The freeness of speech

 

Ever thought that in being afraid to speak truth, out of fear of alienating others, we only serve to alienate ourselves?

Recounts American journalist/author Milton Mayer in his 1955 book, They Thought They Were Free, “Where the community feels and thinks—or at least talks and acts—pretty much one way, to say or do differently means a kind of internal exile that most people find unattractive to undertake, even if it involves no legal penalty.

“One minded one’s own business in Germany, with or without a dictatorship. Germans were no more given to associating with nonconformist persons or organizations than we are.

“As we know Nazism, it was a naked, total tyranny which degraded its adherents and enslaved its opponents and adherents alike; terrorism and terror in daily life, private and public; brute personal and mob injustice at every level of association; a flank attack upon God and a frontal attack upon the worth of the human person and the rights which that worth implies.

” It is actual resistance which worries tyrants, not lack of the few hands required to do the dark work of tyranny. What the Nazis had to gauge was the point at which atrocity would awaken the community to the consciousness of its moral habits.

“In the body politic as in the body personal, nonresistance to the milder indulgences paves the way for nonresistance to the deadlier.”

In one of the first American newspapers, the New-England Courant, founded by Benjamin Franklin’s older brother James Franklin three-hundred years ago this August, there appeared a letter submitted by Benjamin Franklin under the pen name Silence Dogood; having, several times, been denied letters submitted under his own name.

The following are excerpts from the July 9, 1722, letter. Keep in mind the fact that Ben was sixteen years of age at the time of this writing:

“Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech; which is the right of every man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or control the right of another.”

“This sacred privilege is so essential to free governments, that the security of property, and the freedom of speech always go together; and in those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything else his own.”

“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation, must begin by subduing the freeness of speech; a thing terrible to public traitors.”

“The administration of government, is nothing else but the attendance of the trustees of the people upon the interest and affairs of the people: And as it is the part and business of the people, for whose sake alone all public matters are, or ought to be transacted, to see whether they be well or ill transacted; so it is the interest, and ought to be the ambition, of all honest magistrates, to have their deeds openly examined, and publicly scanned: Only the wicked governors of men dread what is said of them. Guilt only dreads liberty of speech, which drags it out of its lurking holes, and exposes its deformity and horror to daylight.”

“Rome, with the loss of its liberty, lost also its freedom of speech; then men’s words began to be feared and watched; and then first began the poisonous race of informers.”

“The best Princes have ever encouraged and promoted freedom of speech; they know that upright measures would defend themselves, and that all upright men would defend them …a blessed time when you might think what you would, and speak what you thought.”

“Misrepresentation of public measures is easily overthrown, by representing public measures truly; when they are honest, they ought to be publicly known, that they may be publicly commended; but if they are knavish or pernicious, they ought to be publicly exposed, in order to be publicly detested.”

Some fifteen years later, November 1737, as the 31-year-old publisher of The Pennsylvania Gazette, Franklin wrote: “Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins. Republics… derive their strength and vigor from a popular examination into the action of the magistrates.”

Another 39 years later at the age of seventy, August 14, 1776, Franklin would propose for the motto of the Great Seal of the United States, “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”