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Building a Culture of Freedom - Our Liberty Must Not Be Taken for Granted
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| Trancer-X |
Building a Culture of Freedom
Our Liberty Must Not Be Taken for Granted
By Jeff Milchen
December, 2001
At a July 4 event last year, I picked up a pocket copy of the U.S. Constitution imprinted with the slogan "Revolution bought us our freedom, but the Constitution let us keep it." At first it seemed like a nice patriotic sentiment, but recent events have awakened me to recognize it as a dangerous falsehood. For without our awareness and vigilant defense of freedoms, the Constitution is no more than discolored paper.
Many citizens have expressed dismay over Americans' failure to counter assaults on our Bill of Rights by John Ashcroft and the Bush administration, but they shouldn't be surprised. Our freedoms have been under bi-partisan encroachment for years with little citizen resistance.
It's easy to blame our recent compliance on reaction to September 11 or sparse media coverage of government critics. Both play a role, but the ease with which Americans have ceded liberty in the name of safety represents a more deeply-rooted problem - a national ignorance of our own history. Perhaps we do not aggressively defend our own Constitutional rights because we don't appreciate their origin and importance.
Supporting this theory is an annual poll that gauges citizen knowledge and attitudes toward the First Amendment, commissioned by Vanderbilt University's Freedom Forum. In 2001, 29 percent of respondents agreed strongly with the statement "The First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees" while another 10 percent simply agreed, suggesting that almost four in 10 people believe we enjoy too much freedom of expression. That number rose dramatically from previous years.
But this is just a passing reaction to September 11; we're still freedom-loving people at heart, right? Sorry, the poll was taken in April, 2001.
Chillingly, the poll also found 23 percent of respondents disagreed that "newspapers should be able to publish freely without government approval of a story" and only 57 percent agreed strongly that "newspapers should be allowed to criticize public officials."
Given this, how can we who value civil rights counter attacks on our hard-won freedoms?
There is no quick fix. We must rally to stop further encroachments, but we need also to sow seeds for future liberty by passing forgotten values on to our children. Disrespect for the Constitution by those in power is not a new phenomenon with the Bush administration, but a perpetual threat to guard against.
When President Clinton alarmingly stated in 1993 that "The United States can't be so fixed on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans," barely a murmur was heard in response. And majorities of both major parties supported the 1996 "Antiterrorism" act, which began erosions of civil liberties accelerated by the Bush administration.
Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy warns that "The Constitution needs renewal and understanding each generation, or it's not going to last." Key to such understanding is recognizing that early Americans were reluctant to establish a central government powerful enough to suppress freedom. Many fled England to flee precisely that power. The Constitution was ratified only because Congress promised to add guarantees of liberty-the Bill of Rights-in a permanent contract between citizens and their government.
Yet today we permit these rights to be treated as privileges that Congress or White House officials may choose to ignore or revoke. Our founders would be apoplectic to witness our Attorney General-the man who lost his Senate seat to a dead man in 2000--contemptuously accuse civil rights defenders of aiding terrorists. Yet no Congressperson or major newspaper has called for his removal.
Mr. Ashcroft derided his critics as using "phantoms of lost liberty" while he unconstitutionally holds hundreds of people in prison without charges (the Bill of Rights makes no exceptions for non-citizens). If we let it happen to "them" without a fight, we will richly deserve the loss of our own freedom. Generations of Americans in the military and social justice movements have fought and died for rights we enjoy today, but our Constitution still is not self-enforcing.
We'll need more than those who deem themselves civil rights activists to build a critical mass of resistance to the internal encroachments on freedom, and we'll need to reach beyond comfortable, effortless actions like e-mails and petitions.
While addressing the current civil rights crisis, we must also rebuild a culture of freedom. We should strive to engage our young people in civics, facilitate their understanding beyond check-box memorization of historical facts and encourage a sense of patriotism that involves loyalty to our Constitutional principles, not blind obedience to power.
While truly dangerous laws like the "Patriot Act" already passed, we have reason for hope. Remember that serious attacks on liberties have succeeded many times in our past--notably during every major war. Yet each time our rights have been curtailed, we not only have struggled successfully to reclaim those rights, but furthered freedom.
We can and must do it again. But it will happen only from the grassroots up, not from the initiative of those in positions of federal power.
And while we organize to restore freedoms lost, let's strive to ensure that future generations will have no need to repeat our defensive struggle, but instead can progress further still toward a nation of liberty and justice for all.
