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Freedom is a word with a lot of baggage in America. Think about free speech! The land of the free. The free market. Kris Kristofferson, who died this week, famously sang – “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Americans are inundated with this term and have been since the inception of their country. What is freedom? According to the Oxford Dictionary:
1. The power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants. “we do have some freedom of choice” Similar: right to entitlement to privilege prerogative due
2. the state of not being imprisoned or enslaved. “the shark thrashed its way to freedom”
The United Nations in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states
“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”
America’s founding documents, Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights tell us:
“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.”
- Preamble to the Declaration of Independence
- (https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration#:~:text=We%20hold%20these%20truths%20to,and%20the%20pursuit%20of%20Happiness.)
“These three documents, known collectively as the Charters of Freedom, have secured the rights of the American people for more than two and a quarter centuries and are considered instrumental to the founding and philosophy of the United States.”
American Conceptions Of Freedom
Freedom, then, gets bandied around by politicians and political parties for all sorts of propagandist purposes. Americans love to wrap themselves up in the national flag, especially campaigning candidates on the hustings. The stars and stripes gets a fashion workout 24/7. Samuel Johnson, the man who is synonymous with the creation of the dictionary, told us – “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Invoking freedom in the guise of the American battle for independence during its revolution in 1775-83 remains a powerful touchstone for Americans. Broad brushstroke conceptions of history provide the present with powerful links to a presumed glorious past. Freedom, in the American tradition, is a call to arms to resist tyranny. A freedom from situation.
On Freedom
Professor Timothy Snyder has released a new book On Freedom. An Eastern European history professor at Yale, Snyder has been a force for Ukraine during the Russian invasion. Drawing public attention to the plight of the Ukrainians through his books, lectures, and media appearances. Ukraine finds itself at the centre of the American political debate in the run up to the latest rendition of the presidential election. Trump and the GOP seem to be Putinists via their actions in delaying military aid bills in Congress. The US has been supplying arms and aid to Ukraine, along with Europe, since the full scale invasion by Russia in 2022. Snyder as an expert on Hitler and WW2 fascist leaders through his Eastern European studies has found himself with plenty to offer on the topic of authoritarian states. The GOP, in its Trump guise, has morphed into a would be authoritarian party. Doanld Trump’s refusal to concede defeat in the 2020 presidential race and attempted insurrection on 6 January 2021 has all the hallmarks of a coup by a dictator. America is at war with itself and the polarization between MAGA Trumpists and Democrats is extreme. Thus, the definition of freedom is getting a workout in America at the moment.
Hollywood’s Vision Of American Freedom
Americans are synonymous with freedom in the mind’s of many. Hollywood has sold the world on the apple pie version of American freedom in countless movies. Hollywood was started by Eastern European Jewish emigres escaping from pogroms and genocide. These pioneers of the movie business took over from WASPS like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, whose money funded the KKK white supremacist flick The Birth Of A Nation by GW Griffith. Competing ideas of what freedom is have been at play and war within the USA for many years. Hollywood studio heads like Louis B Mayer (born Lazar Meir in Russia) and Sam Goldwyn from Austria, Adolph Zuckor Hungarian, William Fox also Hungarian, the Warner Bros from Poland and David Sarnoff a Russian who founded RKO. These men wanted to put a positive spin on the stories they told about America. They created films designed to praise and show the best America and Americans could be. Identity is a powerful thing and Hollywood was forging an American cultural identity. Freedom became about individuals rising up to do the right thing despite adversity. America was shown as a place that welcomed good people from everywhere and gave them a chance to succeed. What is freedom?
Freedom & Slavery
Of course, the reality was nothing like the Hollywood version. America has been at war with itself since its inception. Half of the states in the country were slave states. The south was run economically by enslaving captured and transported Africans on plantations, in mines, and in factories. How can you beat the drum about freedom when you are robbing millions of their liberty to exploit their labour for your profit! This is the basis for America, as the northern states participated economically in slavery via the banks and bonds being traded domestically and internationally. There were some 4 million slaves in the US at the height of American slavery. The value of these slaves was around $3.2 billion at the time. This was a major asset wealth factor within the American economy in the 19C.
“Over the period of the Atlantic Slave Trade, from approximately 1526 to 1867, some 12.5 million captured men, women, and children were put on ships in Africa, and 10.7 million arrived in the Americas. The Atlantic Slave Trade was likely the most costly in human life of all long-distance global migrations.”
White Folk Freedom
Freedom was for white folk, white men of property in fact, when it was so eloquently referred to in those founding documents . It promised freedom from tyranny from other white men, the British aristocracy who had ruled the roost during the time of the colonies prior to the American Revolution. Thus, when stirring memories are raised about the founding of the nation it should be mentioned with numerous caveats excluding women, Black people, Indigenous Americans, and those with the wrong coloured skin more generally. Poor folk did not do so well out of the American Revolution either. Those in servitude or slavery were not freed following the victory by George Washington. The celebration of this achievement is over rated in truth for much of the general population of the United States. Do not let inconvenient truths get in the way of telling a good story, however. This should be the moral of the American story.
