Soap Box

Recent events on college campuses and political rallies have brought about questions concerning freedom of speech. What does our constitution really mean when it says we have the freedom to verbally express ourselves in whatever way we see fit, without fear of retribution from people or organizations that disagree with us?

It seems that some people interpret it to include intimidation, shouting down dissenting opinions or disrupting gatherings where differing ideas are being espoused. To literally go up on a platform and take the microphone away from a person making a speech and have to be forcefully removed.

That has nothing to do with freedom of speech and everything to do with fascism, violating another person's right to express their own opinion just because you disagree. The other person's right to say what they want is protected by the same law that protects yours and you are violating his constitutional rights when you deny him the opportunity to express it.

The early communist party had a whole set of protocols for taking over a meeting. They placed operatives around the room in strategic points to make it appear that most of the crowd was in agreement with them. They turned violent when they felt it suited their purposes and were masters at intimidation.

The people who stopped the rally in Chicago the other night didn't just violate the constitutional rights of a political candidate; they denied the constitutional rights of the people who were there to hear him speak.

Adolph Hitler started the Nazi Party on a shoestring and the kind of hate that is hatched in the halls of hell itself.

Germany was in a financial quandary, totally run away inflation, fiscal upheaval and civil unrest, creating a climate for someone who claimed to have the answers and a scapegoat to blame Germany's woes on, to come forth and lead.

Many of the Jews in Germany - due to their own hard work and business acumen - had become affluent and Hitler blamed Germany's problems on them.

Hitler blamed the Jews, but their side could not even be heard because they were physically prevented from doing so, sought out and beaten and finally rounded up, loaded in boxcars and taken to death camps.

Hitler surrounded himself with toughs and thugs called Brownshirts who disrupted any public gathering that went against Hitler, intimidating the opposition to the point that it just disappeared.
Only one point of view was allowed in Germany, the point of view of Adolph Hitler and his Nazi party, and soon even a breath of criticism against either could well result in a midnight knock and a one-way trip to oblivion.

The people in North Korea are probably the most oppressed in the world, a human being's life there is worth nothing to the "Dear Leader" and there are work camps where the inmates are literally starved and worked to death.

And why? Because a long time ago, somebody decided that their ideas didn't count and they were suppressed and intimidated and forced to fall in line.

The organized disruption of public gatherings has nothing to do with freedom of speech; it has nothing to do with fairness or liberty. It's only a handful of radicals who know their ideas will not be willingly accepted by society and are determined to shove them down America's throats by disruption, intimidation and violence.

Fascism is dangerous school of thought, and the more it's tolerated, the more it's encouraged and financed by opposing political organizations, the wider spread it will become.

And one has to look no farther than what happened to George Wallace and Ronald Reagan and others to understand that individuals cannot be allowed to approach a political candidate and that those who try should be handled in whatever way it takes to totally subdue them, up to and including bodily harm if a weapon is involved.

There is a place for dissent, there is a time for protesting and many positive things have been accomplished by civil disobedience, with the accent on civil.

But there is no place in a civilized, law-abiding society for those who only want to suppress, intimidate and disrupt.

A real leader would condemn it in the strongest terms, a real leader would.

What do you think?

Pray for our troops and the peace of Jerusalem

God Bless America

Charlie Daniels