the world's children. Not of captives subjected to torture but of everybody, even the most indecent of us, treated with dignity. You don't earn your human rights by being good; you claim them by being born. And you don't stop terrorism by being a bully; you stop it by being a model of justice.

All those years ago in Pittsburgh I learned that in relation to Tony S. I learned what we all know about bullies: that Tony was real tough when he was surrounded by his friends but far less brave when they had abandoned him. I learned that if I could convince a few of his friends I wasn't such a bad guy, Tony would be less inclined to beat on me. Casey Stengel, the famous baseball manager, once said that "The secret of being a great manager is to keep the two guys who hate your guts away from the three guys who are undecided" and that's the way to fight terrorist bullies too. Not to be a bully yourself, not to match evil for evil, but to be the wellspring of hope, the defender of rights, the keeper of memory.

In 1933 the great Russian poet Osip Mandselstam wrote a sixteen-line poem condemning Joseph Stalin's atrocities against his people. Five years later the Soviet Secret Police came to Mandelstam's apartment to take him away. They confiscated his manuscripts, forbade their publication and threw him in prison where he disappeared a few months later. But what they had not counted on was his wife, Nadezdha. For Nadezdha had memorized every one of Osip's poems and for the next thirty years she recited them every day in her head to keep from forgetting. Finally in 1970 Nadezdha published those poems and Osip Mandelstam, whose memory Stalin had vowed would be wiped from the earth, Osip Mandelstam came back to life again. "Silence," said Nadzdha, "is the real crime against humanity."

No matter how hard they try to wipe human rights from the earth, our adversaries will ultimately fail. For the power of memory is too grand and the voices of hope too many. We can't be stopped as long as we keep reciting the poems. Keep breaking the silence and, after all the crimes are through and all the wars are finished, justice itself will still be standing. Remember Nadezdha and keep reciting the poems, keep breaking the silence, and I promise that eventually everything we cherish, everything, will come back to life again.

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