Having read BooMan’s story about Huckabee’s speech last night, I decided to post a comment. However, what started out as a short statement turned into something a bit longer than I originally intended. So I decided to post it to the front page instead.
The point Huckabee was making last night at the Republican convention, as I understand it, was that no one in this country has any inherent rights or freedoms except to the extent that we have been given those freedoms by the men and women who serve in our military. People like John McCain, for example. Well, I’m writing this now to tell Mike Huckabee he couldn’t be more wrong.
No one earned the rights you or I possess as Americans. They were granted to us by a legal document, a compact if you will, by and among various sovereign states. That document is called The Constitution of the United States of America, and under its provisions all of us are granted certain freedoms, certain rights and liberties, as a matter of law. The armed forces of this country may be employed to defend the lives and property of the people of this country, and the people who serve in the military have my greatest respect, especially those who died or suffered as a result of their service. But their actions, whether in peace or wartime, did not earn my freedom for me.
John McCain fought, killed people and suffered as a POW in the Vietnam war. That was a war that had little if anything to do with fighting for my freedom or the freedom of anyone else, including the South Vietnamese people, many of whom died as a result of our military intervention in their country. If the South Vietnamese government had survived, and defeated the North Vietnamese military it would not have been a democracy. It would have been controlled by a military junta or a dictator. It might have eventually turned into a democratic government similar to that of South Korea, or on the other hand evolved into a repressive one like Singapore. No one can say. At present Vietnam is much like China, a capitalist economy with a government controlled by an ostensibly Communist party. So McCain’s efforts amounted to little in the grand scheme of things. They certainly didn’t help me. This is not to dishonor the service he gave to our country, nor the suffering he endured as a POW, but that service and his suffering was not ipso facto undertaken to preserve American freedoms and liberties, mine or yours.
What did happen during that war, while Senator McCain was a captive of the North Vietnamese, was an assault on our collective freedom back in the USA by our own government. Google “Cointelpro” and the “Church Committee” for the details. Or look up the history of the Watergate scandal that brought down the Nixon White House. So, McCain, despite his service in the military, didn’t earn my freedom or yours. He did what most soldiers do: he followed orders, and carried out the policy of the civilian leaders of our government, policies we now know were terribly misguided and arguably, in some instances, war crimes.
What earns us our freedom isn’t anyone’s service in the military, laudatory as that may be. It’s our constant attention to insisting, demanding and fighting to preserve those rights granted to all of us under the Constitution. That’s what the Civil Rights Movement of the 50’s and 60’s fought for, and what the Feminist movement has fought for, and the Gay Liberation movement has fought for, and Unions have fought for, and the ACLU has fought for. That’s what even the NRA (an organization of which I do not approve) has fought for: a right it believes citizens are entitled to under the 2nd amendment to the constitution — the right to own a gun.
And every time someone in government does something to diminish those rights, like imprisoning people without due process, or permitting the use of torture, or authorizing and excusing the illegal and warrantless surveillance of American citizens, we lose a little of our “freedoms.” Every time innocent and peaceful protesters are arrested for daring to exercise their rights of free speech and assembly, or people have their homes raided by the police because they belong to a group that plans to protest, or journalists are arrested for covering those protests, our rights are infringed upon by the government. Yet that has what has been happening at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, presumably with the implicit or express approval of John McCain and the Republican party.
So, don’t tell me that John McCain gave me my freedom as a gift, or that he earned it on my behalf. He didn’t. Indeed, his actions as a serving Senator have lately done much to limit my rights. It is only by exercising my freedoms, and standing up for the rights of others, that I have any chance of retaining them. In other words, only when we, you and I, “the people,” stand up collectively for our constitutional rights, even the constitutional rights of people with whom we disagree, or whose views or actions we find offensive, even the rights of people who are charged with crimes or who are not American citizens, can we say we have done something on behalf of our freedoms.
I don’t mean for my words here to dishonor anyone who serves, or served, in the military, but that service means nothing if we allow the excuse of wars fought by our Armed forces overseas, or the presence of enemies, foreign or domestic, to limit the rights to which we are entitled, and to which we became entitled at birth. Under the Bush administration that is what too many Americans, in and out of government, have done. Stood by while our liberties were thrown down in the mud and stomped on.
Many of them are attending the Republican Convention as we speak. Many of them would consider my statements here on this blog to be traitorous and un-American. Many of them have no problem with repressing free speech, if it is speech with which they disagree. Many of them have no problem with torture by our government so long as they are not the one being tortured. Many of them don’t care that our government is spying on us and them, and compiling vast data bases of information about its citizens, an invasion of privacy on a scale unprecedented in our history. Many of them may even have worn wore those infamous “purple bandaids,” which openly mocked the physical courage demonstrated by Senator John Kerry during his military service in Vietnam, at the 2004 Republican National Convention. Well, they were hypocrites then and they are hypocrites now. And in the words of Thomas Jefferson, they are dead wrong about who earned us our liberty:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
