My So-Called "Freedom"

Commenting on certain blogs will get you all sorts of attentions from people in all walks of life and every political persuasion, not to mention a few folks from Canada and Europe.

One of these people is an Iraqi Ex-pat living in Canada. He’s in his mid 20’s I believe and is going to school there to be a doctor (per his story). He is vehemently anti-Bush, Anti-Iraqi war. I always find it interesting when people who are not Iraqi or not IN Iraq get on the comment board of a pro-liberation Iraqi blog and proceed to tell them how they are wrong about things in Iraq. Seems counter-intuitive. What is more interesting is to find an Iraqi ex-pat who does the same.

From what I can gather, he’s been in Canada prior to the demise of the Hussein Regime and he also indicated that his family went there to avoid persecution. Yet, at he same time, he is anti-liberation. His ideal seems to be that Saddam was an SOB, but he was THEIR SOB and it was wrong for the United States to interfere on “false pretenses” of WMD, etc.

Aside from that basic information, I’ve been torn about whether his family was Ba’athist who had a fall out with the insane one, but still believed in the cause or just a pan-Arabist in general.

In either case, several evenings ago he made this comment in regards to a thread about the future of Iranian freedom:

”The Iranians live better today than any Iraqi living under your so-called “freedom”.

It’s not the first time I’ve heard those sentiments. Largely I hear them from Europeans and Pan Arabists in general with an occasional smattering from actual Iraqis who lament the current security situation.

They all have something in common: they really never experienced true freedom and they have never and will probably never in the future value it like we do.

Let’s face it; Europeans have not really had a long history of truly democratic institutions. 90% of them have lived under monarchies and dictatorships up until the last half of the century. What’s interesting though is that it is usually the most recently liberated European nationals that value freedom the most as opposed to those who have gone for half a century without having a dictator over them or living on their borders. The Soviet Union doesn’t count because the half of the European countries that are less likely to be concerned about their fellow world citizens state of freedom are the same countries that insisted the Soviet Union was not “Evil” and that it’s existence should be accepted. Not to mention the fact that each of these countries had some sort of fall out Marxist movements if not attempted revolutions starting in 1848 and moving forward through most of the 20th century.

These people have never really understood freedom. From one decade to the next a new dictator or stagnant government has taken power in corners of Europe because the people are complacent.

Hitler made the trains run on time. He understood the fundamental mentality of your average European. He understood what Caesar meant when he said, “give the mob bread and circus”. For bread, circus and timely trains, approximately 70% of Europeans would give up some parts of their freedom and have, including creating and supporting socialist governments in countries like France and Germany. Unfortunately for them, eventually the bread runs out, the trains break down and the Circus clowns aren’t as funny anymore.

In essence, this is what the commenter at Iraq the Model was saying. Much better to have these things while they last, even if you do have to worry about a knock on your door in the middle of the night taking away your family members, never to be seen again, or suffering imprisonment and torture for no more reason than you dressed wrong, said the wrong word, looked side ways at somebody or did not speak the great leader’s name with the proper tone of respect than to suffer under the uncertainty of freedom which by definition means that the struggle for daily life and the responsibility for all actions belong to the individual, not the state.

At least, in their eyes.

In America, we have to be concerned about the same complacency that marked at least 40% of our population in the last elections and in many local elections. It is these people that imperil my “so-called freedom” by lack of participation, by insisting their vote doesn’t count because they are “1 of millions” or because the elections are “rigged” or because the candidates are all conspiratorially related to some big money scheme that insures one or the other bought candidate wins and these candidates do not have their interests at heart, so why bother?

The day we drop below 50% is the day we should be looking around for the next despot to come to power, right here on our soil.

Pan Arabists have a completely different view. Largely, they will take anyone or anything that presents a face of power that will assuage their own desire to be a world force once again. Unfortunately, by this very delusion and the illusion of power, they sale cheaply the very thing that they require to become a world force: freedom.

America does not sit on top of the global economy because it out produces other countries or has unlimited land and raw materials. It does not straddle the globe as the major military force because it has conscripted its people nor is it considered the “policeman of the world” because it routinely brutalizes and oppresses people, contrary to current lamentations around the globe. It is not able to move humanitarian assistance, people and money to disaster areas within days and not weeks because it hoards food in giant storage bins, all the gold is in Fort Knox or its people are held at gunpoint to perform such deeds.

It is in the very essence of freedom, the freedom of its people to dream beyond today and earthly limitations, the freedom from fear that allows them to focus on improving their own situation and others, the freedom to think outside of boundaries that allows them to create, the freedom to be anything and everything they can be that allows them to produce and the freedom to believe in a brighter and better tomorrow that keeps them moving forward, even under exceptional circumstances. It is freedom that lifts men up.

It is the belief that this freedom is the driving force for all that they can accomplish that compels them to protect it at all costs, keeping its military well stocked with personnel and motivation.

It is in the very core of the American people’s belief that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, chief amongst them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that has given the American people the impetus to defend other free nations and free others through political, economic or military efforts at the cost of their own treasure and with the most precious commodity of all: their blood.

In the recent past, many opponents of these efforts have insisted that “international law” and “cultural sensitivity” take precedence over these unalienable rights to freedom as if man made laws and artificial borders between people trump these higher rights. There are only two kinds of laws: laws that protect the unalienable right of liberty and laws that limit that liberty. Too often laws are created to limit freedom and used by dictators to enforce that limitation to their benefit. Laws that are set to maintain the current order are the laws that are used to keep men in slavery.

There are no higher laws than those that set men on the course of freedom.

It is in this new century that we must recognize that, even with the spread of freedom throughout Europe, parts of Asia and now into the Middle East, that freedom has yet to be won for all of mankind. Once that freedom is achieved, there will be no boundaries for man, except those that he sets against himself. We could reach the stars; touch the heavens and journey beyond our dreams.

Until men from all nations, free or bound in slavery, believe in this true cause, we will be forever bound to conflict and forever bound to this earth.

This then is the manifest destiny of humankind:

Freedom.