WHAT IS THE REAL MEANING OF FREEDOM?

The real meaning of freedom sometimes eludes us especially when dealing with international relations. This came to the fore in the aftermath of Obama’s handling of events associated with the so-called “Arab Spring”. The right wing elements went ballistic over Egypt and Libya. These countries had messy revolutions to free themselves of tyranny. To understand what the right-wingers saw as being wrong with how Obama handled the situation we have to step back a little in history, back to Iran. When they had their revolution to free themselves of tyranny, Great Britain and the Untied States installed the Shah of Iran. With the help of the government of the United States upheld by several U.S. Presidents, he formed and maintained a messy puppet government. In other words, we replace freedom with the tyranny of oil company control. We dressed up these egregious acts with nice words like hegemony or expression such as “they joined the free world”. Because of the hate we generated with this kind of behavior, we still suffer the after effects from their loss of respect for us as a nation. There is a better way!

Finely, we have a President that understands what freedom really means. Egypt and Libya are democracies and are free to form association and alliances with any country in the world they want too. If our businesses treat them fairly, help them to protect themselves from both internal and external aggression, and respect them as sovereign nations they in turn will respect us. We do not need a huge military so that they grovel in fear of doing us wrong. A world of democracies built on mutual respect and not fear is the kind of world I want to live in. A talking head made the statement that if the recent presidential elections were up to the world Obama would win by a landslide; this simple truth is the reason why that is so.