AS Epitomes
Jan Smuts: The Threat to Freedom and Denial of Liberty
Abstract
Decay in Responsibility
There is today a decay of principles which is eating at the very vitals of free government. There is a decay of people’s responsibility and share in government, which seems to strike at the roots of our human advance. A new sort of hero worship is arising, different from that which Carlyle preached, and which saps the foundations of individuality and makes the individual prostrate himself before a national leader as before a god. That way extreme danger lies. The road to Caesarism lies clear. The disappearance of the sturdy, independent minded, freedom loving person, and his replacement by a servile mass mentality, is the greatest human menace.
The issue of freedom, the most fundamental issue of our civilization, is once more squarely raised by what is happening in the world, and cannot be evaded. The danger signals are up in many colours and in many lands. The new tyranny, disguised in attractive colours, is enticing youth everywhere into its service. Freedom must make a great counterstroke to save itself and our civilization. The fight for human freedom is indeed the supreme issue of the future, as it has always been in the past. The guarantees for private rights and civil liberties are going. Minorities are trampled upon, dissident views are not tolerated and are forcibly suppressed. For those who do not choose to fall into line there are concentration camps, the distant secret camp in the wilds or on the islands of the sea.
Intellectual freedom is disappearing with political freedom. Freedom of conscience, of speech, of the press, of thought and teaching, is in extreme danger. One party in the state usurps power and suppresses its opponents and becomes the state. The press is writing to order, and public opinion is manufactured for the support of the autocracy. Freedom of religion is no longer safe, and religious persecution, after being long considered obsolete, once more shows its horrid head. The standard of human freedom has already fallen far below that of the nineteenth century. What we call liberty in its full human meaning—freedom of thought, speech, action, self-expression—there is to-day less than there has been during the last 2000 years.
Tyranny is Infectious
Tyranny is infectious. As Burke said, it is a weed which grows in all soils, and it is its nature to spread. Even in this island home of constitutional freedom I do not know that you are quite immune. Democracy seems to be going out of favour and out of fashion, and unless its methods can be overhauled, its unpopularity may involve the cause of liberty itself.
I am not against new experiments in human government. The extraordinary difficulties and complications of modern government call for revised methods and new experiments. What I am here concerned with is the serious threat to freedom and self government which is involved in the new experiments now being tried out. They are all based on a denial of liberty, not as a temporary expedient, but on principle. The assertion that they aim at the eventual enlargement of liberty is vain, in view of the fundamental negation of liberty on which they are based and the absorption of the individual by the state or the group which is their real objective.
Freedom is the most ineradicable craving of human nature. Without it peace, contentment, and happiness, even manhood itself, are not possible. The declaration of Pericles in his great Funeral Oration holds for all time:
Happiness is Freedom, and Freedom is Courage.
That is the fundamental equation of all politics and all human government, and any system which ignores it is built on sand.
St Andrews, 1934
