Uh, oh! I have to disagree with Uncle Ken on this one: "For most of history nobody gave a second thought to the peasants."
By definition, peasants were farmers (I had to look it up). Maybe historians haven't given them a second thought, but the local rulers certainly did. Peasants may have been at the bottom of the social order but without them the society/kingdom would starve, as they did all the farming. King Larry, for example, may have been cruel and oppressive but not to the extent that the peasants would revolt or pack up and leave. The Church helped a lot with this, assuring the peasants of a better life in the hereafter, if they would only have the proper beliefs. We have plenty of peasants in the US today, except we call them seasonal migrant workers.
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Don't human rights exist solely because we humans say they do? Do our fellow primates, with their complex social structures, have similar notions of "chimp or gorilla rights?"
Human rights as we understand them today are historically recent, only a few hundred years old, probably originating with England's Bill of Rights in 1689, followed by our own Declaration of Independence. The French came up with the "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen" a few years later, and is good reading.
Do international and cultural differences preclude agreement on human rights? If that is the case, then the global madness may never end.
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Many millions of people will be witness to tonight's political hoopla, and I shall not be one of them. It will bring me no pleasure to watch these two distasteful exemplars of the body politic. There will be plenty to read about tomorrow with, perhaps, some lucid analysis. A pox on both their houses.
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