Tag: Freedom of Speech

02/21/16

Liberty—If You Can Keep It

 

 

Yes, it does demand eternal vigilance.

MYRON MAGNET
Winter 2016
auschwitz

 

The gates of Auschwitz—with their demonic jeer, “Work Makes You Free”—led to history’s vilest demonstration of everything freedom isn’t.

Isn’t a sexual revolution a kind of revolution?” a Soviet dissident, the grandson of one of Stalin’s henchmen, asked me rhetorically in the mid-1970s. Recently released from five years’ Siberian exile, he certainly knew what slavery and tyranny were. But now, he wondered, couldn’t the waning of Russia’s sexual constraints be the harbinger of wider liberty? After all, he asked hopefully, “Isn’t sexual freedom, freedom?”

It didn’t turn out that way. So impoverished was the Soviet empire that it couldn’t give its subjects the bread and circuses that pacified imperial Rome’s populace; so, to the cheap vodka drastically shortening Russian life spans, it added lascivious license. Drunken stupor; moments of voluptuous rapture: that’s escape, not liberty. Continue reading →

07/4/15

The Vision of the Founding Fathers

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What kind of nation did the Founders aim to create?
By Myron Magnet — July 3, 2015

Men, not vast, impersonal forces — economic, technological, class struggle, what have you — make history, and they make it out of the ideals that they cherish in their hearts and the ideas they have in their minds. So what were the ideas and ideals that drove the Founding Fathers to take up arms and fashion a new kind of government, one formed by reflection and choice, as Alexander Hamilton said, rather than by accident and force?

Signing of the Declaration of Independence, John Trumbull
Signing of the Declaration of Independence, John Trumbull

The worldview out of which America was born centered on three revolutionary ideas, of which the most powerful was a thirst for liberty. For the Founders, liberty was not some vague abstraction. They understood it concretely, as people do who have a keen knowledge of its opposite. They understood it in the same way as Eastern Europeans who have lived under Communist tyranny, for instance, or Jews who escaped the Holocaust. Continue reading →