Lincoln & Freedom
Abraham Lincoln was a rare beast in American political history. A President who strove for the rights and freedom of ordinary Americans to have economic opportunities. Most political leaders represent the moneyed classes, as they pull the strings that get them elected. Lincoln was not perfect by any means and it is an oversimplification to maintain that he was the man that ended chattel slavery in America. The Civil War of 1861-65 cost the lives of more than 600, 000 Americans. Lincoln fought to keep the Union together over and above everything else. It was the Confederate states who were determined to break away so as to maintain their unfettered right to enslave Blacks and all that entailed throughout the United States. The irreconcilable tension between the north and south over slavery was always going to end badly at some point in time. The concessions made by the non-slaver states and the expansionist tendencies of the United States could not paper over the black hole sucking the morality out of ideals of American freedom forever. It took a bloody war to sort this vile mess out. What is freedom?
Slavery A Tough Stain To Wash Away
Chattel slavery may have been made illegal more than a 150 years ago but you cannot flick a switch on something generational with a centuries long history. The southern slaver states were defined at their beginnings by slavery both economically and culturally. They fought a bloody conflict to maintain this way of living and were willing to kill and die for it. This sort of stuff does not just go away in the blink of an eye. Freedom for these folk was built on the back of oppressed Black people. Thus, in this instance freedom for one group can be at the expense of another body of human beings. Defeat in the Civil War has left bitter scars and a sense of injustice, which has been handed down generationally. White entitlement flourishes in such climates. The KKK were born out of the southern defeat in the Civil War. The failures of reunification and the political victories enjoyed by southern federal politicians in the postbellum period ensured a litany of crimes against humanity enacted on African Americans in the south. Chattel slavery morphed into peonage slavery, as wealthy southern plantation owners sought to keep their labour force. Jim Crow apartheid laws would quickly follow disenfranchising Blacks from their federal rights. Massacres and lynching would deter through terrorism those African Americans who would stand up for their Constitutional rights. Yes, terrorism, which gets bandied about by whites in the current era as a slur on Arabs and Muslims, whether they be guilty of a crime or not.
Segregation & American Freedom
Segregation is big in America. Keeping African Americans and whites apart at school and in neighbourhoods. The freedom to exclude and isolate. You know, if you don’t really live with someone, you don’t really know them. Segregation facilitates racism via the maintenance of fictions about who people really are. In realty, most folk are pretty much the same. We have the same bodies, those of us lucky enough to have two arms and legs etc. Sure, there are superficial cultural differences but our shared realities are much greater. When you live in a big country with some 333 million folk residing in it getting along is pretty important. Demagogues who bang on about that these folk are bad (the other) and you are good – they are just manipulating you for their own political expediency. Fuelling stuff like this is only going to damage the country. Free speech, which denigrates others without due cause is dangerous. Timothy Snyder writes about the crucial difference between ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘free speech’. In his thesis, the integral point is having the freedom to speak truth to power. The crux of the matter is about the little guy or gal being able to have their say – and not billionaires and demagogues falsely targeting communities of Haitian migrants because of the colour of their skin. Segregation is an outdated and disrespectful thing. If you give people a chance you will most likely find that they are a lot like you, no matter the colour of their skin or funny way of saying things. In time, the sense of strangeness drops away and like the history of America shows the nation is built on migration. This is actually what keeps America great via the reinvention and reinvigoration of it through fresh blood.
Places that attempt to keep stuff out and lock a limited defining identity in end up like museums or a zoo. No growth equals stagnation and no freedom to flourish.
Individual Freedoms vs The Union
Free-dom means the dominion of the free. A state of the free. A community of free peoples. Freedom exists not in a vacuum but within communities. No man is an island! No woman either! No one has the right to denigrate others on the basis of their identity. Christians do not have the lawful right to discriminate against those who hold different beliefs. Lincoln strove above all to keep the Union together. Community over and above individuality. If you cannot see the forest for the trees – your subjective view threatens the forest. America is not a theocracy it is a secular state. No group’s idea of god defines the laws of the nation. Of course, we all know that what we consider are religions are all man-made. There is no definitive scientific proof of the existence of any supernatural divine entity. There may be such a force but everything written down about such things has been written by human beings. Belief in revelation has no scientific basis. Some people believe in aliens and UFOs.
America, like much of the West, is a product of the humanist ideals of the Enlightenment. Freedoms, therefore, are agreed upon by democratic norms and not some divine instruction.
