Over the last few months and probably at an ever increasing rate over the last few years, I have asked myself why it is, that nothing gets me riled up as much as even the slightest hint at loss of freedom, whether this be in my personal life or in regards to our society as a whole. Is it some kind of selfish instinct to have everything my way? Is it just selfish individualism that has no consideration for others? Is it just an immature rebel response that makes me want to flip the bird at government? I can answer with honesty that these are not the reasons. Let me explain myself:
I am not a libertine, I am a libertarian!
I am a Christian. For as long as I can think back in my 48 years on this earth, I remember admonishments by my parents and grandparents (I had a very close knit family) to be considerate of others. As a small child I would have a little paper box to collect all my coins to donate to charitable causes. I was told that if I saw an elderly person standing up in the bus that I was to get up from my seat and offer it to them. I was reminded to help elderly ladies across the road, to behave myself at school, to be punctual so as not to inconvenience others and a million other things that parents tell their kids to turn the little beasts into civilized members of society. I’m sure I was no saint and surely committed all manner of naughty acts as a child but I was all in all what you call a goody-two -hoes. I was a pretty good kid, never misbehaved at school, didn’t act up as a teenager, didn’t do drugs, didn’t really drink much…in other words I was pretty ordinary and boring. I wasn’t a natural rebel who wanted to stick it to authority. What my Christian upbringing taught me was that good people co-operated with others so as to get along and that you followed the law in order to make for a well functioning society. But the red thread in that tapestry of ideas was that all of this only mattered if you did it voluntarily because you believed it to be right AND that you were always free to do otherwise and that if you did, you had to take responsibility for that decision. My parents didn’t tell me to stand up on the bus because there was a sign on the bus put there by the government, telling me that I was required to do so. I was taught to do it because it was good and right. The notion of voluntary action in all you do was there from the start. I didn’t know it as a child but it was the principle of individual liberty born out of Christianity which gave rise to the western liberal tradition. It is the foundation for who I am.
My grapda survived a Russian Gulag!
“Hello, my name is Andy. My grandfather survived a Russian gulag, my grandma survived a communist extermination camp, my two year old aunt died of starvation in this camp, my entire family were dispossessed of all their property and half a million of my ancestors were systematically ethnically cleansed”. Not an everyday sort of introduction but nevertheless it is true and I think this is one of the puzzle pieces that shapes who I am and my uncompromising view about liberty. Without going into great detail at this point, suffice it to say that the family on my mum’s side were from a small German ethnic minority in what is now Serbia. Between the two world wars their community was ground to pieces between the two millstones of the 20th century’s worst totalitarian regimes – Nazism and Communism.
My grandfather was forcefully pressed into the German army. When he tried to escape they threatened to kill his father if he didn’t give himself up and when he did, they nearly beat him to death for the audacity of trying. My grandma and her little toddler Resi (my aunt), along with her parents in law were put into extermination camp Jarek, which specialized in exterminating children by feeding them ground glass in their food. Their crime? Being German. They were guilty by association. Grandma and her mother in law were able to escape in time, my aunt at age two, starved to death and was thrown on a wagon of dead bodies in front of my grandma’s eyes. Her father in law, my great grandfather, succumbed to starvation as well.
I was very fortunate to be very close to my grandparents. I had the privilege of growing up with them in Germany (where they fled to after the war), then migrating to Australia with them and my parents when I was 15 years old and having them very close to me until they passed away when I was in my mid 40s. In all these years, my grandfather told me many stories about his experiences in communist Russia. My grandma found it harder to speak about the horrors, but I learned enough about her experiences to understand the great evil inflicted by the National Socialists and the Communists, both systems that glorify the state. Being indirectly touched by the excesses of the state in this way has helped shape my deep suspicion of the state.
The Democratic Republic of Germany and the shadow of the wall
After my grandparents fled from their respective imprisonments in Serbia and Russia, they came to live in West Germany. I was born there in 1972 and lived there until we migrated to Australia in 1988. My entire childhood and early teenage years were overshadowed by the cold war. You have to have lived in Europe during that time to really understand the fear that was palpable in every aspect of life, the news, family discussions, politics, etc. But more than that, what stayed with me the most was that every Christmas and every Easter, my family made up big boxes of care packages which our church community sent to East Germany. As a small child, I was incredulous that there were German people in a country next to us, whom we had to send items such as dolls and toys and non-perishable 8ood because they didn’t have that over there. As I got older, I started to understand a little more why this was so. The shadow of the Berlin Wall and the divided Germany was everywhere in my childhood. To this day, I will never forget the day on 9 November 1989, when my family and I were glued to our TVs in our Brisbane home, watching the Berlin Wall come down. I was 17 years old then. In those days, we all believed that the untoward power of the tyrannical state had been dealt a heavy blow by freedom minded ordinary people. Today, in 2021, I’m not so sure that we, in the west, really learned our lesson.
Infinite reasons for liberty
When I started writing this blog, I thought about giving it a catchy title like “10 reasons why liberty matters”. I couldn’t quite decide what number to settle on. 3, 5, 10, 100 reasons? But when I really think about it, it is infinity reasons. My three paragraphs above outline some of the more profound reasons for why I am suspicious of state power and pro individual liberty. Yet the journey from politically clueless teenager to somewhat uneasy Conservative to Libertarian Anarchist was a long one and what I like to call the opposite of the death by a million cuts, ie the “awakening via the thousand light bulb moments.”
Liberty Downunder 