As the instruction Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

As the instruction - Essay Example It is worth noting that some of the earlier documents of this kind can be seen to greatly influence later documents and the ideas presented within them. President Roosevelt presented this paper in Congress in 1941. Some of the key ideas sene to be laid out in this paper have been widely adopted and voiced by subsequent administrations and other Americans over time. In this paper, President Roosevelt is seen to emphasize the fact that prior to the year 1941, the United States had been greatly affected by occurrences in other continents. These had seen the country involved in about two wars as well as a number of undeclared wars in the United States’ attempt to secure the basic principles of peaceful commerce and civil rights. He urged for democracy which he claimed was greatly assailed across the world. In his speech Roosevelt points out that there are some fundamental things that Americans happen to expect from their government pertaining to their economic and political system s. He summarizes these things as being security for anyone that may happen to require it, jobs offered to those who are in a capacity to work, the general preservation of all civil liberties for each and every individual, and the ending of granting of a number of special privileges to only a select few. These civil liberties, as presented by Roosevelt in 1941, were later seen to be adopted by the UN in the UDHR that it presented in 1948 as the freedom from fear and want and the freedom from of speech and religion (Roosevelt 6). The UDHR presents a number of human rights that contain compressed versions of civil liberties as declared by Roosevelt. Some of them include Article 1 that emphasizes the fact that all human beings are born equal and should therefore have both equal dignity and rights. Article 23 of the UDHR is also seen to borrow its idea from Roosevelt as it stresses the innate right of all individuals to be able to work and have a basically free choice of employment. Secu ring the freedom for individuals to essentially be in a capacity to hold a job is seen to serve to save the individual from lacking some of the wants such as food, essential medical care and housing. (UN General Assembly 2–5). Similarly, in declaring the right for everyone to obtain security, liberty and life, Article 3 of the UDHR highlights the right of all people to obtain personal security, the government should be in a capacity to provide adequate security for its citizen’s according to the expected requirements of this Article which are in turn seen to be in-line with the freedom from fear (UN General Assembly 2). In his article, Kaplan is seen to point out that the United States’ concerted efforts to promote democracy in the poorer different parts of the world are critical. In a similar fashion to Roosevelt, Kaplan stresses that the current democracy in the United States is essentially at a greater risk than ever before (Kaplan 1). Kaplan ends his article by painting a substantially gloomy picture of the potentially bleak future that stands to affect America and the various achievements that have been made possible across the world primarily as a result of the advent and continual spread of democracy. He contends that the West could arguably be seen to stand to eventually fall to the same fate as most of the earlier civilizations across the world, such as the Roman Empire that strongly believed