Impeaching False Gods and Real Tyrants: The Four Freedoms and Their Historic Enemies

“The Four Freedoms were goals articulated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on January 6, 1941. In an address known as the Four Freedoms speech (technically the 1941 State of the Union address), he proposed four fundamental freedoms that people “everywhere in the world” ought to enjoy: Freedom of speech; Freedom of worship; Freedom from want; Freedom from fear.” – Wikipedia

“Historians today (in 1930) generally reject the idea that history repeats itself and may therefore be studied as a warning and a guide…That was not the point of view of the Greek historian of the war between Athens and Sparta, whose book is still a masterpiece among histories. Thucydides would never have written his history if he had thought like that. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge had little attraction for the Athenians…Knowledge was to be desired because it had value for living; it led men away from error to right action…Is democracy right and the rule of the few over the many wrong? To Thucydides the question would have seemed an evasion of the issue. There was no right power. Power, whoever wielded it, was evil, the corrupter of men.” – Edith Hamilton

“I think (biographer Carl Sandburg’s) impression was that Lincoln was a pretty sad man, because he could not do all he wanted to do at one time…He had to compromise to make a few gains. Lincoln was one of those unfortunate people called a ‘politician’ but he was a politician who was practical enough to get a great many things for this country. He was a sad man because he couldn’t get it all at once. And nobody can.” – FDR to ‘youth leaders, white and colored, grouped in the East Room, stonily polite; the President calm and genial despite the sickening reports received from France (June, 1940).’” – James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, 1956

“The slaves’ culture of resistance was articulated in their secular and sacred songs—as well as family histories, verbal games, folktales, aphorisms, proverbs, sermons, riddles, toasts, hexes, and jokes… (the Blues) gave a sense of power, of control. If it did not affect the material well-being of its creators, it certainly did have an impact upon their psychic state and emotional health. It allowed them to assert themselves and their feelings and their values, to communicate continuously with themselves and their peers and their oppressors as well…” – William Barlow, Looking Up at Down: The Emergence of Blues Culture, 1989

“Ever since Eve and Pandora, our culture has positioned curious women as wayward curiosities, investing their desire to know more with dark, forbidden cravings…With women now better represented in the workplace…it is almost impossible to mourn the world we have lost. Women now provide role models (imaginary and real) in abundance, changing the myths we live by, and remaking the human world in ways that promise to make the world more humane.” – Maria Tatar, The Heroine with 1,001 Faces, 2021

“By refuting the Russian…claim that Moscow had inherited ancient Kyivan traditions, (Mykhailo) Hrushevs’kyi provided the basis for a political challenge to the Russian claim to all Ukraine. By treating the common people as part of history, Hrushevs’kyi undermined the traditional distinction between ‘historical’ and ‘unhistorical nations.’” – Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999, 2003

“The aim and result of war…is not peace but victory, and any victory won by violence…justifies the violence that won it and leads to further violence. If we are serious about innovation, must we not conclude that we need something new to replace our perpetual ‘war to end war’?” – Wendell Berry, In the Presence of Fear, 2001

“If Ukraine can become a democracy, so can Russia and that is what truly terrifies the Russian state security system. Putin will be gone someday, but true peace will not be realized as long as the system that supports him remains.” – Crymzyn, Daily Kos, 9/13/22

Vladimir Putin’s failing military invasion of Ukraine, intent upon overthrowing incipient democracy on his borders, 2014-2022, is his version of Steve Bannon’s, Peter Navarro’s and Donald Trump’s failing political invasion (“Green Bay [Packers] Sweep”) of U.S. Constitutional procedures between November 3, 2020 and January 6, 2021, in order to overthrow long standing ideals and practices of American democracy. Both maneuvers were and are motivated by congenital cupidity, self-entitled stupidity, desperate racisms and pathological hatred of women’s agency in this world, plus the itch for control of others, by those who aren’t really that good at controlling themselves.

