The Miracle of Freedom

by Ted Stewart

  The father looked at the statue of the Christian god and thought of the events of the last few weeks. A leader of the Jewish neighborhood, he had been accused of blasphemy against the Holy Christ. As punishment, he had been forced to create a ring of gold-plated Hebrew letters and place them around the statue’s neck. Holy, Holy, Holy, the Lord of Hosts, the sign read.

  The sacred words, taken from the book of Isaiah, were part of a blessed Jewish prayer.

  His son, he knew, shared in his humiliation. He felt the shame of his people, their history, their culture, even now their great Jehovah. The sacred words were intended for the Messiah only, not for the Christian god.

  The father looked down at his son, reading the look in his eyes. “God exempts the man who is constrained,” he said in a quiet voice.

  The son pressed his lips together.

  They had all heard the Hebrew saying far too many times before. This wasn’t the first time their people had been forced to denigrate their faith.

  The father shook his head, then glanced down at the crimson badge his people were forced to wear. The first Jewish ghetto had sprung up in Spain about three hundred years before, but the idea had been embraced until ghettos were common throughout all of Europe now: Madrid, Barcelona, Venice, Rome, and Prague. He thought of the accusations all of them endured. Blood Libels, they were called. Jews had been accused of ritual killings since the height of the Crusades, when all the heretics (Jews, Muslims, and suspicious Christians) had been forced to hide or flee. Some of his own ancestors had been accused of killing Christian children and using their blood to make unleavened bread for the Passover.

  Pulling his coat against the humid chill, the father looked east, knowing the hatred from his fellow citizens was not the most dangerous of his concerns.

  He thought of the brutal Cossack army that had swept through the heart of Eastern Europe not too many years before, massacring the Poles and Jews as if they were rats or wolves. Even now, he knew that nothing stood between the deadly Cossacks and the place that he called home. Nothing stood between the Jewish ghettos and the evil governments and institutions that had sent his people here. Nothing stood between the Jewish people and the superstitious hatred that had been growing for five hundred years.

  His people were alone. No one would stand up to defend them. No state, no nation, no religious institution or act of man, nothing could protect them from their enemies, even if they had wanted to.

  Looking at his child, he prayed for words that might give his son a little hope. Having none, he held his tongue and pulled his son close.

  Office of Information Omsk, Siberia, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics AD 1986

  The Russian investigator stared at the papers scattered across his desk, then leaned back and closed his eyes, unconsciously holding his breath.

  It was too much. It simply couldn’t be! The numbers didn’t make any sense!

  He stared at the water-stained ceiling and exhaled, then closed his eyes again.

  Forty million people in the first generation. Maybe ten or twenty million after that.

  Leaning forward, he let his breath escape, then picked up a yellow page from the top of the pile and read some of the numbers that he had just compiled.

  Sixty million people!

  And we did this to ourselves!

  Gulag. Glavnoye Upravlyeniye Ispravityel’no-Trudovih Lagyeryey i koloniy. Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies. The word had been feared for generations now.

  At one time, there had been at least five hundred separate labor, penal, or “reeducation” camps scattered throughout the Communist nation, a vast majority of them concentrated in the northern tiers, each of them containing tens of thousands of the dying and condemned. Indeed, some of the major industrial cities in northern Russia had been built entirely upon the back of prison labor. More than fourteen million people passed through the gulag in a span of only twenty years. During this same time, another six to seven million were exiled to various “unofficial” Siberian labor and reeducation camps, where they were essentially worked to death.

  By the early 1960s, the Soviet government had officially disbanded the gulag camps. Or at least they had on paper. In reality, the prisons continued operating in newly renamed “colonies.” For a man who had, as a Communist party member, committed his life to furthering the Stalinist cause, it was devastating for the investigator to realize how many of his countrymen the party had killed. Millions of Soviet citizens! Many guilty of nothing more than being orphans or not having a place to live. There were stories of starving children sent away for stealing bread. Political prisoners who let slip the wrong word or phrase. Women who had done nothing more than ask the local party leader when they could expect to get some firewood. Millions of innocent victims, condemned by a government that craved tyranny and power.

  The official records indicated that only a million prisoners had died in reeducation and labor camps. The Russian scoffed. It was a joke. He knew that the common practice was to release prisoners a few days before they died, removing them from any official government list of the dead.

  And though some of the gulag inmates were not political prisoners, he knew that many of them were. He glanced to a green binder on the floor. Demetrius Kosack. Age twenty-two. Married. Father of two. The young man’s father had been a colonel in the Russian army during World War II. He was a loyal party member himself. It didn’t matter. One morning he had whispered an antigovernment joke. He had been reported before noon, arrested before his shift was over, and on his way to a Siberian camp before the sun had set. No trial. No defense. No appeal. Sentenced to fourteen years of hard labor. Dead of tuberculosis halfway through his sentence. Buried in the Siberian snow.

