Anti-Freedom

"Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last." This is the last sentence of the last paragraph of Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'I Have a Dream' speech. Although he was talking about freedom for African Americans in particular, "freedom" still very much eludes us all.

Republicans in America and right-wing politicians all over the western world have claimed the word "freedom" as their own. Their version of freedom however, is in practice the exact opposite. They are in fact the anti-freedom parties and politicians. The fact that we've been duped into believing in their version of freedom in the first place, is because it's the billionaires' version of freedom, who have funded with their billions propaganda and political campaigns pushing their ideology. Notice how they only speak of negative freedoms, as opposed to positive freedoms. Negative freedom is the freedom from regulation and government intervention. Positive freedom is the right and, more importantly, ability to do as you will.

If you're already rich, you've got the positive freedoms pretty much secured. Want to go abroad on vacation? Need expensive surgery? You've got that covered, as well as all the basics like food, water and shelter. Negative freedom therefore is all that's left for you to go after. You're rich, but that pesky government still wants some of it in the form of taxes! That's outrageous! When will they stop!? Tax-cuts and deregulation naturally become the main pillars of your version of freedom. You spend millions of dollars on election campaigns of politicians who proclaim that "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'" Your favorite politician becomes the man who said that "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem".

If you're poor, or just working class nowadays, you haven't got any of the positive freedoms secured, or it's a daily struggle to secure just some of them. At the very least, you need to have your basic needs covered before you can even begin to think about real freedom. Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously said that "Necessitous men are not free men." People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made. The truth of these statements should be obvious to anyone with a functioning brain. Real freedom for the maximum amount of people, that is the maximum amount of freedom for a society, is achieved to catering less to the wish for negative freedom from the rich, and catering more to the wish (and need) for positive freedom from the poor. From Delano Roosevelt's message to Congress on the State of the Union:

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. "Necessitous men are not free men." People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
_{source: Wikipedia}

In practice that means more regulation for corporations and industries and more taxation of the highest income brackets. That, my friends, if left-wing politics. That's politics from the side of the political spectrum we've been led to believe is the side that's against freedom. So I'd like to invite you to do two things: 1) watch the below linked video to begin to learn about how the Republicans have twisted and abused the term "freedom" to mean repression of minorities and the poor, and 2) read the Salon article Republicans and billionaires are selling Americans a deadly caricature of "freedom". After that you'll realize, or maybe you already do, that any political party or organization that has the word "freedom" in its title is probably right-wing and anti-freedom. If and when we all realize this, maybe Martin Luther King Jr's wish will come true:

And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last.
_{source: USHistory.org}

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