The author is the director of ReclaimDemocracy.org
http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org/civ...of_freedom.html |
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| shaolin_Z |
| Interesting read Trance-X. Unfortunately, I'm rather pessimistic about our freedoms and liberties staying secure, given the current political climate (in particular this administration and neo-con dominance since Regan) :(. A larger contributing factor than any influential figure/group or political party is public apathy IMO. I think the latter is far more dangerous. |
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| ali92 |
| quote: | Originally posted by shaolin_Z
Interesting read Trance-X. Unfortunately, I'm rather pessimistic about our freedoms and liberties staying secure, given the current political climate (in particular this administration and neo-con dominance since Regan) :(. A larger contributing factor than any influential figure/group or political party is public apathy IMO. I think the latter is far more dangerous. |
Neo-con dominance? So you just toss Clinton's eight-year presidency aside? |
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| shaolin_Z |
| quote: | Originally posted by ali92
Neo-con dominance? So you just toss Clinton's eight-year presidency aside? |
Yes. |
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| ogvh5150 |
Doesn't matter what party does what. They are two different shift managers at the same slaughterhouse.
The erosion of rights will continue for the people for which it's guaranteed to. Sadly they will be alright with this because they won't have their own minds to think for them since the media and others will do the thinking for them. |
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| Trancer-X |
| quote: | Originally posted by ogvh5150
They are two different shift managers at the same slaughterhouse. |
or two sides of the same coin. |
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| NebulousQ |
Sadly I don't think American people care enough about their own rights to stay invovled and up to date in the necessary areas and to fight for them.
Rather they will sit back and watch how on movie star is cheating on another until it is too late to fight back and the thought police are watching them through the TV. |
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| ogvh5150 |
Remember the monolith in 2001? Where all the ape-men awed in wonder of its blackened surface.
| quote: | Originally posted by TheNobleEu
Cheers,
-Noble |
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| Fir3start3r |
A lengthy but interesting article...
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January 13, 2006
The Multilateral Moment?
Our bad and worse choices about Iran.
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
Multilateralism good; preemption and unilateralism bad.”
For four years we have heard these Orwellian commandments as if they were inscribed above the door of Farmer Jones’s big barn. Now we will learn their real currency, since the Americans are doing everything imaginable — drawing in the Europeans, coaxing the Russians and Chinese to be helpful at the U.N., working with international monitoring agencies, restraining Israel, talking to the Arabs, keeping our jets in their hangars — to avoid precipitous steps against Iran.
Its theocracy poses a danger to civilization even greater than a nuclear North Korea for a variety of peculiar circumstances. Iran is free of a patron like China that might in theory exert moderate influence or even insist on occasional restraint. North Korea, for an increasingly wealthy and capitalist China, is as much a headache and an economic liability as a socialist comrade.
In contrast, Iran is a cash cow for Russia (and China) and apparently a source of opportunistic delight in its tweaking of the West. Iranian petro-wealth has probably already earned Tehran at least one, and probably two, favorable votes at the Security Council.
Of course, Tehran’s oil revenues allow it access to weapons markets, and overt blackmail, both of which are impossible for a starving North Korea. And Iran’s nuclear facilities are located at the heart of the world’s petroleum reserves, where even the semblance of instability can drive up global oil prices, costing the importing world billions in revenues.
No one is flocking to Communism, much less Pyongyang’s unrepentant, ossified Stalinist brand. Islamic radicalism, on the other hand, has declared war on Western society and tens of thousands of jihdadists, whether Shiia or Sunnis, count on Iran for money, sanctuary, and support. Al Qaeda members travel the country that is the spiritual godhead of Hezbollah, and a donor of arms and money to radical Palestinian terrorists.
North Korea can threaten Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and the western United States, and so poses a real danger. But the opportunities for havoc are even richer for a nuclear Iran. With nukes and an earned reputation for madness, it can dictate to the surrounding Arab world the proper policy of petroleum exportation; it can shakedown Europeans whose capitals are in easy missile range; it can take out Israel with a nuke or two; or it can bully the nascent democracies of the Middle East while targeting tens of thousands of US soldiers based from Afghanistan to the Persian Gulf.
And Iran can threaten to do all this under the aegis of a crazed Islamist regime more eager for the paradise of the next world than for the material present so dear to the affluent and decadent West. If Iran can play brinkmanship now on just the promise of nuclear weapons, imagine its roguery to come when it is replete with them.
