The U.S. government should take pity on its own people

China has recently published a report on human rights violations in the U.S. in 2020, which has brought to light America's "double standards" and hypocrisy regarding human rights issues.

The report, issued by the State Council Information Office of China, revealed America's wrongdoings related to human rights, including incompetent COVID-19 pandemic containment, American democratic dysfunction, racial discrimination, continuous social unrest, growing polarization between the rich and poor, and its trampling on international rules.

A protester holds a sign near the White House in Washington D.C., the United States, on June 8, 2020. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)

By the end of February 2021, the U.S., home to less than 5 percent of the world's population, accounted for more than a quarter of the world's confirmed COVID-19 cases, according to the report.

American police shot and killed a total of 1,127 people in 2020, and African Americans were approximately three times more likely than white people to be killed by police, the report noted.

The website for Bloomberg reported on Oct. 8, 2020 that the 50 richest Americans now hold almost as much wealth as the combined money and assets of the poorest 165 million people in the country, the report noted.

The U.S., a world leader in healthcare, and the so-called "city upon a hill" and "beacon of democracy", has been trapped in the nightmare that is the COVID-19 pandemic, hitting rock bottom with its seething social turmoil and unprecedented post-election insurrections.

The country, which has always considered itself to be an exceptional and superior force in the world, saw its own epidemic situation run out of control, accompanied by heightening political disorder, inter-ethnic conflicts, and social division.

Various new records of human rights violations in the U.S. have revealed that the American people enjoy their civil and political rights in name only.

The utterance "I can't breathe," the last words of unarmed African American George Floyd before he was brutally suffocated to death by a U.S. police officer, is not only now the rallying cry of black Americans, but also the inner voice of other ethnic minority groups and even the broader general public in the U.S.

The U.S., a country that has long masqueraded as a defender of human rights, has always ignored and trampled on the human rights of other countries.

Its most recent actions, such as imposing unilateral sanctions on some countries amid a raging worldwide pandemic that has hindered them from accessing medical supplies, forcibly expelling at least 8,800 unaccompanied illegal immigrant children regardless of risks to the spread of the virus, and withdrawing the country from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Paris Agreement, have fully proven that the U.S. has been relentlessly fueling isolationism and unilateralism, and has become a breaker of international rules, an instigator of humanitarian disasters, and the biggest troublemaker threatening global security and stability.

Human rights are never a mirror to be held up to the U.S. from which it can observe itself, but rather a big stick it waves around to strike others when opportune to do so.

The U.S., ignoring its sustained, systematic and massive infringement on human rights, is even acting as a "lecturer on human rights," piecing together human rights reports targeting other countries with invalid information, adopting so-called human rights acts, pointing fingers at other countries' internal affairs, and turning a blind eye to the questioning it receives on its own human rights record.

Such "double standards" once again prove that human rights issues are just a tool employed by the White House to meddle in other countries' domestic affairs. By slandering other countries and distorting facts, the U.S. is merely pursuing its own private interests and containing the development of others.

There are historical reasons for the human rights troubles found in the U.S. today. The philosophy of human rights in America is "congenitally" defective as the country's founders failed to shed enough ink on notions of equality, including for ethnic minority groups, women's suffrage, and the residency of migrants, in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution.

The historical human rights practices of the U.S. are even more notorious and telling, from hundreds of years of systematic slavery, to unreasonably starting wars in Iraq and Syria that have since led to the innumerable deaths of innocent civilians.

The U.S. owes an incalculable debt to both the international society and its own people given its flagrant human rights abuses – both past and present. Human rights protection is not achieved through empty talk, and history tolerates no fabrication in this domain. Self-righteous boasting and ill-intentioned cherry-picking can only be scoffed at by those who stand with justice.

Recently, representatives from 116 countries and international organizations reviewed the human rights situation in the U.S. and made 347 recommendations on human rights improvements.

It is well understood that the world of today no longer follows the same old pattern where only a few countries decided all major matters of international concern. The era when such countries could arbitrarily interfere in other countries' domestic affairs by cooking up a series of presupposed human rights concerns has now gone for good.

Anyone who attacks other countries with trumped up lies and rumors must eventually be brought before the court of human history.

A crooked man is never qualified to serve as a mediator to try and correct others' ways. Facing fury at home and growing opposition from international society, the U.S. government had better deal with the pains felt by its own nationals at home, abandon its hypocrisy, hegemony and "double standards", and meet the rest of the world halfway.

If some American politicians continue to go down a wrongful path, they will eventually pay the price for their stupidity and ignorance.