To carry the metaphor of Americans’ favorite wargame, NFL football, a little further, these haters of democracy and diversity are being successfully opposed by a (Pittsburgh Steelers) “Steel Curtain Defense” of NATO in Europe and around the world. Add to that, paranoid responses to successful “hotbeds of tolerance” embedded in every State, city and town in the United States, and the “chickens,” as Malcolm X once said, “are coming home to roost” — again. In the hiring of Miami Dolphin’s fired black head coach, Brian Flores, to be senior defensive assistant coach, for example, cynical sports writers claimed the move gave the Steelers “the most overqualified linebackers coach in NFL history.” They didn’t point out that the Rooney family, owners of the Steelers, in backing their African American head coach, Mike Tomlin; had created a positive work place culture for competent diversity in the struggle against warlords of racism still lurking in NFL and other sports ownership culture. Similar moves in Tampa Bay and Houston are afoot. Since most Americans take sports more seriously than they do politics or religion, this is a “big deal.”

Every once in a while, though, Americans suspend their fondness for athletic diversions for attention to real crises. Recently, NFL great and Jackson State football coach, Deion Sanders, recently addressed infrastructure problems targeting black residents of Jackson, MS by saying nice things about white Governor, Tate Reeves, a source of the problem as much as the solution, for the sake of the public good, white and black. Add to this “Coach Prime [Time]’s” AFLAC ads, as an equal, with Alabama’s coaching legend, Nick Saban, a white coach, and you have a visual equity that confounds bigots. Dictators like Putin, Trump, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis don’t understand such egalitarian diplomacy between black and white folks when the chips are down in today’s America. For clarity I needed to consult my KGB animal friends.

High Plains Reader: Vladimir Putin seems to have been more of a genius in espionage and subversion of democracy at home and abroad, especially in the United States, than he is as a general. His troops are quite good at waging mass murder, but they aren’t much when it comes to waging war. Didn’t he know how pathetically ill prepared they were to take on the West?

Rasputin: He probably knew the Russians were not up to American military standards, but he underestimated Ukrainians’ ability to fight effectively using those standards. And he really underestimated the ability of American leadership under President Joe Biden in 2022 to respond with the resolve and resources unleashed by President Harry Truman against his beloved Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin in the late 1940s. This time, however, Joe Biden didn’t have to “scare the hell out the American people”, as President Truman did with the specter of communist dictatorship in the 1940s. MAGA Republican dictatorship, home grown, but also aided and abetted by a former KGB chief in the old Soviet Union, with military hardware provided by dark money and perversions of the 2^nd Amendment, is all too real as a clear and present danger.

Lena: Dictators always underestimate and undervalue democracies. It’s only when democracies undervalue their own virtues that they underestimate themselves and get into trouble. Putin’s use of Donald Trump for his devices of dictatorship was pure genius, albeit evil.

HPR: And the Donald was underestimated for the threat that he was until it was almost too late. Fortunately, he and his willing executioners overestimated their abilities as much as Western observers overestimated the capabilities of the Russian Armed Forces. But we are still at war this Fall; by proxy in the military theater of Ukraine; and in 50 different States of the political theater of the United States.

Chicago Dog: The GOP Tea Party of 2010 was the latest installment in the war of aristocracy of the skin and male gender against everyone else that has been going on since Adam ‘dissed Eve. Most Americans today, however, prefer their war “by proxy,” which explains the popularity of American Football, as good a reenactment of war as the sports world can conjure up.

Mr. Swamp Fox: Sports culture inventing virtual animosities of fandom for one city or another to replace real animosities engendered by race, religion and gender. It is “live and let live,” folk genius at its best. Friends sitting together at TV screens and at world-wide arenas, many with the jerseys of opposing teams. And the sports they watch have rules that are enforced, and fiercely debated when they seem to be broken, as in doping and drug scandals, or in the fairness of judging each play by human or technical device.