When a supposedly unhinged Mr. Ahmadinejad threatens the destruction of Israel and then summarily proceeds to violate international protocols aimed at monitoring Iran’s nuclear industry, we all take note. Any country that burns off some of its natural gas at the wellhead while claiming that it needs nuclear power for domestic energy is simply lying. Terrorism, vast petroleum reserves, nuclear weapons, and boasts of wiping neighboring nations off the map are a bad combination.
So we all agree on the extent of the crisis, but not on the solutions, which can be summarized by four general options.
First is the ostrich strategy — see and hear no evil, if extending occasional peace feelers out to more reasonable mullahs. Hope that “moderates” in the Iranian government exercise a restraining influence on Mr. Ahmadinejad. Sigh that nuclear Iran may well become like Pakistan — dangerous and unpredictable, but still perhaps “manageable.” Talk as if George Bush and the Iranians both need to take a time out.
I doubt that many serious planners any longer entertain this passive fantasy, especially after the latest rantings of Ahmadinejad. Pakistan, after all, has some secular leaders, is checked by nuclear India, and has a recent past of cooperation with the United States. Most importantly, it is more than ever a lesson in past laxity, as the United States and Europe were proven criminally derelict in giving Dr. Khan and his nuclear-mart a pass — which may well come back to haunt us all yet.
Alternatively, we could step up further global condemnation. The West could press the U.N. more aggressively — repeatedly calling for more resolutions, and, ultimately, for sanctions, boycotts, and embargos, energizes our allies to cut all ties to Iran, and provides far more money to dissident groups inside Iran to rid the country of the Khomeinists. Ensuring that democracy works in Iraq would be subversive to the mullahs across the border. Some sort of peaceful regime change is the solution preferred by most — and, of course, can be pursued in a manner contemporaneous with, not exclusionary to, other strategies.
It is a long-term therapy and therefore suffers the obvious defect that Iran might become nuclear in the meantime. Then the regime’s resulting braggadocio might well deflate the dissident opposition, as the mullahs boast that they alone have restored Iranian national prestige with an Achaemenid bomb.
A third, and often unmentionable, course is to allow the most likely intended target of nuclear Iran, Israel, to take matters into its own hands. We know this scenario from the 1981 destruction of Saddam’s French-built Osirak nuclear reactor: the world immediately deplores such “unilateral” and “preemptory” recklessness, and then sighs relief that Israel, not it, put the bell on the fanged cat.
But 2006 is not 1981. We are in war with Islamic radicalism, at the moment largely near the Iranian border in Iraq and Afghanistan. The resulting furor over a “Zionist” strike on Shia Iran might galvanize Iraqi Shiites to break with us, rather than bring them relief that the Jewish state had eliminated a nearby nuclear threat and had humiliated an age-old rival nation and bitter former enemy. Thousands of Americans are in range of Iranian artillery and short-term missile salvoes, and, in theory, we could face in Iraq a conventional enemy at the front and a fifth column at the rear.
And Iran poses far greater risks than in the past for Israeli pilots flying in over the heart of the Muslim world, with 200-300 possible nuclear sites that are burrowed into mountains, bunkers and suburbs. Such a mission would require greater flight distances, messy refueling, careful intelligence, and the need to put Israeli forces on alert for an Iranian counterstrike or a terrorist move from Lebanon. Former Israeli friends like Turkey are now not so cordial, and the violation of Islamic airspace might in the short-term draw an ugly response, despite the eventual relief in Arab capitals at the elimination of the Iranian nuclear arsenal.
If the Israeli raids did not take out the entire structure, or if there were already plutonium present in undisclosed bunkers, then the Iranians might shift from their sickening rhetoric and provide terrorists in Syria and Lebanon with dirty bombs or nuclear devices to “avenge” the attack as part of a “defensive” war of “striking back” at “Israeli aggression”. Europeans might even shrug at any such hit, concluding that Israel had it coming by attacking first.
The fourth scenario is as increasingly dreaded as it is apparently inevitable — a U.S. air strike. Most hope that it can be delayed, since its one virtue — the elimination of the Iranian nuclear threat — must ipso facto outweigh the multifaceted disadvantages.
The Shiite allies in Iraq might go ballistic and start up a second front as in 2004. Muslim countries, the primary beneficiaries of a disarmed Iran, would still protest loudly that some of their territories, if only for purposes of intelligence and post-operative surveillance, were used in the strike. After Iraq, a hit on Iran would confirm to the Middle East Street a disturbing picture of American preemptory wars against Islamic nations.
