Thursday, September 21

Misapplying "Essential Liberty"

Did America's revolutionaries do any sort of monitoring of the enemies' communications during the War? Did they seek to discover those within the Colonies who were helping the Crown? Is it prudent, during a time of war, to know what your enemy is planning and their contacts within the nation's borders?

Benjamin Franklin on Liberty:
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
This statement of defiance in the cause of Freedom has lately been misused by some in the context of the United States government's surveillance of terrorists and their accomplices within the country. On the surface it may seem applicable; upon closer inspection, it clearly is not analogous.

When Franklin and other patriots stated this simple but profound truth, they were facing a mortal threat from England: Stand down and submit, or else. The trade-off here for Americans was that if they were to avoid martial conflict with the Crown, they were going to have to sacrifice their God-given Liberty and their dignity as men. The temptation to acquiese to England's tyranny in an effort to avoid harm to their bodies and property must have been great.

Today, the aforementioned quotation is used not to encourage Americans to fight against the murderous Tyranny of Allah, which has maimed and killed thousands of Americans in its effort to subdue and humiliate us in accord with Islam's "sacred" texts (indeed, "Islam" means "submission" not "peace"). It is not used to ignite patriots' love of Liberty against those who would subject us to the vile state of abject abasement and humiliation called dhimmitude. Neither is it used to inspire courage against those who would take and use our sons, daughters, wives, and lives to gratify their "divinely-sanctioned" sadistic and imperialistic predilections.

Instead, this indictment of those who love safety more than Freedom is misapplied to a government seeking to identify those who would kill us (and worse) in the name of their false god and prophet.

The West is now in the latest phase of Allah's one and one-half millennia-old War Against Humanity; it needs to make every effort to defend itself, and that includes using every technological advantage at its disposal to discover and monitor the jihadists and their accomplices. The intellectually lazy and morally bankrupt should not handicap our struggle by taking the Founders' comments out of context.

Those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear.

We must defend our Lives, Liberty, and sacred honor against the malevolent, tyrannical evil seeking to them in the name of Allah. Anything less is cowardice. We are better than that, and we have much that is worth defending.