Learning From History

Perhaps one of the greatest truisms is that the one thing we learn from history; is that we learn nothing from history.

Benjamin Franklin is credited with several versions of the following quotation:

”They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Yet, Monday’s Guardian contains a poll that suggests some 73% of the British people would be prepared to make that very trade off.

Are they stupid? Are they plain evil? There is a trend in today’s society to ridicule civil liberties as something that is the domain of woolly thinking “liberals”; the white middle classes who do not have to deal with the realities of criminal behaviour. Yet our civil liberties are what enable us to keep government at bay, it is the liberty that means we do not exist under the yoke of oppressive regimes such as those endured in the past under Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini. Today, such regimes still exist in Africa and the Middle East. Is this what the British people want when they decide that they wish to trust government with removing freedoms in order to make it easier to catch “terrorists”? And, what exactly do we mean by “terrorist” anyway? Is it the current flavour of the month; Muslims? What about tomorrow? What about those of us who dare to remind people and government alike that the tradeoff is not only undesirable, but doesn’t work? As Guy Herbert points out over at White Rose, the Saudi regime doesn’t bother overmuch with such niceties as civil liberties, yet still suffers from terrorist action – indeed, rather more than the relatively liberal Britain.

Are we who want to keep our hard fought liberties to be labelled “friends of terrorists”? and therefore get exactly what we deserve when our freedoms are removed? Because, make no mistake, the people who think removing freedoms is a good idea were referring to other peoples’ freedoms, not their own.

Maybe they should try going to Specsavers…