HUMAN WRONGS

He should not pack you away in an isolation cell while denying publicly that you're under detention; he should not salt you away in a labor camp after a sentence by a kangaroo court; he should not on a whim machinegun you in the street or hack you to death in your bed or with relish take you to a ditch and break every bone in your body before killing you. If you're an infant, you have the right not to have your skull smashed against a wall; if a nursing mother, not to have your breasts sliced off; if a nun, not to be raped and disemboweled; if an old man, not to be made to defecate in front of a crowd and eat your own excrement; if a boy or a young man, not to be castrated and have your severed organs stuffed into your mouth. The right not to have those things done to you -- the right not to be tortured, mutilated, enslaved, or injudiciously murdered -- is what we've come to mean by the term human rights.

Excerpted from the essay "Orwell's 1984," which is reprinted in "Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution: Selected Essays, 1977-1992"