What Freedom Means To Me

George W. Bush and his administration, like the administrations before him, are very fond of using the term "freedom." I had thought that the word was pretty much meaningless, in that there was no way to define it which would fit the broad way in which it is used. It seemed to be simply what we have and what our enemies don't.

The traditional definition is primarily associated with freedom of expression, religion, self determination, etc. These freedoms are certainly not consistent with the use of the word by US administrations.

It seems to me that the only definition which would be consistent with history is this: freedom is the unabated ability for the strong to exploit the weak to furthur their own prosperity. This appears initially to be contradictory with what I think freedom should mean, until I realize that those who have defined it this way see only the limited segment of society to which they belong. When George W. Bush refers to America as a "free" society, he is refering only to his own freedom as a member of the wealthy elite to retain his power through exploitation.

Examples of this are abundant throughout the history of the United States, especially in Latin America. In Chile in the 1970s, the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende enacted land reform by seizing large plantations and turning over ownership to the workers. This interfered with the freedom of the plantation owners to retain their extravagant lifestyle at the great expense of the vast majority of the population, and because the minority plantation owners are the only people that matter, the US brought freedom to Chile by helping to orchestrate a military coup and installing the brutal dictator Augosto Pinochet. The same was attempted in Cuba. I do not defend the majority of Castro's later acts, but his first act after coming to power was to retake the Cuban sugar industry from American investors and return the sugar plantations to the Cuban people. By doing this, he sacrificed the freedom of a small minority for the sake of the expanding the freedom the majority, and thus the US was required to step in and attempt to bring freedom to the poor Cubans, when in reality the only freedoms being protected were those of wealthy American investors.

Socialism itself, fundamentally, is therefore contradictory to freedom. Under the principal of socialism, everyone works for the social good. No individual is free to lower someone else's standard of living in order to increase his own, and therefore, no socialist society can ever fit the American definition of freedom.