Nobody is taking away the essential freedoms of white folk in America. Progressive Democrats do not want to make these folk less but rather they want their share of the spoils. The GOP and Trump are proselytising a zero sum game story. The Republican party has been telling white Americans that any fair sharing of wealth with those traditionally dispossessed will cost them personally. This is not necessarily true and promotes civil unrest and polarization. Divide and conquer has long been a strategy of tyranny. The rich have pitted poor whites against Blacks on many occasions in American history. Howard Zinn in his People’s History of The United States is fulsome in these accounts of diabolic behaviour. Large portions of Americans are poorly educated and the curriculums they have been taught tellingly omit these inconvenient historical facts. I regularly hear from Americans that they had never heard of these massacres committed in Tulsa, Washington, Baltimore, Red Summer in Chicago, Slocum Texas, and Springfield to name just a few of dozens of mass murders. https://www.zinnedproject.org/collection/massacres-us/
The Freedom To Hate
There are white working class Americans who believe that there is no place for LBGTQI folk in America. That believe that immigrants are destroying the white way of life in America. These non-college educated individuals, in the main, blame liberal progressives for their own lack of wealth and opportunity. How they get to that scape goat is without logic but promulgated by Republican politicians and MAGA Trumpists in particular. Trump spends most of his time playing the politics of grievance – blaming his opponents for all the ills of the MAGA cultists. Whinging Americans are on the look out for folks to blame. The culture of complaint identified by Robert Hughes has morphed into an entitled deep chip on the shoulder. Lazy thinking is a common occurrence among folk who are not deep thinkers. Anti-intellectualism has been a feature of American identity for a very long time. This has been pandered to by the GOP in search of votes. It is now in overdrive in the MAGA era, as a rejection of science suited the climate change denying oligarchs funding the GOP. Antivaxxers and the refusal to wear masks and PPE became a libertarian feature of protesters during the Coronavirus global pandemic. The fact that nearly a million Americans died during Covid is neither here nor there for these personal freedom fighting folk. This is individual freedom, around comfort, being put forward over the life threatening interests of some in the community. Gun rights are another crazy example of this, where you have a minority of folk who wish to freely use military style AR-15 weapons having their rights upheld over the majority of Americans who want to see greater controls over these weapons of mass murder. Every week a mass murder involving these guns happens in the US, often the mass murder of innocent children. Congress is stymied by careerist self interest funded by the gun lobby. The US Supreme Court has been captured by radical conservative dark money and has overturned gun control measures. Leonard Leo is the name of the man at the centre of this Republican subsuming of SCOTUS. Overturning Roe vs Wade via the Dobb’s decision has seen abortion become illegal in many GOP controlled states around America.
Women have lost their freedom to control their own reproductive rights in America in the 21C. What is freedom?
The Free Press
The dominion of the free is being redefined in the US in 2024. The free press is controlled by corporate interests and has been for years. The majority of the local newspapers and networks have been crushed and/or taken over by big corporations and big tech. Elon Musk has bought Twitter and turned it into X – a mouthpiece for the free speech of billionaires and demagogues. Facebook and Instagram are Zuckerberg’s platforms. Tik Tok, a Chinese platform, is under constant threat of Xenophobic warnings and shut down. Journalism has been diminished and replaced in large parts by corporate funded public relations and op/eds by talking heads. Rupert Murdoch and what he has done via Fox News and his plethora of newspapers and networks around the Anglo globe is a travesty. The free press is a bad joke and we are the fall guys. In America, the government gets around the free speech First Amendment by classifying much of its documentation as top secret. National security concerns gazump the public’s right to know at the source. The American people in turn have fallen in love with conspiracy theories. If you deny knowledge and the truth to people they will make stuff up to fill the gap. Now, you have a population born and bred on the teat of fictions and exaggerations. The political machine uses this predilection for conspiracy theories in its manipulation of the voting public. Secrets breed paranoia. A willingness to believe the worst of people and parties. Investigative journalism is an essential saviour from this unhealthy state of affairs. The government and the national security agencies are no fans of journalists who dig deep to find the truth. Julian Assange is the perfect example of this. Freedom of information does not really exist. The narrative goes like this. “we are protecting you from the bad guys by keeping you in the dark.” Surveiling the American population via a complicit big tech is the price of freedom from the threat of terrorism since 9/11.
Freedom, as you can probably see, is a far more complex thing than is sold to us by campaigning politicians who want our vote.
“Loyalty and honesty and grace and beauty, commitment, friendship, these things are real. And freedom is the state of things in which you or I or all of us are able to choose among these values as we go through life and thereby create character, create personality. I think free will at the end of the day is character.
Freedom is not just the absence of something evil, but the presence of something good. “
- (Timothy Snyder On Freedom posted on https://www.persuasion.community/p/timothy-snyders-on-freedom)
Snyder writes a positive story about freedom and how we can strive to create a free state worth living in. Progressive, humanist approaches to life are about taking responsibility within your community. The individual in balance with the community. The preservation of the union through tolerance and love.
Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of America Matters: Pre-apocalyptic Posts & Essays in the Shadow of Trump.
©MidasWord
