Liberty Maven

[This article was written for the new freedom oriented political activist website for candidates and voters: freeople.com, I encourage everyone to register and start participating over there. It really is an excellent site and tool. - Marc]

Defining freedom is simple to do with words, but words forever fall short. Freedom is living your life the way you wish to live it. They are simple words but they do not illustrate the varying degrees involved. They do not account for culture and perception. Freedom to a Cuban is likely different from freedom to an American. H.L. Mencken once stated, “The average man doesn’t want to be free, he wants to be safe.” Judging from the 2008 primary election results, Mencken looks like a genius.

In 1759 Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither…”. Keeping alive the give-and-take battle between freedom and safety alive is essential in a truly free society. Ignoring the argument suggests the importance of one over the other.

Today we rarely hear any politician broach the subject. This is dangerous territory in an age where the Patriot Act, the Protect America Act, and the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Protection Act are being pushed into law. It’s almost as if feeling safe has usurped the Bill of Rights. This is a travesty.

There is hope, though. We are still mostly free in America for now. The recent “Wikileaks” case demonstrates this hope.

Wikileaks.org is an anonymous whistle blower web site that was sued by a Swiss Bank for defamation. The bank sought to shut down the site and prevent it from being moved to another server. The judge in the case initially ordered the site shut down. It was, but it was still available via its IP address. Then on February 29th the federal judge withdrew his own ruling, citing the First Amendment. The bank has since dropped the case. This victory for liberty gives us evidence that the Constitution is still functioning, albeit often weakly, in the United States.

More evidence of this for optimism rests in the kind of strong support Ron Paul is receiving from his staunchly loyal grassroots movement. One of the highlights of his campaign was when he strongly echoed the “liberty vs. safety” words of Benjamin Franklin during a televised debate. Dr. Paul has sparked a revolution of liberty. He represents hope for America’s future. There are over 40 candidates running for Congress who share his principles and many are running just because of his inspiring campaign. They all have joined in the effort to halt the erosion of our freedom in the name of limited government, sound money, peace, and prosperity.

Make no mistake: safety is just as important to these patriots as liberty. The belief that one has to sacrifice liberty for safety is a fallacy. The neo-conservative terrorist fear-mongering propaganda has reinforced the fact that if you repeat something often enough in the media, people will start to believe it even if it has no basis in reality. The truth is that we are spreading our military too thin, making us lesser safe than ever at home. The Constitution says we should have a strong national defense, not a strong offense. This is a wise strategy in an era when small factions of criminals we call terrorists are dead set on killing us.

Waging war against an idea is a failing proposition. Even Thomas Paine had this foresight when he wrote, “You can’t conquer an idea with an army.” Of course, at the time he was no doubt referring to the British army going up against the idea of freedom and independence, in an effort to increase the morale of the U.S. revolutionaries. Terrorism is a idea militarized into a tactic. If we try to conquer it with armies, we are doomed to fail as we spend ourselves into bankruptcy. These perpetual wars cost money, but they also cost lives. Ron Paul elaborated on this during his Presidential campaign when he said, “Waging a war against terrorism is like waging a war against guns, or bombs, or night attacks. Terrorism is a tactic; it is a tool—it is not an enemy. Because it’s not an enemy, it cannot be defeated. The war on terror will have no end, unless we end it. This does not mean that we shouldn’t defend ourselves against terrorism. It means that declaring war on terrorism sets an unrealistic standard for victory, and that it is time to set new standards and new goals.”

Terrorism is not a country that can ever be conquered by spilling the blood of Americans. The fight should fit the circumstances of the crime. Terrorism is criminal and should be dealt with as such. Deploying the full might of the US military into countries in order to fight terrorism is akin to hunting squirrels with a machine gun while uprooting all the trees in the forest. You end up hurting a lot more than the squirrel.

We now have a doctrine of preemptive war in the name of fighting terrorism and spreading democracy. The preemption and occupation breeds contempt for America in other nations. That contempt is then used as motivation to recruit more terrorists. The more we wield our military might in other countries the less safer we are from terrorism. We are, in effect, subsidizing terrorism with our current strategy. When you subsidize something you get more of it. Our doctrine has the exact opposite effect of its intent.

Terrorism is an extremely effective excuse for sacrificing freedoms. By sacrificing our freedoms we are losing the war. The goal of terrorism is to cause enough fear (ie. terror) in the enemy and to change the enemy’s behavior. The ironic thing is that the terrorists have an unlikely ally in their effort: the U.S. government. With each act of legislation passed that undermines our freedoms, the smiles on our enemies’ faces grow wider.

Supporters of the Iraq War and the War on Terror like to point to the fact that there have been no attacks on U.S. soil since 9/11. One could argue that they need not attack us physically when we are attacking ourselves by passing laws that erode our liberties. We are falling into their trap.

Terrorists are winning against us on two fronts. The insurgency in Iraq is one of them. The loss of our freedoms at home is the other. Wendell Phillips said, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” Today, it seems that our vigilance is lacking. We need to work hard to restore our vigilance for liberty. Halting the erosion of freedom at home should be the major first step of a winning strategy in the effort to reduce terrorism around the globe.