VDH's Private Papers::Security and Freedom

June 27, 2008
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 14^th-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.