Soviet-style human rights promoted by American Secretary of State (???)

Former U.S. Secretary of State Eliott Abrams sums up the difference between Soviet style human rights and the old-fashioned American kind that is being thrown under the bus by leftists (my bolds).

At the height of the Cold War, when Ronald Reagan was president, the Soviets and their allies and satellites did not shirk human-rights debates with the West. They had their arguments ready. When American officials denounced the lack of freedom of speech or press or religion, or the absence of free elections, they did not whimper. Their replies went something like this: “It’s important to look at human rights more broadly than it has been defined. Human rights are also the right to a good job and shelter over your head and a chance to send your kids to school and get health care when your wife is pregnant. It’s a much broader agenda. Too often it has gotten narrowed to our detriment.”

No one would be surprised to hear that such words were spoken by Mikhail Suslov, the long-time ideological chief of the Communist party of the Soviet Union, or by Khrushchev or Brezhnev, or by Castro or Ceaucescu, or by any other chieftain from the “socialist countries.” But that quote actually comes from Secretary of State Clinton, in an interview this month with the Wall Street Journal. It is an astonishing revival of the old Soviet line, now taken up by an American official.

Hmmmm. Sounds like the Marxist strains emanating from the 'human rights' industry here in Canada. And of course, one does want to see a fair and just society. Just is that without the real human rights of freedom, the other kinds of "rights" don't happen either, unless everyone being equally poor (except the thugs in command) is what you're looking for. Abrams writes:

The “socialist camp” did a wretched job of providing “social goods” such as jobs and housing and medical care. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the poor living conditions in the East became even more evident, and the Russian situation remains catastrophic to this day.

But of course we did not take their argument on its own terms. We told the Communist officials that those arguments were offensive and baseless. No country is too poor to be free, as India was proving even back then, but many are too poor to provide adequate jobs, housing, hospitals, and the like. The purpose of extending the definition of human rights beyond the essential political rights was clear: It was the basis for two theories they liked to propound solemnly. The first was that the countries in question would perhaps someday develop all the human rights, from jobs to schools to freedom of speech to free elections, but this would take a very long time as they were poor, developing countries. The second was that the really important human rights were not the freedoms the West kept talking about, but the “social rights” guaranteed (well, on paper anyway) in the Socialist Bloc. So, they would say, you have your definition and we have ours; who’s to say who is right?

Sickening.