HPR: But sports good will hasn’t stopped professional haters like Donald Trump from injecting his divisive poison into that part of the body politic, as was the case with Colin Kaepernick. As one of the most insecure people in the world, Trump only feels free when everyone else is ensnared in the chains of his insecurities. Just like Vladimir Putin. How do we fight that?

Madame Inspector Chen: Simple. Use the same resolve in local elections and boards against local blowhard bullies that the Ukrainians have shown against deadly, armed bullies in their counter offensives against the Russians, first around Kiev, and then around Kherson and Kharkiv – with aid from Joe Biden’s America and a reinvigorated European Union. Your hard-won freedoms for voices and votes haven’t been silenced yet. Use them or lose them, It’s not too late.

Brenda Bison: As Professor Timothy Snyder pointed out recently to Lawrence O’Donnell (msnbc), Volodomyr Zelensky and his people are showing us that we must connect freedom and security; not separate them. In addition, captured Russian soldiers are treated by Ukrainian military with greater humanity than these brainwashed Putin puppets showed to Ukrainian civilians upon their murderous invasion. Your MAGA GOP neighbors have been put to sleep by con artists. Wake them up with an electoral thrashing, and then offer them a drink.

HPR: True enough. I hope we do just that. It seems that Zelensky’s Ukrainians are practicing what FDR was preaching in “the only thing to fear is fear itself” and the Four Freedoms: from want and fear, and of speech and worship.

Becky Badger: More than that, Ukrainians are showing Americans that the way to fight election deniers and the MAGA Republicans, and freedom deniers on the Supreme Court is through relentless, but joyful, persistence. The big fear of white male supremacists is that they will be treated as shabbily by women and folks of color, once they are no longer in charge, as they have done over the centuries. This is what drives the one black and five white Federalist Society minions dominating our 3^rd Branch of Government.

Schickelgruber: Just as reactionary judges in Weimar Germany destroyed democratic freedoms and security there well before Hitler attempted to destroy them all over the world, the reactionary Supremes are bent upon rewriting the U.S. Constitution to connect Church and State, and disconnect both freedom and security from the vast majority of Americans.

Torquemada: MAGA Republicans’ contempt for the U.S. Constitution and habeas corpus, combined with Putin’s Stalinist approach to the Ukraine, is helping Americans in 2022 to visualize what it might have been like if the Confederacy had won the military phase of the U.S. Civil War, 1861-1865, in addition to their many Jim Crow racist rearguard victories to this day.

Jim Crow XV: Women know what’s at stake. People of color know what’s at stake. More and more young people know what’s at stake. Pollsters and pundits? Not so much, but it doesn’t matter. Unless MAGA Republicans can figure out a way to cancel Election Day itself before November 8, 2022, they are in for a world of hurt.

Chicago Dog: MAGA types are more likely to be hurt by themselves, than by those they fear.

Prudence Possum: A lot of Washington D.C. Beltway egos are in for a crash landing as well. With the exception of Stuart Stevens, they have failed to acknowledge that the Joe McCarthy wing of the Republican Party was always more ascendant on Wall Street and on their golf courses, than the Dwight Eisenhower wing. “Conservatism” for the GOP was always just a cover for reactionary racism and misogyny.

Agatha Alligator: The biggest ego casualty so far has been U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. One of our fellow swamp creatures found a poetry page ripped out of his secret diary, and stuck to one of the leaked pages of the Dobbs decision abolishing Roe v. Wade last Spring:

Where Has All My “Conservatism” Gone?………………..Headless Horseman (John Roberts)

I thought “Conservative” was quite the word;
To summarize my world, and lofty perch;
But now, I fear I’ve lost control. This lurch
Into the past that’s daft. Unreal. Absurd.

These five Reactionaries on my Right
Are tearing up the Document I love;
And substituting dogma from above
That has no human temper. Only Might.

I never dreamed dark money hid such proof
Of my own folly; That I could not see their game
To set Theocracy upon this land of ours.
These godless gods and goddesses; aloof
From ordinary folks. Done in MY name:
Now hopelessly diminished ‘spite my pow’rs.