En bas cette fausse idée de la liberté!

Down with Boilerplate’s and the neocons’ bizarre Orwellian re-definition of freedom. Let’s go back to the American and Western and Christian traditions of liberty. For example, we could start with:

Now the Lord is that Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.
(2 Corinthians 3:17)

By the way, the title of this blog entry means: Down with this false idea of liberty. As I was posting the entry and thinking of a title for it, what came into my mind was the phrase, En bas le tyran, down with the tyrant, which is what the delegates repeatedly cried in the French National Assembly the day Robespierre was overthrown. A few years ago I was thrilled to see the original transcripts of the French National Assembly from that great day in August 1794, on display in the Morgan Library in New York. My use of the phrase here is appropriate because the object of dislike is much the same: a dehumanizing, de-culturating, Jacobin force.

Indeed, Boilerplate has gone so overboard with this “freedom” business that even the New York Times “conservative” David Brooks is on ABC saying that Bush is emphasizing freedom too much and needs to talk more about order and security. But that’s what happens when an ideology, with its accompanying simplistic slogans, takes over a person’s mind, especially when the person in question had a severe lack of mental furniture to begin with.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 20, 2005 03:00 PM | Send