These are the kinds of fallacies that destroy any sort of reasonable political debate. This country isn't defined by any one person; each of us have rights that we can exercise, one of them being freedom of speech. This right is critical, for ideas are the motor behind any dynamic society. Terrorism is bred by systems which don't encourage a free marketplace of ideas, and in some respects, that is really the reason why they hate us so much. Certainly if the ideas that some of these extremist Islamic religious types were truly subjected to a free marketplace of ideas, it would probably not perform so well. How do we know? Iran is a theocracy, yet its population has been shown to be very open to political freedom and liberty. What sustains the Mullahs rule is that they have a monopoly on the political discourse and they rule by fear. In a free society, ideas that are bad go to the side while those that optimize human interest stay. That's the beauty of free societies, and why they are much more dynamic than those that don't espouse it.
The terrorists don't like that we have such freedoms and they feel that such values are encroaching upon theirs, especially in light of globalization. So why would we want to suppress freedom of speech here at home when that's exactly what the terrorists want? They want us to be afraid, to be obsessed about the enemy. Yes, we need to be vigilant and proactive, but not fearful. Fear is the biggest enemy to freedom; it creates conditioned responses that make people subservient, unquestioning of their leaders. When that happens, freedom and democracy will go into the dustheap of history --leaders lose accountability, rights are taken away, to be replaced by suppression. It's a cycle that has been seen in many societies throughout history, one that has been defined by citizens who become pliant, soft, and uncritical.
Fear is a part of wartime; rights are many times foregone for supposed security needs. During the Civil War, Lincoln closed down newspapers which he saw as subversive. Woodrow Wilson during the First World War jailed one of his political opponents for speaking against the war.
My big concern with this war on terrorism is that it is becoming increasingly obvious that our leaders consider this venture to be a long term, open ended affair. Thus it seems like the suspension of key rights like Habeas Corpus will become a precedent that won't be turned back any time soon. Lincoln and Wilson did retract some rights, but they were promptly restored after the end of the war. This war is not against any one enemy, it is against an idea, a tactic that's been used since the beginning of human warfare. It's safe to say that the use of terror as a political tactic won't end any time soon. How do we know that weve won the war on terrorism? Will there be a declaration of victory? The open-ended nature of this war on terror is such that it can lead us in many different directions; according to what we define as a threat at any given moment in a rather arbitrary way.
Im worried that we can very well lose our freedoms because of this constant war type mentality. This is something that we need to be wary of if we expect to continue being a free society that promotes democracy here at home and abroad. Political liberty has always been our calling card as a nation, lets not forget that.
