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Jan. 14th, 2012 05:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadgerOne of my friends posted a link to this story in the Post about the erosion of civil liberties in the US. I started to reply, and then realised that it would perhaps be more appropriate to post my response here than co-opt his entry.
We've given up a lot of freedoms. We traditionally do that in time of crisis. During the Civil War, most of the Union was under martial law at one time or another, and US citizens were routinely arrested and detained without trial or haled before military tribunals that sentenced them to indefinite detention. And let's not even talk about the loss of civil liberties perpetrated by the state governments and Continental Congress durign the Revolution. Not only foreign citizens but US citizens of foreign extraction were imprisoned without even an accusation of crime or disloyalty during the world wars.
I say this not to justify the current situation, but to explain why I think the author's comparison of the US to countries like China, Saudi Arabia, Syria, or Iran is fallacious. Citizens of those countries have no expectation of civil rights (I don't know for sure, but I imagine in most of those countries they don't even have enumerated notional rights). Pakistan is the one country of those named where I see some similarity to the US. Pakistan, in its own short history and reaching back to British India, has a tradition of the rule of law and a societal belief in individual liberties that I don't think any of those other countries have.
Something like Pakistan is what I most fear the US becoming. For most of its existence, civil government has been threatened by military rule, not because the military is stronger than the people but because the people have repeatedly accepted that it was better for the military to rule the country than for its citizens to do so. When the people have become outraged by military misbehavour, they have been able to force change. Musharraf was forced out of power because he tried to create a dictatorship, because he tried to overthrow the one part of civil society that still has respect in Pakistan--the judiciary.
I think that civil liberties are currently degraded in the US, but I think that is temporary. I think the desire for freedom and its importance as part of who we are as a nation is too great for the mass of the population to tolerate its loss for very long once we perceive that such diminution of rights is no longer needed. We saw it in the repeal of the Alien and Sedition Acts, when those were used (created, in fact) for political purposes. We saw it in the SCOTUS findings, after the war, that many of the powers asserted by President Lincoln and the federal government to defeat the Confederates were unconstitutional. We saw it in the repeal of similar measures after the world wars and the remorse (however belated) that has come over internment. In Syria or China or Saudi Arabia there would be no remorse or apologies; there would be no repeal. There is no (real) independent judiciary in those countries for victims of overmighty government power to appeal to.
Has national security been used to extend unaccountable government power too far in the current crisis? Yes, it has, in some cases. But I won't be worried about the long-term health of liberty in the United States as long as we are concerned about, write about, discuss, and protest these actions.
We've given up a lot of freedoms. We traditionally do that in time of crisis. During the Civil War, most of the Union was under martial law at one time or another, and US citizens were routinely arrested and detained without trial or haled before military tribunals that sentenced them to indefinite detention. And let's not even talk about the loss of civil liberties perpetrated by the state governments and Continental Congress durign the Revolution. Not only foreign citizens but US citizens of foreign extraction were imprisoned without even an accusation of crime or disloyalty during the world wars.
I say this not to justify the current situation, but to explain why I think the author's comparison of the US to countries like China, Saudi Arabia, Syria, or Iran is fallacious. Citizens of those countries have no expectation of civil rights (I don't know for sure, but I imagine in most of those countries they don't even have enumerated notional rights). Pakistan is the one country of those named where I see some similarity to the US. Pakistan, in its own short history and reaching back to British India, has a tradition of the rule of law and a societal belief in individual liberties that I don't think any of those other countries have.
Something like Pakistan is what I most fear the US becoming. For most of its existence, civil government has been threatened by military rule, not because the military is stronger than the people but because the people have repeatedly accepted that it was better for the military to rule the country than for its citizens to do so. When the people have become outraged by military misbehavour, they have been able to force change. Musharraf was forced out of power because he tried to create a dictatorship, because he tried to overthrow the one part of civil society that still has respect in Pakistan--the judiciary.
I think that civil liberties are currently degraded in the US, but I think that is temporary. I think the desire for freedom and its importance as part of who we are as a nation is too great for the mass of the population to tolerate its loss for very long once we perceive that such diminution of rights is no longer needed. We saw it in the repeal of the Alien and Sedition Acts, when those were used (created, in fact) for political purposes. We saw it in the SCOTUS findings, after the war, that many of the powers asserted by President Lincoln and the federal government to defeat the Confederates were unconstitutional. We saw it in the repeal of similar measures after the world wars and the remorse (however belated) that has come over internment. In Syria or China or Saudi Arabia there would be no remorse or apologies; there would be no repeal. There is no (real) independent judiciary in those countries for victims of overmighty government power to appeal to.
Has national security been used to extend unaccountable government power too far in the current crisis? Yes, it has, in some cases. But I won't be worried about the long-term health of liberty in the United States as long as we are concerned about, write about, discuss, and protest these actions.
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Date: 2012-01-14 10:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-14 11:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-15 12:09 am (UTC)By instead tying them to bogus "wars" (on drugs, terror, whatever) that endpoint doesn't exist and while some people will care, the response will be both slower and more muted. This helps ensure that even when things revert, it won't be all the way. Some of the rights that were trounced upon will remain gone and the people as a whole will be happy just to get some others back.
The "War on drugs" has been going on for a long time, and I don't see many of the heinous breaches of rights enacted in its name coming back yet. I don't expect the equivalents pushed though by the "war on terror" to be any different.