The Fallacy of Defending Democracy With Repression: Algeria

Writing about the French terror campaign to defeat the terror campaign of the Algerian independence forces (the 20^th century one that almost destroyed the struggling French state), Albert Camus made a last-ditched effort to persuade his two homelands—France and Algeria—to overcome their clash of civilizations.

Silence Is Death

If it is unfortunately true that sometimes the barbarian hordes really do come charging down without warning from the hill on the horizon, it is nevertheless far more likely that dire threat to “our way of life” will instead saunter smiling straight through the front door. For liberty, silence is death.

Remember!

Learning his own history is the free man’s first defense against government abuse of power.

Peace, Freedom…& Responsibility

“Down to the destruction of Carthage, the people and Senate shared the government peaceably and with due restraint, and the citizens did not compete for glory or power; fear of its enemies preserved the good morals of the state. But when the people were relieved of this fear, the favourite vices of prosperity – licence and pride – appeared as a natural consequence. Thus the peace and quiet which they had longed for in time of adversity proved, when they obtained it, to be even more grievous and bitter than the adversity. For the nobles started to use their position, and the people their liberty, to gratify their selfish passions, every man snatching and seizing what he could for himself. So the whole community was split into parties, and the Republic, which hitherto had been the common interest of all, was torn asunder….The people were burdened with military service and poverty, while the spoils of war were snatched by the generals and shared with a handful of friends.” — Sallust, The Jugurthine War/The Conspiracy of Catiline, pp. 77-78 (Tr. S.A.Handford), Penguin Books, 1963.

Democracy and the Freedom to Criticize

Three millennia ago the ancient dynasty ruling the then-emerging Chinese state had a bulletin board – not for the regime to post notices to the people but for the people to post criticism of the regime! Time passed, governance declined, and by the fall of the Ch’in dictatorship, this wonderfully modern democratic practice had been replaced by laws against “slander and magic incantations”—laws so severe that they scared even officials into silence. (Sima Qian, Emperor Wen)

When Liu B led his army to overthrow the Ch’in and set up the new Han dynasty, this man-of-action focused on the immediate military needs of reestablishing peace and evidently gave little thought to the issue of freedom of speech. The more reflective emperor Wen who headed the post-rebellion generation, however, gave serious thought to the quality of governance…

Slippery Slope: Government Undermining of Civil Liberties

“Clematius, an utterly innocent man, was put to death without being allowed to open his mouth or speak.
After this act of wickedness, which, now that cruelty had been given free rein, aroused fears that it would be repeated in other cases, a number of people were found guilty and condemned through mere misty suspicion. Of these some were put to death; others suffered confiscation of their property and were driven into exile from their homes; left with no resource but complaints and tears they supported life on the charity of others, and when what had been a just constitutional government was transformed into a gloody despotism many rich and noble houses shut their doors. In the past savage emperors had often preserved the appearance of legality by preferring charges against their victims in the courts of law, but now even a counterfeit accusation was felt to be superfluous; as one mischief was heaped upon another whatever the implacable Caesar had resolved was immediately put into effect, as if it had all the force of a deliberate legal decision.“–Ammianus Marcellinus The Later Roman Empire (AD 453-378)(Tr. Walter Hamilton), London: Penguin Classics, 2004).

Ammianus Marcellinus, Roman military officer and historian, chronicled the decline of the superpower of his day.

Temptation

“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
che la diritta via era smarrita.”

[“When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.”]–Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Tr. Allen Mandelbaum (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1980)

Dante may have been thinking of individuals, but the message applies as well to factions, elites, political parties, countries, cultures, and civilizations.

Democracy, Freedom, & Responsibility

On June 8,. 1978, heroic anti-Soviet intellectual Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave an address at Harvard that bears consideration on numerous grounds. The two paragraphs below offer some  remarks on Western freedom, addressing, first, the media, and, second, the population as a whole:

“The press too, of course, enjoys the widest freedom. (I shall be using the word press to include all media). But what sort of use does it make of this freedom? Here again, the main concern is not to infringe the letter of the law. There is no moral responsibility for deformation or disproportion. What sort of responsibility does a journalist have to his readers, or to history? If they have misled public opinion or the government by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, do we know of any cases of public recognition and rectification of such mistakes by the same journalist or the same newspaper? No, it does not happen, because it would damage sales. A nation may be the victim of such a mistake, but the journalist always gets away with it. One may safely assume that he will start writing the opposite with renewed self-assurance. “ “Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day. There is no open violence such as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevent independent-minded people from giving their contribution to public life. There is a dangerous tendency to form a herd, shutting off successful development.” One of Dostoyevsky’s characters [Brothers Karamazov, Signet Classic, p. 292], although developing the rather different concept of having the courage to admit one’s personal errors, makes a remark highly relevant to Solzhenitsyn’s warning: “ ’You are, I see, a man of great strength of character….You have dared to serve the truth, even when by doing so you risked incurring the contempt of all.’ ”