Shortly after our revolution, which started in 1789, many adopted what has became, and still is, our republican devise or motto (Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité) and it was thought to be both national and universal. This meant that these principles were considered the ideals which should not only motivate and govern our own constitution but also affect and inspire the way of life of all peoples and nations around the globe.
I stress that these principles have always been seen as perfection and ideals for which we should all strive, and we cannot avoid the admission that their application has been patchy, but this does not take away from their intrinsic potential value to each and every inhabitant of the world. To give an early example of hypocrisy in the use of the words, they were carved across the front of the church in a village in the west of France, in an area where the repression of freedoms was among the most severe and the local people were killed for wishing peaceably to practise their religion. At the same time, this did not immediately lead the revolutionaries to abolish slavery, one of the most obvious breaches of their supposed principles. In our own day, many leading politicians who claim to respect these principles, prefer either to act against them directly or ignore the grossest of breaches by those whose support they desire to have. This leads them to do nothing whatsoever to apply these magnificent values in their policies.
However much they may not have been applied in practice by so many who claimed to support them, these principles deserve our respect and more detailed examination and we should all give them due honour.
Liberté (commonly rendered into English as Liberty or Freedom) requires us to grant such freedom to every individual as allows him or her to act (using what is theologically known as "free will") as he or she wishes provided that such acts do not harm others. This proviso explains why we must restrain those who would harm others and, by extension, other sentient beings. It also means that even though we may have to kill humans to protect ourselves or animals for this same reason or to provide ourselves with food, we should never do this with cruelty. This is one of the reasons why all decent folk oppose the death penalty, whose only motive is a form of crude vengeance, since any offender who has once been subdued should no longer need to be killed. In other words, honouring Liberty requires us to respect life itself.
Egalité (Equality) and Fraternité (Fraternity or Brotherly Love) can be said to sum up what we now call Democracy. I hasten to add that we have to be careful every time that we say Democracy to be sure that we have discarded the original Greek meaning of the concept, which only gave rights to the citizens in their civlisation, and treated every slave as if he or she were a domestic animal rather than one of our fellow human beings.
This attitude towards slaves is one of the worst remnants of aspects of the old régime which we should condemn, and it appears every time that any one group considers any other as being intrinsically inferior. It is encapsulated in the late Adolf Hitler's view of those whom he classified as "Jews" and its mirror image when Goldie Myerson (née Mabovich, who later adopted the pseudonym of Golda Meir) referred to the Palestinians as cockroaches worthy only of being crushed.
If we genuinely adopt the modern meaning of democracy to embrace all human beings, we cannot avoid accepting that every other person is our equal, from the most famous or infamous of the supposedly "great" leaders of nations living in excessive luxury to the poorest and least educated man, woman or child suffering hunger and illness in any poverty stricken part of our earth, and also unable to benefit from a proper education.
These principles also drive us to accept our own failings, and our acknowledgement of these can be useful in making us to do what we can to help all our brothers and sisters. We can both help the excessively affluent and those who misuse any form of power to see the error of their ways and do what small thing that we can to aid the poorest and the least favoured to reach a decent standard of living. The latter task can always be addressed, apart from any alms which we can give, by applying such pressure as we can on the rulers and the wealthy to act to the advantage of the least fortunate.
This is one of the justifications for every political move to oppose those guilty of oppression and persecution, and it started a trend when it ended apartheid in South Africa, even though the turmoil arising from the past continues to give rise to horrors in that country. The even more severe form of apartheid currently applied by the Zionists in the Holy Land deserves the same condemnation on the part of all of us, but many of the most powerful politicians in the world prefer to turn a blind eye to such horrors for reasons usually arising from the basest of political expediency.
We should all do that we can to support Democracy, as defined to incorporate both Equality and Brotherly Love, and we should never give up the fight to convert our political leaders to do the same while at the same time helping the poorest of our brothers and sisters in every way that we can. This is not a class battle, but a battle to abolish the inhuman idea of class when considering any human being, however high or low his or her supposed place may be in the society in which he or she may live.
Any genuine believer in Judaism, Christianity or Islam is, by applying the terms appearing in the Bible and/or the Qur'an, bound to approve all three principles comprising our national devise, and this appproval arises from the precepts of many other religions, but we find ourselves facing powerful false prophets, whose teachings lead to fear and hatred of the "other", however we define that "other" and his or her relationship to ourselves. Such false prophets, who batten on the least well educated, are our universal enemy, and we should denounce them whenever we come across them, whilst always showing our willingness most happily to welcome them back into the human family if only they would repent.
© Copyright 2008 by AxisofLogic.com
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