Security and Freedom

Security and Freedom

by Victor Davis Hanson
Private Papers

The Margaret Thatcher lecture delivered to the Heritage Foundation,
June 3rd, 2008.

There cannot be freedom without security nor true security without
freedom. The Greeks from the very beginning understood this symbiosis
between the two, and framed the nature of the relationship — and
occasional antithesis — between these necessary poles. The historian
Thucydides, for example, makes Pericles in his famous funeral oration,
talk in depth about the nature of democratic military service and
sacrifice that are the linchpins of the freedom of Athens, and how any
short-term disadvantages that may harm an open society at war are more
than compensated by the creativity, exuberance, and democratic zeal
that free peoples bring to war.

Because, like all Democratic leaders, Pericles knew the charge that
liberal peoples were prone to indiscipline and incapable of collective
sacrifice in times of peril, he made the argument that consensual
societies in extremis fight as well disciplined as closed, oligarchic
communities, and yet still enjoy the advantages that accrue to liberal
societies.

We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude
foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the
eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality; trusting
less in system and policy than to the native spirit of our citizens;
while in education, where our rivals from their very cradles by a
painful discipline seek after manliness, at Athens we live exactly as
we please, and yet are just as ready to encounter every legitimate
danger.

In contrast, authors as diverse as Herodotus, Xenophon, and Aristotle
remind us that the king, tyrant and autocrat lives insecure lives,
since their reign is based on fear and instilled terror, and thus they
dare not ever lessen their grip for an instance, lest both the people
and the military turn on their despised government.

The long history of Western civilization — the Persian War, the Punic
Wars, the Napoleonic Wars, World Wars I and II, the Cold War — often
suggests that free peoples, if slow to confront enemies on the
horizon, nevertheless have been able more often than not to defeat
their autocratic enemies. That is why today the West is defined by
consensual governments rather than something more akin to the
Napoleonic, Hitlerian, or Stalinist modes of rule.

In other words, the Western tradition of civilian-controlled
militaries erred on the side of openness, with the assurance that when
war came the advantages of free speech, expression, and informality
would more than outweigh those of discipline, rote, and
authoritarianism that their dictatorial enemies embrace.

The key for Western societies in times of peril has been to calibrate
the proper balance in times of danger between personal freedom and
collective military preparedness and readiness. Often authoritarianism
— Rome in the imperial period, Medieval monarchies, France under
Napoleon, the fascism of Italy and Germany — have sacrificed personal
liberties in preference for security concerns and militarist cultures.

Others, often in reaction to recent bloody wars, Western societies
have erred in the opposite fashion on the side of disarmament and
appeasement, and lost their liberty as a consequence of not being able
to provide security for their own peoples. Here one thinks of the fate
of Athens in the age of Demosthenes or France of 1940. But more often
the dilemma is not so black and white. Abraham Lincoln, and later
Andrew Johnson, suspended habeas corpus in some border states to
detain pro-Confederate sympathizers, and later Ku Klux Klan
organizers. In World War II, the United States censored news from the
front, hid information about military disasters, tried and executed
German saboteurs in secret military tribunals, and wiretapped the
phones of suspected enemy sympathizers — and yet preserved the
Constitution while fighting a global war with a military of over
twelve million.

Since September 11, Western societies have struggled with this age-old
tension between freedom and security concerns, and a number of
dilemmas have arisen.

With passage of the Patriot Act, the establishment of the Guantanamo
detention center, court-approved wiretaps, renditions of terrorist
suspects abroad, and systematic surveillance some Americans have often
casually alleged that the Constitution has been sacrificed to
unnecessary security concerns. But it is far more difficult to
calibrate this supposed loss of civil liberties than it is to
appreciate the absence of a post-September 11 terrorist attack. That
said, is there a danger that, in fact, we have lost much of the
ability of self-expression, not through government zealousness, but a
certain laxity on its part to protect free speech — as a result of
Western public opinion that itself is willing to sacrifice unfettered
expression, either out of good intentions or sheer fear?

In this regard, we can ask a few rhetorical questions about the nature
of freedom and security in the public realm. Take a variety of
contemporary genres of Western expression.

Film — is it now safer for a moviemaker to produce a controversial
feature-length film attacking the President of the United States (as
in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 or Gabriel Range’s Death of a
President that offered a dramatic version of an assassination of
George Bush), or a short clip questioning radical Islam, such as Gert
Wilders’ Fitna or Theo Van Gogh’s Submission?

Novels — is a Westerner writer more in danger for writing a novel
contemplating the assassination of a sitting American President (such
as Nicholson Baker’s 2004 Alfred Knopf published Checkpoint) or one,
in allegorical fashion, caricaturing Islam (such as Salman Rushdie’s
The Satanic Verses)?

Journalism — Is a Westerner more constrained from caricaturing a
sitting American President in print (such as Jonathan Chait 2004 New
Republic article “The Case for Bush Hatred,” with its first sentence,
“I hate President George W. Bush”), or drawing editorial cartoons
mocking Islam (such as those initially published in 2005 in the Danish
newspaper Jyllands-Posten)?

