Unfree Republic

Lew Rockwell ^ | 9/24/01 | Jeff Elkins

[Hank Kerchief]

Well that's true but the fact remains that this is a conservative forum and if a liberal or progressive wants to argue with a conservative, he/she should do so somewhere else.

Exactly where would a liberal or progressive find a conservative to argue with? This seems to be the right place to me, and we should welcome them, so we can logcially demonstrate their errors.

Hank

[BluesDuke]

It's just amazing to me that someone as intelligent as Gates could do something so stupid as to donate to the DNC.

Bill Gates donating to the Democratic National Committee would seem to contain the same sort of ring you might catch from knowing that a battered spouse was contributing to the struggle to get her abuser released from prison. He can do as he pleases, of course, but if the hounds of the State were to come after me for no good reason other than having built a mousetrap so popular that the cats ganged up on me, I would sooner be caught dead sharing a steak with Beelzebub than contributing to the party in power when the hounds were set loose upon me.

As for the controversy and chazerei about the topic in question, I lean as always upon a wiser man than I, Frank Chodorov in this instance, who wrote in 1949 the following which some of you may have seen me cite before but which is always appropriate under such circumstances:

Heterodoxy is a necessary condition of a free society. When two people are in disagreement, both may be wrong, but both cannot be right...Whenever I choose an idea and label it "right," I imply the prerogative of another to reject that idea and label it "wrong." To invalidate his right is to invalidate mine. That is, I must brook error if I would preserve my freedom of thought. When I presume to be in possession of "absolute truth," and maintain that those who disagree with me not only are in error, but are wickedly or sinfully so, I lay myself open to similar judgment; in the end, then, the "absolute truth" becomes a matter of power to constrict thought.

...To be sure, our history is not free of political efforts to put limits on what people may think...In every case, the authorities sought to get at ideas by inflicting punishment on those who held them; in every case, freedom of thought was the issue. It is to the credit of the American genius for freedom that ultimately the right to think as one wishes prevailed, even though too often some were made to suffer for it. Somehow the citadel of thought has held firm, and the right to be wrong has added something to human dignity.

...If men are punished for espousing communism, shall we stop there? (This is extracted from Mr. Chodorov's essay, "How To Curb The Commies". - BD) Once we deny the right to be wrong we put a vise on the human mind and put the temptation to turn the handle into the hands of ruthlessness...The danger, to those who hold freedom as the highest good, is not the ideas...espouse(d) but the power they aspire to. Let them rant their heads off - that is their right, which we cannot afford to infringe - but let us keep from them the political means of depriving everybody else of the same right.

[Ada Coddington]

Mr. Elkins, of course, is right on target. As a long-time poster on FreeRepublic, I'm shocked by the pro-totalitarian sentiments being expressed on this forum. Bush's new Department of Homeland Security should scare the hell out of all of us. If Clinton had proposed the same monstrosity, he'd be catching hell right now.

Good point. I doubt if all these conservatives would be rallying around Clinton with calls of "he's a traitorous son-of-a-bitch but he's OUR son-of-a-bitch" right now. They'd be looking to impeach him again for allowing it to happen. And they would somehow be able to recognize all these recycled and previously rejected measures for what they are: power grabs by the government which wouldn't make us one bit safer from terrorism.