  And there were vaults the size of football fields with green folders just like this one.

  He took another long breath and closed his eyes. Depressing as it was, he felt a shiver of relief.

  Things were changing. He could feel it.

  And he was right.

  The Age of Freedom was finally near.

  • • •

  From the most ancient civilizations to modern times, across every continent and culture, from generations and kingdoms lost in the fog of history to the well-documented atrocities of modern day, stories such as those just related represent how most members of the human family have lived. As foreign as such accounts may be to our experience, and as dispiriting as they may seem, they might be told more than a hundred billion times, for they represent the vast majority of the human experience.

  Indeed, these examples illustrate the common hopelessness that was pervasive in the day-to-day lives of most of the men and women who have been born into this world. Such were the only expectations they ever had for their lives. Scraping out a meager existence, many times on the brink of starvation or death. Fear. Nowhere to turn for justice. No police or local magistrates to protect them. Government the source of oppression rather than protection. No voice ever raised to protect the young, the weak, the women, those who could not protect themselves. Control the only thing that mattered. Power. Strength. The sword.

  Liberty Is Not the Norm

  For those of us living in the United States, a nation that has experienced more than two hundred years of unparalleled liberty, it is easy to take for granted the extraordinary gifts we have been given. And for most of us, it is much easier to become lackadaisical about these gifts than it is for the inhabitants of other nations who are forced to struggle every day in their battle for liberty. In fact, unless we are serious students of world history, or have traveled extensively, we might not recognize how unique the blessings of liberty actually are.

  Throughout the age of human experience, most people have never been afforded the simple right of the freedom to choose. The great exception to this truth is the modern age—by which we mean
the years since the United States of America has been in existence—and even in this modern age, with the exception of the United States, freedom and democracy are not universal and have not been of a long duration. These gifts are limited to those countries that we refer to as the West, meaning Europe and the United States of America, and those few nations scattered around the world that have emulated the Western form of political philosophy and government.

  In the Beginning

  As illustrated in the personal narratives above, individual freedom is an idea that has been barely recognized for most of human history. True, there are a few examples of rare cultures or extraordinary leaders who at least tried to understand the value of freedom and justice, but they are few and far between. One example would be the ancient Babylonian king Hammurabi, who in 1790 BC put forward a code that would assure “that the strong should not harm the weak.”1 In the Jewish law, as found in Leviticus 19:15, Jehovah tells the people, “Thou shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor honor the person of the mighty: but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbor.”

  Scattered examples of justice and acknowledgment of individual dignity aside, the fact remains that the majority of human beings have never even thought about the possibility of living under the protection of a government that would honor their individual rights or grant them freedom.

  Which then raises a certain question: Are oppression, tyranny, and fear the natural order of things?

  Looking over the span of human history, the answer would seem to be undeniably yes.

  Nineteenth-century French philosopher Frederic Bastiat argued in his short but powerful work The Law that “it is injustice, instead of justice, that has an existence of its own. Justice is achieved only when injustice is absent.”2

  In Bastiat’s view, injustice is the norm, the instinctive way of man. He claims that, in order for justice to prevail, injustice must first be eliminated, a difficult and extraordinarily rare thing to do.

  Other learned opinions—as well as historical evidence that we will discuss later—seem to agree with this view. For example, projecting what a future historian might say about our day, one distinguished American, Dr. Walter Williams, made the following observation:

  Mankind’s history is one of systematic, arbitrary abuse and control by the elite. . . . It is a tragic history where hundreds of millions of unfortunate souls have been slaughtered, mostly by their own government. A historian writing 200 or 300 years from now might view the liberties that existed for a tiny portion of mankind’s population, mostly in the western world, for only a tiny portion of its history, the last century or two, as a historical curiosity that defies explanation. That historian might also observe that the curiosity was only a temporary phenomenon and mankind reverted back to the traditional state of affairs—arbitrary control and abuse.3

  Williams’s point is hard to dismiss. This modern day we live in, with the unimaginable blessings of freedom and liberty, is the aberration, not the norm. Further, simply because freedom exists today does not guarantee this gift will survive for future generations.

  The Few We Are

  How unusual is it, really, in the history of all known human experience, to enjoy the blessings of living free? What are the odds of being born in such a day?

  The best estimates of how many people have ever lived on the earth range from 100 to 110 billion. Freedom House estimates that approximately three billion of the earth’s current population live in “free” nations.4 Most of this is due to the fact that the number of free nations has almost doubled in the last generation.5

  It has also been estimated that 554 million people have lived under freedom in the United States since 1780.6 We can also postulate that perhaps another billion, or fewer, have lived under freedom in the other European nations that evolved, in fits and spurts, into free nations during the twentieth century.

