WarSclerotic

Reagan’s Startling Prediction Is Closer Than Ever To Becoming True

By Randy DeSoto June 11, 2015 Via Western Journalism

(So true. – LS)

Ronald Reagan once famously observed that “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well-taught lessons about how they, in their lifetime, must do the same.

“If you and I don’t do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.”

Many fear in our day that we face the prospect of freedom being lost simply due to a lack of knowledge in how we gained it. Thousands of years ago, Moses shared the same concern for his fledgling nation and instructed the people to “lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and bind them as a sign on your hand [and your forehead]. You shall teach them to your children, speaking of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up.”

History tells us that the citizens of ancient Israel eventually forget the source of their laws and their history, and suffered civil war and eventual conquest.

In modern times, the United States came into existence because the British King and Parliament forgot that the American colonists were also English citizens, guaranteed all the rights of anyone born in the Mother country. Two years before he penned the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote his influential essay A Summary View of the Rights of British America. In it, he argued that the Crown was failing to recognize their rights as Englishmen, dating back to the the Magna Carta.

The central message conveyed by that document (which would become the central message of the Declaration of Independence) is that even the king is under the law. Among the specific rights secured to all British citizens on the fields of Runnymede in 1215 included no taxation without representation, trial by a jury of one’s peers, and no loss of one’s liberty or property without due process of law (i.e. all the protections against arbitrary rule guaranteed by the law).

Jefferson eloquently addressed King George III in his essay, writing: “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.” The Virginian hoped the king would “quiet the minds of your subjects in British America against any apprehensions of future encroachment” of their rights.

Avi Davis, president of the American Freedom Alliance–an organization dedicated to preserving the Western ideals of liberty–observed: “Is it any wonder that the American revolutionaries in the 1770s, in claiming their rights to reject taxation without representation, regarded themselves as doing so not as Americans at all but as British citizens, whose natural rights, they claimed, had been articulated and codified in the Magna Carta?”

In an interview with Western Journalism, Davis noted the contrast in the development of countries in the former British Empire–including the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand– whose citizens understood their inalienable rights, versus many nations around the world who believed, and in some instances still believe, that the “king is the law.”

He agreed with Reagan that freedom and democracies are “fragile and depend on the goodwill and respect of the citizens.” Davis believes we must keep revisiting the Magna Carta and the other sources of our liberties because they are the foundation of who we are. If we fail to do so, freedom truly is a generation away from extinction.

To that end, the American Freedom Alliance is sponsoring a two-day conference in Reagan’s hometown of Los Angeles, called Magna Carta: The 800 Year Struggle for Human Liberty. The event will take place on June 14-15 (the anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta) and feature noteworthy speakers including European Parliament member Daniel Hannan and former Australian Prime Minister John Winston Howard. There will also be various panel discussions by experts in the field on the influence of the Magna Carta in America’s founding and in democracies around the world.

On the actual anniversary of the signing, Monday, the conference will go live to Runnymede, England, via satellite link up, to join the celebration there.

One of Ronald Reagan’s close Hollywood friends, Jimmy Stewart, played the role of Jefferson Smith in the iconic film Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. In the climactic final scene of the movie, as Smith is conducting a one-man filibuster against government corruption, he said: “Great principles don’t get lost once they come to light. They’re right here. You just have to see them again.”

The 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta offers a great opportunity to see many of those great principles again so they are not lost in our generation–and those generations yet to come.

This entry was posted on June 11, 2015 at 10:23 PM and is filed under Education, Freedom, Ronald Reagan. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.