[ovrtaxt]

Now we have people saying that it's peace, not freedom that matters. That might sound good until you realize that by "peace" they simply mean the absence of armed conflict. Tyranny? Fine. Not even the most basic of freedoms? No problem ... as long as there's peace. Today an astounding number of people, principally on the left, believe that peace without freedom is just fine, thank you very much.

Neal crystallizes it right there. Thanks for posting this!

[livius]

I thought that was a good point, too.

I was having a Freeper disagreement with a poster the other day who thought Saddam was just fine because there was "peace" in Iraq. The fact is, there is "peace" in any dictatorship, because any disagreement is met by the knock on the door in the middle of the night. Is this a situation in which most Americans would like to live, essentially just depending on the whim of a dictator, who may one day let you live and the next day decide that you are his enemy and must die?

And even if Americans believe that what happens to people thousands of miles away doesn't concern them, the fact is that dictatorships are never happy within their own borders. It is in the nature of a dictator to want more and more power, more and more control, more and more territory.

So the "peace" of a dictatorship is pretty illusory, and yes, it does represent a threat to us, or will at some point.