It’s interesting that much of the original concern about nations in the Middle East living under the rule of dictators seems to center around the way they treat those who object to their autocratic rule. Apparently we only become apprehensive when people take up their inalienable rights of self-determination and begin to express objection in public forums.

Of course what can we expect from third world nations and two-bit chief executives get their pet legislatures pass laws against such protest, and then go on to use the full force of government and a constrained system of justice against those who speak up against them. You know … like the United States.

The first bit of history that might draw your attention in this direction are the Alien & Sedition Acts, four laws passed by Congress in 1798 to allow the government and president John Adams to deal with criticism that they were facing over an undeclared war with France.

The Naturalization Act may not have drawn much fire, as it only lengthened the time of residence from 5 to 14 years for those attempting to become citizens. The Alien Act subsequently went much further however, allowing the president to deport any non-citizen considered “dangerous to peace and safety”. The Alien Enemies Act went on to allow the president to arrest and deport non-citizens whose home countries were at war with the United States for any reason or none at all. The final blow came with The Sedition Act, which basically made it a crime to criticize the government either verbally or in writing.

Have I got your attention yet?

Let’s skip forward now some sixty years to that model of presidents, who held the nation together in a time of crisis and ended slavery in this country after the war that was supposedly fought over it was over. Of course he did so by suspending the right of free speech and freedom of the press by shutting down newspapers that printed anything that he didn’t like, while arresting the publishers who spoke out against these abuses of Constitutional authority. He then held them and others in jail without benefit of the legal right of habeus corpus, which he suspended on his own authority. He showed mercy to a former Ohio Democratic legislator who criticized him however, by merely deporting him to the Confederacy.

Of course it might be pointed out by those who take an interest in history, that the entire Civil War was fought by the president’s insistence that States which had entered voluntarily into a compact (The Constitution) to form a union (better known as the united States) had no right to voluntarily withdraw from that union when they felt that it was no longer in the best interests of their State and their citizens. So I guess we can conclude that Lincoln saved the union formed by the Constitution by throwing its guarantees of personal freedom and the limits of government out the window in its defense.

Of course objecting to protests are not our only offenses. Let’s jump forward again to the 20th Century and we have Teddy Roosevelt arbitrarily taking land from another sovereign nation on another continent and creating the country of Panama (remember Kuwait?), because Columbia wouldn’t let him build a canal on their land under US control.

Not to be outdone in executive abuse however, his fifth cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt put 110,000 people in prison camps, simply because they or their ancestors had been born in Japan. And while many point to Pearl Harbor in an attempted excuse for this trashing of personal freedom, logic and reason (and shame) have not deserted enough of them to feel embarrassment when it’s pointed out to them that no such camps were built to house those of German or Italian extraction that we also fought against.

Perhaps before we begin to point out the flaws in other leaders and other nations, we might want to take an objective look at our own history. While we may consider ourselves the true defenders of freedom and liberty in the world, ‘The American Way’ contains its share of shameful events and deplorable behavior. Like the busybody neighbor, we might better tend to our own house that attempt to intervene in the concerns of others. Perhaps as the New Testament points out, we should be less concerned with the speck in our neighbor’s eye than the beam in our own.

Tim Higgins blogs at Just Blowing Smoke

Tags: Just Blowing Smoke, Opinion, Tim Higgins

This entry was posted on Friday, April 1st, 2011 at 11:08 am and is filed under Just Blowing Smoke, Opinion.
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