Religious Expression — Is a Western religious figure more in danger,
issuing a CD damning the United States (such as Rev. Jeremiah Wright
calling the United States “The USKKK of A”, urging his congregation to
“Goddamn America,” and suggesting that the United States deserved the
September 11 attacks), or referencing the historic relations between
Islam and Christianity (such as Pope Benedict’s quotation of a 14th-
century Byzantine treatise about a letter from a Manuel II Paleologus
to leaders of the Ottoman Empire)?

Public dissent and expression — Would a citizen of London or Amsterdam
feel more secure in violent public protest of Israeli foreign policy,
or in peacefully criticizing Islamic Sharia law and its contributions
to terror abroad and repression at home?

Government bureaucracies — Is it more likely for an American or
European government agency to prohibit the use of particular
descriptive phrases such as “Islamic terrorism” or “Jihad” or
insensitively to demonize all Muslims in its public proclamations?

Each age has its demons of either laxity or authoritarianism. But our
age has fostered a novel menace in a peculiar form of self-censorship
that far exceeds anything dreamed up by the Department of Homeland
Security, the FBI, or the Pentagon. The only mystery about our
reluctance to speak honestly and freely about particular issues is why
our eagerness to give up on free expression, especially when it comes
to radical Islam that fuels much of the world’s terrorism in the
present post-September 11 landscape?

Other than fear, one cause surely is contemporary postmodern
ideologies such as multiculturalism, utopian pacifism, and moral
equivalence. What these notions have in common are particular views of
radical egalitarianism and Western culpability for the inability to
achieve it. Multiculturalism — whether found in Edward Said’s
Orientalism, or “black liberation theory,” or various indictments of
European colonialism of Africa and the Americas — grew up in an age of
postwar affluence, characterized by Western guilt over past
colonialism, imperialism, and global dominance. It argues that the
sins of human kind — slavery, sexism, racism, and imperialism — were
uniquely Western rather than simply innate to all cultures. Therefore,
we could hardly use our own arbitrary standards of “freedom” or
“equality” to judge other cultures, a practice that in the past had
led to the subjugation and oppression of others under dishonest
banners such as “civilization.”

In its most radical manifestation, multiculturalism would argue that
Westerners could not arbitrarily define what distinguishes the
methodology of a contemporary Islamic terrorist from, say, the
revolutionary generation of 1776 or a B-17 bombardier over Dresden or
an American GI at Hue. Or more broadly, the multiculturalist alleges
that the West has neither the moral capital nor the intellectual
deftness to condemn foreign practices such as suicide bombing,
religious intolerance, female circumcision, and honor killings, and so
must allow that these endemic practices and customs are merely
different rather than repugnant across time and space.

The practical consequence is that millions within the West have been
taught not believe in Western exceptionalism and thus insidiously
convey that message to millions of immigrants who seek to enjoy the
benefits of European and American life, but feel no need to assimilate
into it, and some cases, thrive on being as antithetical to it as
possible, albeit without forfeiting its undeniable material benefits
that residency within Western borders conveys.

Many Westerners are now hesitant to condemn something like Sharia law
in abstract terms as an enemy of freedom, or to say Islamic suicide
bombers kill barbarously for a uniquely evil cause. Because of
multiculturalism, many in the West either don’t think jihadists pose
any more threat than does their own industrial capitalist state; or if
they do, they feel that they simply lack the knowledge, or have
previously lost the moral capital, to do anything about it.

Utopian pacifism was always innate in Western civilization, given its
propensity both to wage horrific wars and in response to seek
transnational legislative means to prevent the reoccurrence of such
catastrophes. From classical times, there has been a strain in Western
letters and thought that a natural human, freed of the burdens of an
oppressive civilization, might find a blissful existence without war,
hunger, or the stress of the nation-state — should he be properly
educated and replace emotion with reason.

In revulsion to the carnage of the European twentieth century, and
given the respite at the end of an existential threat from a nuclear
Soviet Union, these old ideas about the perfectibility of human nature
through education, and energized by a vast increase in national
income, have again taken hold. Sometimes we see these hopes manifested
in world government, such as those who advocate surrendering national
sovereignty to the United Nations or the World Court at The Hague.

Sometimes they are more pedagogical and more ambitious, such as
establishing “Peace Studies” programs to inculcate our youth that,
with proper study and counsels, war can be outlawed, as if the
resulting carnage is a result of misunderstanding rather than evil
leaders knowing exactly what they want and planning how to get it. At
other moments, diplomats delude themselves into thinking leaders of
autocratic states — a Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, or Bashar Assad of
Syria, or North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il — either have legitimate
complaints against the West that explains their hostility, or have
been misrepresented in the Western press and appear bellicose largely
through misunderstanding and miscommunication. In fact, the utopian
believes, that such autocrats no more wish to harm us than we do them,
and resort to armed threats largely as a legitimate reaction to the
military preparedness of democracy.