Experts warn that we are not talking about a Clintonian one-day cruise-missile hit, or even something akin to General Zinni’s 1998 extended Operation Desert Fox campaign. Rather, the challenges call for something far more sustained and comprehensive — perhaps a week or two of bombing at every imaginable facility, many of them hidden in suburbs or populated areas. Commando raids might need to augment air sorties, especially for mountain redoubts deep in solid rock.
The political heat would mount hourly, as Russia, China, and Europe all would express shock and condemnation, and whine that their careful diplomatic dialogue had once again been ruined by the American outlaws. Soon the focus of the U.N. would not be on Iranian nuclear proliferation, or the role of Europe, Pakistan, China, and Russia in lending nuclear expertise to the theocracy, but instead on the mad bomber-cowboy George Bush. We remember that in 1981 the world did not blame the reckless and greedy French for their construction of a nuclear reactor for Saddam Hussein, but the sober Israelis for taking it out.
Politically, the administration would have to vie with CNN’s daily live feeds of collateral damage that might entail killed Iranian girls and boys, maimed innocents, and street-side reporters who thrust microphones into stretchers of civilian dead. The Europeans’ and American Left’s slurs of empire and hegemony would only grow.
We remember the “quagmire” hysteria that followed week three in Afghanistan, and the sandstorm “pause” that prompted cries that we had lost Iraq. All that would be child’s play compared to an Iranian war, as retired generals and investigative reporters haggled every night on cable news over how many reactor sites were still left to go. So take for granted that we would be saturated by day four of the bombing with al Jazeera’s harangues, perhaps a downed and blindfolded pilot or two paraded on television, some gruesome footage of arms and legs in Tehran’s streets, and the usual Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer outtakes.
So where do these bad and worse choices leave us? Right where we are now — holding and circling while waiting for a break in the clouds.
Still, there are two parameters we should accept — namely, that Iran should not be allowed to arm its existing missiles with nukes and that Israel should not have to do the dirty work of taking out Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
The Europeans and the Americans right now must accelerate their efforts and bring the crisis to a climax at the Security Council to force China and Russia publicly to take sides. India, Pakistan, and the Arab League should all be brought in and briefed on the dilemma, and asked to go on record supporting U.N. action.
The public relations war is critical. Zen-like, the United States must assure the Europeans, Russians, and Arabs that the credit for a peaceful solution would be theirs. The lunacy of the Iranian president should provide the narrative of events, and thus be quoted hourly — as we remain largely silent.
Economically, we should factor in the real possibility that Iranian oil might be off the global market, and prepare — we have been here before with the Iranian embargo of 1979 — for colossal gasoline price hikes. This should also be a reminder that Ahmadinejad, Saddam, Hugo Chavez, and an ascendant and increasingly undemocratic Putin all had in common both petrodollar largess and desperate Western, Chinese, and Indian importers willing to overlook almost anything to slake their thirst. Unless we develop an energy policy that collapses the global oil price, for the next half-century expect every few years something far creepier than the Saudi Royals and Col. Moammar Gadhafi to threaten the world order.
The Democratic leadership should step up to the plate and, in Truman-esque fashion, forge a bipartisan front to confront Iran and make the most of their multilateral moment. If the Democrats feel they have lost the public’s confidence in their stewardship of national security, then the threat of Iran offers a Hillary Clinton, Howard Dean, or John Kerry an opportunity to get out front now and pledge support for a united effort — attacking Bush from the right about too tepid a stance rather from the predictable left that we are “hegemonic” and “imperialistic” every time we use force abroad.
Finally, the public must be warned that dealing with a nuclear Iran is not a matter of a good versus a bad choice, but between a very bad one now and something far, far worse to come.
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>>Source<< |
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| Trancer-X |
| quote: | "The president spoke today about extending freedoms abroad and at home. As we enter the 109th Congress and President Bush's final term, we must remember that the main calling of government is expanding opportunity for all Americans, not just for some. President Bush swore to uphold the Constitution this afternoon, and Democrats will be standing with him for the next four years - making sure he keeps that promise for all Americans."
http://www.farr.house.gov/issues2.cfm?id=10002 |
| quote: | “I don’t give a goddamn,” Bush retorted. “I’m the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way.”
“Mr. President,” one aide in the meeting said. “There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution.”
“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artm...icle_7779.shtml |
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| Trancer-X |
| quote: | The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.
- Thomas Jefferson |
| quote: | It is to secure our rights that we resort to government at all.
- Thomas Jefferson |
| quote: | I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedoms of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
- James Madison |
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| Lepanto |
"Laws are silent in time of war" - Cicero
"The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph" - Thomas Paine, December 1776 |
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