RFI President Eric Patterson wrote an article published at WORLD Magazine this week titled, “Choosing Freedom Instead of Totalitarianism” in which he reflects on the demands of protecting human rights in the modern world, beginning with the simple, yet necessary, act of telling the truth. Patterson writes:

What must we do to respond to the crisis of human freedom in the contemporary world? This is an important question, particularly as we reflect on the UN-sponsored “International Day for the Right to the Truth Concerning Gross Human Rights Violations and for the Dignity of Victims” that occurred last week, on March 24. Part of the answer is, “tell the truth.”

We live in a world riven with violations of fundamental human rights, and it is up to us to tell the truth about Russian aggression, China’s concentration camps, the horrors of ISIS, Boko Haram, and others. Christians have a moral framework for understanding the nature of human dignity and human agency based on the imago dei and commandment to love our neighbor.

The reason we have an international day to tell the truth about human rights violations is because of the lies that authoritarians and Communists perpetrated during and after the Cold War. The lie went something like this: Man and his societies are merely materialistic phenomena and communists strip away culture, values, and religion from society and from the individual until just the material roots of existence remain. In other words, humans are merely moldable chemical and biological material that can be deconstructed; then communists can rebuild a person and a society in our own image. That was the claim. Of course, only a small elite group controls all facets of the restructuring of a ‘new’ society.

Read the full article: “Choosing freedom instead of totalitarianism.”