On December 27, 1657, a group of English citizens in Flushing, New York, who were not themselves Quakers, signed a petition protesting the persecution of Quakers. This “Flushing Remonstrance” is an eloquent statement of the principle of religious liberty, and is widely regarded as a forerunner to the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.
The petition was delivered to Director-General of New Netherlands, Peter Stuyvesant.
It is the Day After Christmas — Boxing Day, in Britain! — and did you open this weekend’s podcast? If not, here is your chance!
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There can be no such thing as liberty where there is not rational reflection and choice.
William Graham Sumner, “Is Liberty a Lost Blessing?” Earth Hunger and Other Essays (1913).
Henry Lee III’s eulogy to George Washington in Congress declared the former general and president to be “first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” Washington had died on December 14th, 1799, and Lee’s eulogy took place twelve days later.
Oh, and Merry Christmas!
The answer is yes.
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Free government works well in proportion as government is superfluous.
George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States (1920).
On Christmas Day in 1776, George Washington and the Continental Army crossed the Delaware River at night to attack, the next day, the Hessian forces serving Great Britain at Trenton, New Jersey.
United States President Andrew Johnson granted an unconditional pardon to all Confederate veterans on Christmas Day in 1868.
A series of unofficial truces occurred across the Western Front to celebrate Christmas in 1914. The image, at top, illustrates the event: “British and German Soldiers Arm-in-Arm Exchanging Headgear: A Christmas Truce between Opposing Trenches” with a sub caption explaining “Saxons and Anglo-Saxons fraternising on the field of battle at the season of peace and goodwill: Officers and men from the German and British trenches meet and greet one another — A German officer photographing a group of foes and friends.” Originally published in The Illustrated London News, January 9, 1915.
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On December 24, 1973, the District of Columbia Home Rule Act was passed, allowing residents of Washington, D.C., to elect their own local government.
“Why would I be monitored?” Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai queried a reporter last Sunday. “I’ve always been very free.”
Yet governments the world over do certainly spy on citizens, and nowhere more virulently than in China, or with less accountability.
As for being “free,” or “very free,” that’s the real issue, the very reason those who love tennis along with all who love freedom — and life itself — have been so worried about Peng.
She’s not free. Not even close. Nor are 1.4 billion others living under Chinazi rule.
It’s a big problem.
To recap the story from last month: On November 2, Peng posted a statement on her official Weibo page, her country’s state-monitored-and-censored equivalent of Facebook* (which is banned there). According to The Washington Post, she “claimed that former vice minister Zhang Gaoli had pressured her into having sex with him.”
That’s a scandal — and possibly a crime.
Followed by another crime: Her post was removed. She was silenced. And then Grand Slam doubles tennis champion Peng Shuai was summarily erased from the Chinese Internet.
Gone. Disappeared. Nary a trace.
As weeks passed with neither sight nor sound of Peng, the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) started to raise the alarm, threatening to withdraw from their quite lucrative activities in China if her safety could not be guaranteed.
That’s when Chinese media clumsily hyped an email wherein Peng supposedly said she was peachy-keen. Then the International Olympic Committee, on the CCP’s payroll, held a staged video call with her without bothering to even inquire about her allegations. Followed by a second silly call.
Now the update: last weekend, Peng appeared in a supposedly impromptu interview, telling a pro-Beijing newspaper in Singapore, “I have never said or written that anyone has sexually assaulted me.”
But more than her original allegation, which remains unproven and uninvestigated, it is the totalitarian treatment of this one professional tennis player post-allegation that has caught the world’s attention. Perhaps Peng’s plight is easier to get one’s head around than two million Uighurs in concentration camps or China’s organ harvesting exploits.
None of it will apparently lead to an Olympic boycott by the U.S.
Still, the WTA, to its enormous honor, has stuck to its guns, forfeiting millions in revenue by canceling all events in China and making clear that “these appearances [by Peng] do not alleviate or address the WTA’s significant concerns about her well-being and ability to communicate without censorship or coercion.”
Because Peng Shuai is not very free. Or safe.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Of course, Facebook is a U.S. Government-encouraged corporate censor. That’s terrible, as regularly noted on these pages, but not nearly as suffocating and brutal as the CCP’s system.
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