Watering Down Evil
I am about halfway through Sean Hannity's Deliver Us From Evil, in which he spends some time revisiting the Nazi rise to power and the Holocaust. The stark depictions of those horrors and what precipitated them made me stop and think of the way the term "Nazi" is thrown around today, and how often people are compared to Hitler.
Not only that, but it amazes me how lightly the terms "freedom" and "liberty" are taken now. Someone actually made the point to me the other day that the rich should pay more for the defense of the country because they benefit more from the freedoms of this country than do the poor. I have already posted on the correlation between economic freedoms and poverty, but this issue goes deeper than that.
People in this country have somehow become callous as to the effects of tyranny and oppression in the world. Hearing that Bush is a war criminal, for example, makes me wonder if these people understand the concept of freedom at all. A U. S. President will never have to be tried by the world for crimes, because, as a free nation, we have the power to do that. George Bush was just on trial in this country and acquitted. If the rest of the world views him as a war criminal, then come get him.
The only reason the Nazi's were able to carry out the systematic murder of millions of Jews is that they had a strangle-hold on power. Do we not see that freedom means not only the ability to do better economically, but the ability to live without the fear of a tyrannical government indiscriminately throwing you in jail forever?
When I hear people say that maybe Arabs don't want freedom, or, as Maureen Dowd wrote, that the U.S. is a theocracy, I wonder how it is we have gotten to this point. That we don't realize that freedom is inherently good, and tyranny is inherently bad. It saddens me to think that the sacrifices of so many before us mean so little to us now.
Could it be because our education system no longer trumpets America and the great experiment our founding fathers risked all to create?
Not only that, but it amazes me how lightly the terms "freedom" and "liberty" are taken now. Someone actually made the point to me the other day that the rich should pay more for the defense of the country because they benefit more from the freedoms of this country than do the poor. I have already posted on the correlation between economic freedoms and poverty, but this issue goes deeper than that.
People in this country have somehow become callous as to the effects of tyranny and oppression in the world. Hearing that Bush is a war criminal, for example, makes me wonder if these people understand the concept of freedom at all. A U. S. President will never have to be tried by the world for crimes, because, as a free nation, we have the power to do that. George Bush was just on trial in this country and acquitted. If the rest of the world views him as a war criminal, then come get him.
The only reason the Nazi's were able to carry out the systematic murder of millions of Jews is that they had a strangle-hold on power. Do we not see that freedom means not only the ability to do better economically, but the ability to live without the fear of a tyrannical government indiscriminately throwing you in jail forever?
When I hear people say that maybe Arabs don't want freedom, or, as Maureen Dowd wrote, that the U.S. is a theocracy, I wonder how it is we have gotten to this point. That we don't realize that freedom is inherently good, and tyranny is inherently bad. It saddens me to think that the sacrifices of so many before us mean so little to us now.
Could it be because our education system no longer trumpets America and the great experiment our founding fathers risked all to create?
posted by The Man at 9:20 AM
2 Comments:
I would go even further to say that absolutely nothing would have happened had Stalin been elected president. The wheels of a democratic republic turn slowly, and no one makes such a radical difference in the span of 4, or even 8 years.
Also, on another note, it struck me that your commenter awhile back, Kofi Anonymous, said that "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" is more moral than "final solution". Yet the former resulted in even more carnage than the latter. Call it left-wing, call it right-wing, tyranny is evil.
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