Monday, January 31, 2005
9/11, Iraq, and the meaning of freedom
A very disturbing study finds that a large fraction of the current crop of American high school students---the 9/11 generation---no longer believe in the 1st Amendment.
Only half, for example, think there should be a free press.
My friends teaching freshmen and sophomores in college tell me there has been a sudden, generational shift towards authoritarianism. Hobbes is in; Locke is out. Fear of terror, and the imperative of maintaining security, have triumphed over the love of liberty.
Did al Qaeda attack America because it "hated our freedom", as so many Republicans have said? Of course not; only someone totally ignorant of al Qaeda's goals, and willing to treat a serious enemy as a gaggle of idiots, would assert such nonsense. They wanted to engage us in a global struggle over the future of the Islamic world. They don't care what we do in the privacy of our own borders.
The real enemy of American freedom has used to the 9/11 attacks to tear up the constitution, introduce fear and torture to the daily political lexicon of America, and, most insidiously of all, shift political discourse so far towards security policy that children growing up in today's America think the struggle against terrorism trumps all other concerns, including civil rights. Is the constitution of American liberty so weak that a mere 3000 civilian deaths, in a country of 300 million, could persuade us to abandon the Bill of Rights? Horrible as 9/11 was, it would not test the Founders' faith in liberty, and it should not test ours. Thomas Paine would be shocked at how little we suffered before abandoning our birthright.
My words may strike some readers as strange, because the very terms "freedom", "liberty", and "democracy" are being redefined under own noses. Bush claims he is on a worldwide crusade for freedom---which naturally consists of war, threats, and occupation abroad, the secret construction of an international gulag archipelago, and the smearing of domestic opponents as traitors. All part of freedom, you know.
All modern authoritarians must confront the concepts of liberty and democracy. Most choose to redefined these words so that their regimes can be seen as paragons of democracy and freedom. We're not just living such a redefinition, we're exporting it.
Yesterday, the brave people of Iraq ignored guerilla attacks to participate in... what exactly? An election with more than a hundred parties, secret candidates afraid for their lives, a puppet government expected to do well (how can they not in the circs), an occupier regulating their press and freedom of movement---this sounds like a plebiscitory carnival to me, not a democracy. I'm hesitant to even admit the mere possibility this could lead to democracy or a democratic culture.
But the press and pundits of the US called it "democracy", and, more disturbingly, "freedom". In Bush's America, political freedom is no more than the right to participate in periodic majoritarian elections, no matter how twisted, and subsequent submission to the supposed embodiment of that majority. I don't know how anyone can connect the two concepts, but essay after essay says the Iraqis, by participating in this grisly joke, are showing their love of "freedom". (Soon, we'll probably find that this exercise of freedom consisted of granting a patina of legitimacy to the occupiers' puppet while generally voting on ethnic lines. Woo-hoo!)
Freedom, for those who have forgotten, is not the same as democracy. Often, freedom must be protected from democracy. That, high school students, is the purpose of the First Amendment and Bill of Rights. Our most cherished political documents; the very Holy of Holies of the American civil religion, is a bulwark against the tyranny of democratic majorities.
But these precious civil liberties have been traded in for a cheap knock-off: personal autonomy, which many Americans incompletely construe as liberty from government taxation and regulation.
Plebiscites and empire. Napoleonic democracy, anyone?
Only half, for example, think there should be a free press.
My friends teaching freshmen and sophomores in college tell me there has been a sudden, generational shift towards authoritarianism. Hobbes is in; Locke is out. Fear of terror, and the imperative of maintaining security, have triumphed over the love of liberty.
Did al Qaeda attack America because it "hated our freedom", as so many Republicans have said? Of course not; only someone totally ignorant of al Qaeda's goals, and willing to treat a serious enemy as a gaggle of idiots, would assert such nonsense. They wanted to engage us in a global struggle over the future of the Islamic world. They don't care what we do in the privacy of our own borders.
The real enemy of American freedom has used to the 9/11 attacks to tear up the constitution, introduce fear and torture to the daily political lexicon of America, and, most insidiously of all, shift political discourse so far towards security policy that children growing up in today's America think the struggle against terrorism trumps all other concerns, including civil rights. Is the constitution of American liberty so weak that a mere 3000 civilian deaths, in a country of 300 million, could persuade us to abandon the Bill of Rights? Horrible as 9/11 was, it would not test the Founders' faith in liberty, and it should not test ours. Thomas Paine would be shocked at how little we suffered before abandoning our birthright.
My words may strike some readers as strange, because the very terms "freedom", "liberty", and "democracy" are being redefined under own noses. Bush claims he is on a worldwide crusade for freedom---which naturally consists of war, threats, and occupation abroad, the secret construction of an international gulag archipelago, and the smearing of domestic opponents as traitors. All part of freedom, you know.
All modern authoritarians must confront the concepts of liberty and democracy. Most choose to redefined these words so that their regimes can be seen as paragons of democracy and freedom. We're not just living such a redefinition, we're exporting it.
Yesterday, the brave people of Iraq ignored guerilla attacks to participate in... what exactly? An election with more than a hundred parties, secret candidates afraid for their lives, a puppet government expected to do well (how can they not in the circs), an occupier regulating their press and freedom of movement---this sounds like a plebiscitory carnival to me, not a democracy. I'm hesitant to even admit the mere possibility this could lead to democracy or a democratic culture.
But the press and pundits of the US called it "democracy", and, more disturbingly, "freedom". In Bush's America, political freedom is no more than the right to participate in periodic majoritarian elections, no matter how twisted, and subsequent submission to the supposed embodiment of that majority. I don't know how anyone can connect the two concepts, but essay after essay says the Iraqis, by participating in this grisly joke, are showing their love of "freedom". (Soon, we'll probably find that this exercise of freedom consisted of granting a patina of legitimacy to the occupiers' puppet while generally voting on ethnic lines. Woo-hoo!)
Freedom, for those who have forgotten, is not the same as democracy. Often, freedom must be protected from democracy. That, high school students, is the purpose of the First Amendment and Bill of Rights. Our most cherished political documents; the very Holy of Holies of the American civil religion, is a bulwark against the tyranny of democratic majorities.
But these precious civil liberties have been traded in for a cheap knock-off: personal autonomy, which many Americans incompletely construe as liberty from government taxation and regulation.
Plebiscites and empire. Napoleonic democracy, anyone?
