Give up more freedoms?

An unpopular truth

[Reprinted from Issues & Views October 8, 2001]

Tony Blankley, writing in the Washington Times on September 26, wants us to "Trade Civil Liberties for Better Security." This seems very unappealing. Give up freedoms? We already gave at the office--we gave some up last year, the year before that, and during the whole mind-numbing forty odd years of the overblown Cold War. " We're fresh out, old chap," we say, slamming the door in the impertinent fellow's face.

That will never do. In the new situation, says Blankley, "every congressman, senator and citizen must discard everything they thought they believed about civil liberties. We all have a moral obligation to think for ourselves and act for the common good." Well, this may not be a big change for Congress; I don't know how much they were thinking about civil liberties anyway. As for the people, we Americans are famous for reinventing ourselves, so I'm sure we can reprogram our thinking about such minor affairs as the first ten amendments to the . . . . whatever it was.

Making the by now predictable appeal from bad precedent to bad proposal, Blankley recounts how poor Abe Lincoln took up suspending habeas corpus to save the union. If Mr. Blankley inquires further into these things, he might discover that many people--in the 1860s and even today--have found in Mr. Lincoln's union-saving methods an indictment of Lincoln, rather than heroic precedent to which to appeal.

It will be time enough to think about "giving up" some freedoms, temporarily or not, once we have conducted a thorough study of how many we actually have remaining to us after the awful 20th century, and what the exact content of those may be.

-- Joseph R. Stromberg, excerpted from "The Old Cause," September 28, 2001, on Antiwar.com

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