Victor Davis Hanson: Security and Freedom ... an age-old tension
[Victor Davis Hanson is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor emeritus at California University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.]
*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...
Read entire article at www.victorhanson.com
*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...