The Fourth of July has a special significance for me and, I suspect, most people who, like me, were born elsewhere. It marks the 240th anniversary of the declaration that every living person has the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”— thus giving birth to the most exceptional nation on earth.
When I was much younger and wet behind the ears, I was persuaded the U.S. Constitution, which sprang from the Declaration of Independence, was greatly inferior to the British version.
It was held that the “unwritten” British Constitution was far more flexible—and thus far more adaptable to changing political, social, and economic circumstances—than that of America.
Years spent reporting both in the former Soviet Bloc and Western Europe taught me that flexibility is anything but a virtue. Experience shows that liberty is best guaranteed by government according to the U.S. model, with a constitution that unambiguously limits the muscle and reach of government.
Today, however, it seems that immigrants like me hold the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights in rather higher esteem than many of the folks who were born here. This, at least, appears to be the case from the apparent bland acceptance displayed by so many of our fellow citizens to efforts to modify, erode, distort, or alter its meaning.
The relentless assault on the First Amendment is a case in point. Newly-discovered so-called “rights” are being invoked not only to stifle our constitutionally guaranteed freedom to express our religious beliefs, but also to restrict our political freedoms by stifling debate on a wide range of vital issues.
This is a development that is especially chilling for those of us in America who have experienced life in totalitarian societies where Christianity was considered, in Karl Marx’s words, to be the “the opiate of the people” and condemned as subversive.
In the early days of the Soviet Union, bishops, priests, and deacons faced the firing squad. When the Nazis invaded in 1941, Josef Stalin ordered the reopening of the churches when he saw the unflinching courage and self-sacrifice the Christian faith inspired.
After the war, however, his secret police cracked down on the faith once again. Bishops, appointed by the party, were essentially Communist stooges. Troublesome priests were routinely packed off to the Gulag, and congregations were largely composed of KGB agents and the impoverished elderly with little to lose.
Christians were not the only ones crushed by the heel of the state. Everybody, even avowed Communists, was under constant surveillance.
The secret police throughout the Eastern Bloc raised telephone tapping to an art form. It was common practice for people to cover their home telephones with a pillow because the secret police used the telephone as an eavesdropping device to monitor “subversive” speech.
Even so, conversations about “sensitive” subjects were generally held in bathrooms with the water taps running in both sink and shower stalls for fear of the ever-present official eavesdroppers. Thoughtless or unguarded remarks were ruthlessly punished. Minor transgressors were often demoted or denied privileges such as the right to travel. More serious offenders were deprived of their livelihoods, their liberty, and even their lives.
A Polish acquaintance, for instance, applied for membership in the Communist Party. He was not a convinced Marxist, but he wanted permission to travel to America. He was turned down on the grounds his dog was named Bossa Nova, after the popular dance.
Vainly, he explained that the dog was named Bossa Nova because he was constantly wiggling and jiggling. The cadres were not amused. The mere mention of a “decadent” Western dance was taken as evidence that he was hopelessly bourgeois and unqualified for party membership.
In Nazi Germany an off–hand remark at a cocktail party had lethal consequences for a friend’s aunt, a glamorous social butterfly with an acerbic tongue. She was overheard to remark that the Nazi leaders were so coarse and uncultivated they would never be welcome at her dinner table …
For this mild insult, she was arrested, brutally interrogated by the Gestapo, and shipped off to a concentration camp to die in the gas chambers.
During Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, an architect then employed by the Soviet dictator and his henchmen told me that he and his wife rarely enjoyed a night’s sleep. Every day neighbors were whisked away in the dead of night by the secret police, and the couple lay awake, terrified that the next knock on an apartment door would be for them.
This regime of fear was typical of the communist world right up to the Soviet collapse. The East German secret police, the Stasi, for example, directly employed around 274,000 agents with another 500,000 or so working as unpaid informers. At a ratio of one Stasi to every 166 citizens, it was a surveillance network that, on a per capita basis, far out outstripped the Soviet KGB and Hitler’s Gestapo.
In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge made even the fearsome Stasi look like pussycats. The Cambodian communists actually executed people who owned eyeglasses for the crime of being “intellectuals.”
The morbid humour of intellectuals is reflected in the cynical Russian question. “Why do KGB men always work in threes?” The answer: “One to read, one to write, and one to keep an eye on the two intellectuals.”
Actually, the repression of “intellectuals”—shorthand for people who think for themselves—is common to tyrannies of both the Left and the Right. That’s because people who think freely are liable to challenge political orthodoxy.
Sadly, in America the suppression of free thought is growing by leaps and bounds. Political correctness is, in fact, symptomatic of a “soft and creeping” tyranny. It is a stratagem for shutting down debate—preventing challenges to controversial political agendas by making discussion of them off–limits. In short, it is the very antithesis of the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. In 1787, at the close of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked: “Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?”
“A Republic …” replied Franklin, “if you can keep it.” Timidly submitting to political correctness is a surefire way of losing it. GPH✠
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