[Last year, I published my usual Memorial Day Tribute. I followed it up with this post. You can read my tribute by clicking the link. But the point of this post is no longer an afterthought. Given the sharp turn toward statism that followed the last election, the point that defending and upholding freedom is an intellectual battle that must be taken up by private citizens can't be made strongly enough. There are no credible threats to American freedom coming from the outside. The threat is internal. That point must be put front and center this Memoral Day. The last century, our military defeated the external totalitarian threats from fascism, theocracy, and Communism. The totalitarian threat is now internal. Our military can do nothing about that. Last century, the military did its job. As private citizens, it's now our turn. Honor the memory of Americans who gave their lives on the battlefields of shooting wars by taking up intellectual arms on the battlefield of ideas--the ideas of the American Founding that grew out of The Enlightenment. That is the only way to defeat the advance domestic totalitarianism.
[Thanks]
American soldiers killed in action certainly deserve our gratitude and honor. But not for the usually recited reason.
Memorial Day will once again feature the mantra that soldiers died defending our freedom and individual rights. One popular song even includes the phrase, “At least I know I’m free, and I won't forget the ones who died who gave that right to me.” Yet today the news is full of horror stories of business owners being fined and shut down, their livelihoods stripped away, price controls imposed, even their customers arrested, for defying orders by political leaders wielding “emergency” powers. Where’s the military? Today, for the first time since the Jim Crow era, we have an administration and a political partythat has made racism official government policy. One that believes government coercion is the solution to every crisis, real or imagined. One that seeks to roll back First Amendment freedoms. One that seeks to dilute the anti-tyranny checks and balances of our governmental structure our Founders put in place (e.g. neutering the Senate, abolishing the Electoral College) The list of intiatives aimed at attacking our individual rights is seemingly endless. And its increasingly coming from the Right, as well.
In the last 100 years, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers died on the battlefield. In that same 100 years, our general freedom, especially economic freedom, has steadily eroded due to the growth of the regulatory welfare state. While our First Amendment freedoms have fared somewhat better, they today face withering attacks on multiple fronts, as are the governmental checks and balances put in place by the Founders to protect us from tyranny due to concentration of government power. Where was the military? Where is the military?
The fact is, contrary to Memorial Day propaganda, the military’s job is to protect our borders, not our freedom. The fight to establish, maintain, and defend freedom is a philosophical, not a military, fight. It is fought with words and ideas, not guns and tanks. It is fought within, not outside, our borders. It is fought among the civilian, not military, population. The fight for freedom requires, not military combat, but mind-to-mind combat. The Founding generation’s defeat of the British Army, heroic as that was, did not secure our rights. Our rights were secured afterward, on the battlefield of political philosophy and constitutional law. That battlefield—the one of ideas, not arms—is where our Founders took the first and most crucial steps toward fulfilling the promise of the Declaration of Independence, the creation of a government “to secure these rights, drawing their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
The enemies of freedom exist not only in foreign dictatorships, but among us right here in America. The military has done a fine job of protecting us from foreign enemies. We, the people of the United States, have done poorly in our job of protecting our rights at home. By the design of some, the neglect and complacence of others, and ignorance of many, and the fear of "argument" or of "offending" by still others, we have granted our government more and more power to restrict our individual rights. We must abandon our false sense of security that we can rely on the military to preserve and restore our liberty. The U.S. military has given us a virtually impenetrable forcefield to live behind. It is entirely up to we, as individual citizens, to secure and restore our freedom and make our rights inalienable--to make sure that impenetrable forcefield continues protecting something worthwhile--a free society.
Happy Memorial Day.
Related Reading:
America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It by C. Bradley Thompson
1 comment:
People who live by physical force might succeed, but only for a short time. Then they lose, usually to others who live by physical force who, then, lose a short time later. Occasionally they might lose to people who live by their minds.
In history up to this moment, people who have lived by their minds have been in EXACTLY THE SAME FIX as people who live by physical force. Why? Because they think living by their minds lets them abandon physical force once they have established a central control of human relations by physical force, especially if that central control is a government by laws instead of a criminal regime. They forget, or ignore or evade the fact that the central control is a machine which runs by a process, and that they must unceasingly drive the machine BY THAT PROCESS, and by no other, with no exception. They know better, and regarding other machines, like cars, as an example out of millions of man made machines, they DON'T forget, ignore or evade. But, they DO, regarding the central of human relations by physical force once it is established. They think they can run it ANY old way and get what they want. If the machine is government by law, they abandon it for crime, the only alternative, to get what they want by any old way.
It does no good to tell them this so they might correct themselves. THEY MUST BE CORRECTED whether they like it or not, because they don't want what comes of government by law and the process it requires. They want something else by other processes.
But, people who have lived by their minds to this moment have always abandoned physical force in centrally controlling human relations, leaving the machinery of government by law to the criminals who are eager to use initiatory physical force, perverting the machinery to that purpose.
Those living by their minds must tend to the machinery ACCORDING TO ITS NATURE like they would any other machine, and be willing to get their hands dirty, and not abandon the necessity of countering crime under the guise of government by law, by means of ACTUAL government by law AND ITS PHYSICAL ENFORCEMENT MACHINERY, even in the face of elections where voting is only a secondary right.
No matter how much talking and actual convincing of many tens of millions of people is accomplished, even then, action against criminals in positions of power meant for government must be taken, using the enforcement machinery, because the criminals won't otherwise budge. If the Constitution doesn't provide for this (I think it does), the Declaration of Independence surely does.
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