  Even being generous in our estimates, it seems clear that fewer than five billion of the earth’s total inhabitants have ever lived under conditions that we could consider free. This would be something like 4.5 percent of people who have ever lived. And these are generous estimates. The actual numbers might be much lower than this.

  Which is, as Dr. Williams said, truly a “tiny portion of mankind’s population.”

  Even more surprising is the fact that freedom is a relatively unstable marvel. For example, in a recent work, Yale professor Robert Dahl could identify only twenty-two nations with a democracy older than fifty years. Think about that! Even now, when most of us consider free will and self-government as the norm, there are only twenty-two nations that have lived under a democratic form of government for even a single lifetime. (Most of the nations Dahl identified were European or English speaking, with Costa Rica being the only Latin American country, Israel the only nation in the Middle East, and Japan the only nation in Asia.)7

  What Do We Mean By “Democracy” and “Freedom”?

  Any analysis of the rarity of freedom and democracy8 is complicated by the fact that the very definition of freedom is subjective and that the term democracy has many meanings.9

  So how do we define those salient terms?

  Perhaps we ought to start at the beginning, that is, with what our Founding Fathers considered the fundamental truths that justified their rebellion, those principles of government that, if denied, gave just cause to sever ties to their mother land and go to war:

  We hold these truths to be self–evident, That all men are created equal, That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,

  That among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men,

  Deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.10

  Considering these inspired words, our own understanding of history and political philosophy, as well as the practical need to encompass a number of political values into shorthand terms, we are led to suggest definitions of freedom and democracy that include the following five characteristics:

  1. Self-government. The right of the people to govern themselves, and the right of the people to form the type of government that they choose. This includes an acknowledgment that those who govern do so only by the consent of the governed. It means the right of the people to choose those who will make and enforce the laws and the right of the people to refuse to be governed by those that are not so chosen.

  2. Fundamental rights. All people are born with certain fundamental rights. It is understood that those rights include the right to life and personal liberty, and the right to keep one’s property and the fruits of one’s labor. These personal liberties would include freedom of speech, religion, thought, the press, and movement, among others. We believe it is understood that these rights, or liberties, are inherent and unalienable and do not come from a constitution or laws or any government, but from God.

  3. All are created equal. A belief in the equality of all at birth, including the belief that a major role of government is to assure that everyone, regardless of status, is treated equally by the law and that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed or fail.

  4. Commitment to justice. By justice we mean that condition wherein each man or woman is rendered that to which they are entitled; that is, they should receive their earned rewards or punishments regardless of how rich or powerful they are or what class or race they may belong to.

  5. Commitment to the rule of law. All people are subject to the same law—be they president or common citizen. This means that no man or woman can ignore the rightful laws of the land without being punished.

  These five principles, values, or characteristics are what we mean when we make reference to democracy and freedom throughout this book.

  The Importance of Economic Freedom

  In addition to the freedoms listed above, our Founding Fat
hers clearly understood the importance of, and sought for the protection of, our economic freedom. One of the foundational freedoms mentioned in the Declaration of Independence is the right to the “pursuit of happiness,” which would include the right to receive the reward of our work or actions. Our Constitution also guarantees the right of private property.

  Recently it has become fashionable to demonize successful individuals, as if their accomplishments were attributable to nothing more than being the lucky winners on an uneven playing field. In fact, some national leaders have become so critical of wealth and success that they actually seek to implement policies that would lead to overall decreases in wealth and technology.11 But there is no doubt that economic freedom has led to the greater common good, including less poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, and oppression of the defenseless.

  Recent studies also show that many leading measures of environmental quality are closely tied to improvements in national incomes.12 For example, twenty-three of the top twenty-five most polluted sites in the world are found in current or former Communist nations—governments that, by definition, do not honor economic freedom.13

  Recent studies by the National Bureau of Economic Research also indicate a strong correlation between economic freedom and the significant decrease in world poverty that has taken place over the past forty years.14 Other well-respected studies show a strong link between a country’s wealth and other significant measures of well-being, including innovation and expanded economic opportunities.15

  Considering the benefits that are attributable to economic freedom, is it any wonder that it is one of the first of our freedoms that our enemies seek to destroy?

  Why Did Freedom Happen?

  Why has the West produced such a rare, and historically counterintuitive, commitment to democracy and freedom? What extraordinary events in history worked in concert to create circumstances in which we—a fraction of the people who have lived on the earth—could enjoy self-government, belief in the equality of man, the rule of law, pursuit of justice, and a focus on personal liberty? How are we so lucky? To what do we owe this great blessing?