Preserving Our Freedoms

For John, BLUF:  We are missing the erosion of our society, but an immigrant points it out to us..  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali:  We Have Been Subverted

Here is the sub-headline:

What is at stake in our ability to see the threat plainly?  Nothing less than the preservation of our way of life.

From The Free Press, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, 4 June 2024.

Here is the lede plus seven:

If you wonder why I—a woman of color, an African, a former Muslim, a former asylum seeker, and an immigrant—look at the antics of today’s anti-Israel, anti-American protesters with such fear and trembling, allow me to explain.

I was born in Somalia in 1969. The country had achieved independence nine years before. But less than a month before I was born—on October 21, 1969—a junior member of the brand-new Somali armed forces seized power with the help of the Soviet Union. The first two decades of my life were shaped by the upheaval that followed that coup.

The Somalia that gained its independence was a young, optimistic society full of national pride. We had such hope for growth, political stability, prosperity, and peace. But, in a story sadly familiar to many of my fellow Africans, those hopes were dashed.

What followed was a nightmare.

For me it is all captured in the earliest memories of my youth: statues of Mohamed Siad Barre, our dictator, sprung up across Mogadishu, flanked by a trio of dark seraphim: Marx, Lenin, and Engels. This particular communist experiment plunged Somalia into bloodshed, mass starvation, and a 20-year period of suffocating tyranny. I recall my grandmother and mother smuggling food into our house. I also remember the whispering: we felt the state was omnipresent. It could hear everything.

My father was thrown into prison. His friends—those other pioneers in pursuit of a democracy modeled on America—were either jailed like him or, in many cases, executed.

By the time I was eight, my family knew we needed to escape. We left in 1977. By 1990, the country had descended into a civil war from which it has never fully recovered.

I never stopped longing for the kind of freedom my father had taught me about. And at the age of 22, I fled to the Netherlands seeking it. There—and later, in America—I discovered what we’ve come to call “Western” values.

This is a companion piece to the one noted in an earlier blog post, "Niall Ferguson: We’re All Soviets Now".♠

We are where we are, in terms of political organization, because of those who went before us, stretching back thousands of years.  We have the Magna Carta, from 1215 AD.  It was kind of narrow when signed, but it grew in meaning until we had the Common Law protecting the rights of Citizens.  Before all thar we had the Decalogue, the Ten Commandmentd, brought down from the mountain by Charlton Heston.  It was a set of rules about how Citizens should relate to each other.

But, today these underpinnings are being dismissed or buried.  An example of this ahistoric approach is the recent outrange regarding a Louisiana Law signed Wednesdaay, by Governor Jeff Landry requiring the posting of the Ten Commandments in every classroom.  But, not everyone is happy to see the Ten Commandments put forward as a guide for life, as this Slate article shows.

Our system of government works because there are rules and we follow them.  Author Ali is saying that is slipping away.  On the one hand, we have moral relativism.  However, it does not provide a solid basis for agreeing on the future, as discussed here.  On the other hand we have the Marxist Woke culture of group pitted against group, destroying unity.  Remember, our motto, as a nation, from 1782, was E pluribus unum ("Out of many, one").  What do we rally around?

We would do well to pay attention to Ms Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  The two authorw are married.