The claim that rights derive from industrial society is not true. The claim that life in pre-industrial societies must necessarily be bad is not true. And the claim that free speech is in any way secondary - in ANY society - is not true.The fact of the matter is, people in "primitive" societies did not have to work very hard, and did not have to surrender a great deal of their liberty. They had injustices, yes, and they had poverties, yes, and they had bad teeth and a shorter lifespan, yes. But they were people with enough freedom and enough dignity, that you will find Indian activists to this day, in many continents, who are striving and risking their liberties and in many cases their lives, simply to keep their "primitive" lifestyle without interference.
To the contrary, the actual situation is that it has been oppressive governments that made the Dark Ages what they were. The peasants were not poor because they didn't have tractors; they were poor because the nobles took every good thing they ever came up with. The worst abuses of the Dark Ages were never associated with low technology, but with governments seeking to seize control over territory, seize control over religions, seize control over learning, seize control over everything.
If sweatshop laborers in Malaysia are low-paid, it is NOT because their country lacks "technology". It is because their country is run by a brutal CIA-installed dictatorship which destroys free press, which outlaws trade unions, and which defeats every aspiration of the people to dignity and equality. And in order to do these things, you will always see censorship riding in the front rank of the army of darkness.
ALWAYS. Without exception, I say. Without exception, evil in the physical world is preceded by the enforcement of IGNORANCE in the mental. Thought proceeds to action, and censorship proceeds to oppressions and massacres. It cannot occur any other way.
[Response to: "however, 'rights' can mean other things to those that are in less economically prosperous nations that are currently undergoing industrialization or have not yet undergone industrialization. rights, to such people, could mean the right to reject labour in a nike sweat shop for something more fitting of a human being, and not an animal, or the right of a child to live _as a child_, not as the facilitator of a household after both parents have been killed due to political or military incidents."]
None.
