Thoughts on Liberty in the "free world"

Humanity once having gained a victory for the rights of man, it is assumed that the crowd has persisted in the love of freedom and has sought only to secure its blessings to the future. Such views appear to be taken for granted... This is a "free country" as a result of the heroic feats of our ancestors. Liberty has been achived once and for all. (?) The cause of freedom is that of the masses against real or possible alien oppressors. Liberty and popular government are much the saem, adn the idea of liberty has become so associated with patriotic emotion that is has become more a matter of pride in history, -- or in popular fictions about history -- than a clear, rational concept. /Photo: Earlier David Irving is in "Canadian" shackles, ... now in an Austrian jail serving a 3 year sentence for being "foolish" about History./

We persuade ourselves, for instance, that we entered the late war in order to make the world safe for democracy and were thus true to our historic role as a nation, fighting for liberty.

The ignorant man always belives he is right, the educated man seldom! Hence intolerance is the device by which the ignorant, the unadjusted, the mentally immature, strive to lord it over the communisty - always of course in the interest, not of their own power, but of "Eternal Right". The less a man has in him, the more intemperate he becomes in the vindication of the right.

Having made up its mind, it refuses to listen to the expression of dissenting opinion. Obejctors are thrown aout, howled down, thrust aside, trampled upon. The freedom of speech is the real test of a people's love of liberty. "Our way, or no way!" -- they shout. Censorships exist apparently to stamp out error and vice. Their real purpose, however, is to stamp out the Truth. Assuming that "the foolish" could be protected by the denial of free speech, truth could not possibly be the gainer thereby, for the pursuit of truth necessarily takes pleace in the open!

The censor is almost invariably a second-rate person whose chief qualification for office is absolute ignorance of the thing he censors. Intolerance and insincerity: was there ever a censorship established except to perpetuate a falsehood? /tj/