Today, America remembers those who fought and died defending our freedom. It is also an appropriate occasion to remember the ideals they fought to preserve.
Consider the sacrifice of American soldiers who died liberating France during World War II. Under German occupation, the French were forbidden to have hidden weapons; they could not peaceably assemble or parade in the streets without a government permit. They had to carry identification with them at all times and produce it upon demand.
Automobile traffic was scarce in occupied Paris, as the Germans co-opted city streets for their own use. A policy of plunder was in effect: Under the guise of security searches, German soldiers could confiscate whatever they wanted.
When the Germans took over public buildings, they put sentries at the entrances and set up bollards to keep French citizens at bay. Henri Frenay wrote that he felt un sentiment de viol — a feeling of rape — as he walked the streets of Paris.
Many citizens feel a similar alienation walking the streets of Washington, D.C., where public buildings now are blocked by police forces, many city streets are off-limits to citizens, and merely entering a museum requires submitting to a search without probable cause.
How can we claim to revere the sacrifices made to liberate France when we tolerate our own government acting, in some ways, as an occupying force?
Or recall the many Americans who fought valiantly to free Eastern Europe from totalitarian regimes: i.e., governments that required citizens to pass through checkpoints; that, in the name of “domestic security,” kept secret files on citizens — citizens who were never free from government surveillance. What does it say for the sacrifice of those warriors that Americans now live under similar conditions?
Under communism, public property did not belong to every citizen; it was considered to be the property of the state managed by the bureaucracy. Find a public building in Washington, D.C., that does not now fit that description.
Georgi Arbatov, a member of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and adviser to six Soviet leaders from Nikita Khrushchev to Boris Yeltsin, wrote in his memoir that restricting freedom of information was fairly simple: “Each time a debate became unpleasant for the leadership, new areas were ‘classified.’ ” Sound familiar?
Arbatov also described how Soviets kept tight reins on citizens by creating a huge political-police apparatus that used extrajudicial means to enforce a leader’s will.
By expanding its role beyond presidential protection and exempting it from traditional restraints, Congress is allowing the Secret Service to metastasize into such an instrument of unchecked power.
Did Americans fight the Cold War for nothing? Are we really willing to accept for ourselves what we once considered intolerable infringements on freedom?
Today’s soldiers are fighting in Iraq, we are told, to defend our way of life. But Americans forfeited our way of life after Sept. 11, 2001. Residents of the nation’s capital trudge through the city like badge-wearing drones, tracked by surveillance cameras.
They may no longer freely enter their own public buildings; at the White House, they may be shooed off the sidewalk. Tourists line up outside the Archives building to undergo an unreasonable search before viewing the document that protects them from … unreasonable search.
Unfortunately, the courts allow these because the searches are voluntary. The logic is: Want to assert your Fourth Amendment rights? You are free to stay at home.
But that shapes American policy around the concession to fear, rather than the defense of freedom. Craven officials and zealous police officers insist they are “protecting the symbols of democracy.” But the symbol of democracy is an open society, not an ominous police presence.
Americans did not fight and die at Verdun and Normandy, Pork Chop Hill, Vietnam, Kuwait or Baghdad so that this generation could succumb to fear and lead a hasty retreat from liberty.
To truly memorialize the sacrifices of those who fought and died on our behalf, we must memorialize the values they defended. Unless we, too, defend the freedom they protected, their great sacrifices will be in vain.
Examiner columnist Melanie Scarborough lives in Alexandria.
