Dec. 11, Rick Halperin, the director of the SMU Dallas Human Rights Program, along with John Vernon, law professor SMU Dallas Dedman School of Law, for a commentary advocating that world leaders reconsider and recommit to the tenets and spirit considered 75 years ago when the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights was drafted. Published in the Dallas Morning news under the heading 1948 U.N. declaration is the sanity we need now: https://tinyurl.com/37u87eay
It is hard for most Americans to fathom the wounded state of the world as it was in October 1945.
The Northern Hemisphere was in ruins. Europe, the Soviet Union, much of Asia and particularly Japan were coming to grips with the utter devastation wreaked by World War II during which 70 million people, mostly civilians, were killed.
In 1945, there was no understanding of the Holocaust, which had claimed the lives of 17 million people, 6 million of whom were Jewish. Two atomic bombs had been dropped late in the war on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, unleashing the atomic age. All of this had come on the deadly heels of World War I, which had claimed at least 20 million lives, half of whom were civilians.
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