By Matthew Continetti
Saturday, November 25, 2017
On November 13, a 24-year-old North Korean soldier, known
only by his surname Oh, commandeered a jeep and sped toward the De-Militarized
Zone that for 64 years has separated his Communist homeland from the democratic
capitalist South.
As he approached the border, the young man abandoned the
vehicle and scrambled on foot toward the line of control. North Korean soldiers
began firing on him. He was hit five or six times before collapsing onto South
Korean ground. Transported to a hospital in Suwon, near Seoul, doctors
performed emergency surgery. They discovered and extracted parasitic worms from
his small intestine. Diagnosed with tuberculosis and hepatitis B, he is
nonetheless expected to recover.
Oh risked everything to live in freedom. He has joined
the ranks of other defectors, refugees, and exiles who fled oppression for the
chance of a life free of tyrannical control. From the Berlin Wall, to
Vietnamese and Cuban boat people, to the DMZ, the prisoners of Communism run in
only one direction: toward liberty and self-government, toward the bounty of
the marketplace and the possibilities of representative democracy.
Many did not — many do not — make it. They die
imprisoned, like the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, or do not survive the
crossing, like Peter Fletcher, murdered by the Border Troops of the German
Democratic Republic at the age of 18.
And there are millions more still who, having been born
and raised in democratic capitalist societies, do not fully recognize or
appreciate the novelty and blessing of their lives. The story of Oh is not only
a reminder that the call of freedom persists. It is a rebuke to those who
ignore freedom’s song.
For it has become fashionable, on both left and right, to
downplay or ignore or deprecate the idea of freedom, to blame individualism,
self-determination, and choice for inequality, pollution, corruption, immorality,
decline, and other tragic aspects of the human condition. The fact that all of
these pathologies flourish in autocratic, socialist, and Communist societies as
well as in our own seemingly escapes the notice of the intellectual critics of
freedom.
Even so, we are told that free will is a delusion, that
we are better off being “nudged” by our cognitive and moral superiors, that
freedom and democracy are like rubber bands that snap back when stretched to
the limit. “We are drowning in freedom,” says one editor. Tell that to Oh.
I am the first to admit that freedom is not enough. It is
a necessary but insufficient condition for human flourishing. In the absence of
family, tradition, religion, community, and vocation, freedom can be
directionless, aimless, self-indulgent, and even harmful. “What will be wrought
by freedom unaccompanied by learning and faith?” asked one champion of freedom.
“The license of Weimar Germany and the decadence of Imperial Rome; human
behavior un-tempered by a sense of moral spiritual, or intellectual limits —
the behavior G.K. Chesterton described as the ‘moral weakness of always
sacrificing the normal to the abnormal.’ And when freedom is mangled in this
way, what George Orwell would have called un-freedom soon follows.”
True, freedom may be only one of several ingredients for
a good society. And disordered liberty may carry spiritual and physical costs.
But these are no reasons to diminish freedom’s importance, its appeal, or its
centrality in the American experience. Earlier this week marked the 154th
anniversary of the Gettysburg Address and its peroration of “government of the
people, by the people, for the people.” Yesterday, Americans celebrated our
opportunity to live in religious and civil liberty. Every July, we commemorate
our Declaration of Independence from Britain and rededicate ourselves to the
idea of a government whose purpose is to secure inalienable natural rights.
We may be comfortable, affluent, secure, and
self-involved, but dangers to freedom remain. The world’s most populous nation,
and soon to be largest economy, is governed by a Communist dictatorship whose
ruler idolizes the butcher Mao Zedong. Its allies include: a Stalinist
hereditary monarchy with nuclear weapons; a gigantic autocratic mafia state
fomenting discord around the globe; and a terrorism-supporting theocracy. A
global movement of religious fanatics conspires to kill innocents and impose
fundamentalist law. In our own hemisphere the Communist dictatorship of Cuba
shows no signs of political or true economic liberalization while the socialist
government of Venezuela has turned its people into mendicants.
At home, the freedoms of speech and religion are under
attack, the bureaucracy and judiciary resist attempts to hold them accountable
to the people, the right to life is contested, personal freedom is endangered
by the rise in violent crime, the national symbols of flag and anthem are
denounced, and one of the authors of American liberty is defaced on the very
grounds of the university he created. Might these phenomena be connected to the
cynical degradation of the idea of freedom, to the mass forgetting of and
assault upon our national patrimony and heritage?
In the spring of 1947 the recently installed president of
the Screen Actors Guild gave an interview to Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda
Hopper. “Our highest aim,” he said, “should be the cultivation of freedom of
the individual, for therein lies the highest dignity of man. Tyranny is
tyranny, and whether it comes from right, left, or center, it’s evil.”
A few years later, that same actor delivered the
commencement address to the 1952 class of William Woods College in Fulton, Mo.:
It has been said that America is
less of a place than an idea, and if it is an idea, and I believe that to be
true, it is an idea that has been deep in the souls of man ever since man
started his long trail from the swamps. It is nothing but the inherent love of
freedom in each one of us, and the great ideological struggle that we find
ourselves engaged in today is not a new struggle. It’s the same old battle. We
met it under the name of Hitlerism; we met it under the name of Kaiserism; and
we have met it back through the ages in the name of every conqueror that has
set upon a course of establishing his rule over mankind.
It is simply the idea, the basis of
this country and of our religion, the idea of the dignity of man, the idea that
deep within the heart of each one of us is something so God-like and precious
that no individual or group has a right to impose his or its will upon the
people, that no group can decide for the people what is good for the people so
well as they can decide for themselves.
It’s hard to answer the question of how Ronald Reagan
might have responded to the bewildering world of the early 21st century. But I
can venture with absolute certainty that he would not have been surprised by
the defection of Staff Sergeant Oh. He would have instantly grasped its
significance and import. And he would have been pleased.
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