Like multiculturalism, utopian pacifism has had the effect within
Western societies of defining difference down, and deluding Western
publics into thinking that problems with radical Islam are as much of
our own making as they a result of aggressive jihadist doctrines. In
practical terms, utopianism, like multiculturalism translates into a
public that does its best to convey the message that Western and
radical Islamic cultures are roughly similar — and that any
differences that arise can be adjudicated through greater
understanding and dialogue. Therefore, novelists, filmmakers,
journalists, or politicians who believe otherwise should not express
their sentiments out of concern for the greater ecumenical good — or
at least exercise prudence in curtailing free expression, in
recognition that their naked expression may evoke a counter response
quite injurious to the Western public in general.

A third postmodern tenet that has curtailed free expression is what I
would call moral equivalence, or the inability to discern Western and
non-Western pathologies. As a strain of multiculturalism, moral
equivalence seeks to do away with any notion of calibration and
magnitude, and place impossible burdens of perfection upon Western
societies.

Sometimes the Western misdemeanor is defined down as equivalent to
another culture’s felony. Abu Ghraib, for example, where no Iraqi
detainees perished, is the equivalent of either a Nazi Stalag or
Soviet Gulag, where millions were starved to death or executed. After
all, all three were penal camps and therefore roughly equivalent in
ethical terms.

Context becomes irrelevant. The invasion of Iraq — approved by an
elected Senate, argued over at the United Nations, intended to remove
a genocidal dictator and leave a constitutional government in its wake
— is no different from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the result
of a communist dictatorship desire to crush an anti-Soviet neighbor,
waged ruthlessly against a civilian population, and resulting in the
installation of an authoritarian puppet government.

Standards of censure are never equally applied: We worry whether an
errant bomb killed Iraqi civilians; silence ensues when Russians
nearly obliterate Grozny and kill tens of thousands of civilians. The
mishandling of the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina,
one of the five worst natural disasters in the nation’s history, in
which 1,836 Americans were killed, is singular evidence of American
racism and incompetence; nearly 300,000 were lost in an Indonesian
Tsunami, a Burmese Hurricane accounted for 100,000 dead, and a Chinese
earthquake took 50,000 lives — and few remarked either on the
incompetence of these governments in reacting to such a staggering
loss of life, or the failure of such states to provide safe and
adequate housing for their populations in the first place.

Despite the veneer of internationalism and caring, moral equivalence
is predicated on the arrogant and a condescending notion of low
expectations — that an educated and affluent Western society must not
err, while the “other” is apparently always expected to. Once the
doctrine of moral equivalence is adopted, it becomes impossible to
abide by any standards of censure. We circumcise infant males, so why
should not the Sudanese “circumscribe” female infants? We have bombed
civilians; so why should not suicide bombers do the same? Timothy
McVeigh was a religious, right-wing terrorist, so why are the
thousands of Islamic terrorist deserving of any special censure?

The aggregate result of multiculturalism, utopian pacifism, and moral
equivalence is that philosophically and ethically the Western public
becomes ill-equipped to condemn Islamic extremism. In Western
consensual societies this so-called political correctness likewise
permeates the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of
government. For a variety of reasons we voluntarily restrict free
speech and expression; but in the cases in which we otherwise would
not, we do not expect our governments to have the intellectual and
moral wherewithal to protect the safety of writers, filmmakers,
intellectuals and journalists who chose to express themselves candidly
and incur the wrath of radicals abroad.

One question remains? Why have these particular harmful doctrines
become so popular in our own era? In the general sense, the wealthier,
freer, and more leisured a society becomes — and none is more so on
all three counts than is 21st-century America — the more its
population has the leeway, the margin of error so to speak, both to
question and feel guilty over its singular privilege. Abstract
doctrines that allow one to vent remorse over our riches, without
denying our enjoyment of them, satisfy a psychological need to
reconcile what are intrinsically irreconcilable.

Second, with the collapse of communism and the rise of globalized
capitalism, Marxism as a formal doctrine was formally discredited. But
its underlying and more vague assumptions that the state must enforce
an equality of result among all the citizenry remains attractive to
many. One way of forcing Western societies to redistribute their
wealth both at home and abroad is to argue that it is not earned or
the results of practices not at all unique from, much less better
than, what is found in non-Western societies. The Marxist corollary of
false consciousness, that the deluded masses must be enlightened by
well-meaning elites to recognize their true interests explains why the
utopian insists on the substitution of his version of reason
(pacifism) over the mob’s superstition and emotion (war-mongering).
And to justify the use of state coercion to stifle the individual, the
old Marxist doctrine equates its own brutality merely as remedies for
original oppression and exploitation.

The Western military tradition assures Western states that they could,
if they so wish, become almost immune from foreign attack. Consensual
governments can, in extremis, craft security legislation consistent
with constitutional principles that will protect citizens without
eroding their rights. But government has no remedy once citizens
voluntarily begin to abandon freedom of expression out of fear, guilt
— or misguided ideologies designed to deny the singularity of their
civilization.

©2008 Victor Davis Hanson


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