“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” —from Franklin Roosevelt’s first Inaugural Address, 1933

By Phill Courtney
Eighty-five years ago this month, on January 6, 1941, in Washinton D.C., President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered the eighth of his constitutionally mandated reports on the nation’s condition. Given first as speeches by Presidents Washington and Adams, then followed by many years of written reports, it’s almost always given now as an annual State of the Union address after President Wilson restored the tradition in 1913, and Roosevelt gave this one at the beginning of his unprecedent third presidential term while warfare in Europe and Asian blackened the background.
World War II was now raging, and Roosevelt was acutely aware of the conflicting forces then abroad in the land, with some voices calling for our participation, while others countered that call by urging a continuation of what some called “neutrality,” and others American “isolationism.”
In Roosevelt’s speech, he focused much of his attention on an effort to persuade many Americans that we could not continue to ignore our role in stopping the dictators then goosestepping across the globe, with some reminders of just what we should be fighting for; describing them as “The Four Freedoms,” which has led to this State of the Union address being referred to by that title.
So, with that introduction in mind, let’s take a look at each of these four freedoms; the goals they laid out; how far we’ve come, and how far we’ve yet to go, since, in so many ways, we’ve fallen far short of FDR’s lofty visions for the future; visions both for us as a nation, but also for the entire world as well.
FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND EXPRESSION: Roosevelt envisioned a world where all are permitted to express their opinions and beliefs free from the fear that they might suffer dreadful consequences if they dared to do so. Of course, before FDR’s speech, countless people died for doing just that, often tortured to death for their beliefs. However, that’s not just ancient history, conjuring up visions of thumbscrews and the burning of heretics, but continues today with far too many examples since FDR’s speech.
Some of us remember the wholesale slaughter that occurred in 1989 when those wishing to express their opposition to the communist regime in China were mowed down in droves by the terrible tanks of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, to the massive bloodbath now going on in Iran. Yes, our current president is decrying that bloodshed, but, at the same time, he has also disgustingly embraced, encouraged, and enabled other despots such as those murderous misogynists in Saudi Arabia, and rolled out the red carpet (not just literally, but also figuratively since it was soaked in blood!) for another murderer who’s currently ruthlessly ruling the country of Russia, whose opponents seem to keep falling “accidentally” out of the windows in high rise apartments.
So, we have no room to be smug Americans, looking down from our lofty perch of moral superiority as paragons of free speech and expression. Many have also lost jobs; been ostracized; and even shot down (literally) because someone didn’t like what someone had to say. We’ve even seen a broadscale banning of books—banned because of what someone expressed through their written work; writers cancelled (yours truly included, although not here at the Sentinel); and educators told they don’t have the freedom to tell the unvarnished truth about our history because it might make some students feel “bad” about our country.
FDR would also be heartbroken to see the current crop of autocrats still running countries; from Azerbaijan (where human rights activists and journalists are routinely imprisoned), to Zambia (where our ambassador there was expelled from the country in 2019 when he dared to speak out against their oppression of same-sex couples) and continue to crush their critics, while the man who currently holds the position FDR once held, uses masked thugs from ICE as, essentially, his own private police force to harass and even kill dissenters. This was not what FDR envisioned after World War II when blood was shed once again to make the world “safe for democracy.”
Freedom of Worship: Since 1941 religious repression has continued throughout the world, following civilization’s long, disgraceful history by those in power oppressing those whose beliefs they did not approve of. Yes, the United States has, by law, no religious requirement for elective office. But, even now, there are those who think that there should be, along with an unspoken agreement that non-believers running for congress will not be elected, and it wasn’t until 2006 that a congressman who was openly a “non-theist,” was elected.
Also distressing has been the naked antagonism towards groups seen as outside the mainstream, with many today unaware that even some sects claiming the title of Christians, like the Mormons, were massacred in the 1900’s, and, since FDR’s speech, Muslims have been targeted and entire populations smeared as “garbage” by the man now occupying FDR’s office.
Also profoundly alarming has been Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson’s openly advocated position that political candidates be subjected to a sort of religious “litmus test’ to determine if their values are in line with Biblically based Christianity—in his world view the only sound basis for government. Although he’s soft-pedaled that twisted logic lately, there’s been no indication that he’s renounced it—only taken it under the radar.
As for the oppression of minority religious groups in the world at-large since the FDR’s speech, it’s also been on-going, with one of the most egregious examples being what the Chinese did to the Tibetans when they swept in and took over that nation in the 1950’s with mass executions and even widespread castrations of Tibetan monks. It’s an outrage that continues today because the Chinese cannot be forced to relinquish the country (as we did for Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War after Iraq’s forceful take-over)) since the Chinese (unlike the Iraqis) possess nuclear weapons in yet another example of the continuing principle that “might makes right.”
Few talk of Tibet now because of China’s status as a faithful trading partner since they buy so many American products and vice versa—with the typical American home being a virtual “made in China” emporium of communist merchandise made for those “low, low prices”—which includes, of course, those unspoken low-low standards for the rights of workers.
One of the few celebrities who has spoken out loud and clear about China’s crimes has been the honored film actor, Richard Gere, who’s been unrelenting in his campaign of criticism. But he’s had to pay a high price in ostracism and outright bans, asserting that he is no longer cast in American blockbuster films due to his criticism of China, which constitutes a huge market for such films. Then, after speaking out against Chinese human rights violations at the 1993 Academy Awards, he was banned from ever appearing again. So much for freedom of speech in America.
Besides Tibet, religious repression continues within the traditional boundaries of China itself with their systemic near genocide of various religious minority groups, with perhaps the most well-known being the Muslim-majority Uyghurs; many of whom are now being held in the largest secretive internment camps since the Nazi Holocaust. Hundreds of thousands have been subjected to rape; torture; executions; as well as forced labor; abortions, sterilizations, and the coerced insertion of contraceptive devices. That a single American home contains a single product from such a country, is an on-going disgrace.
Meanwhile, in Myanmar, the genocide against the Rohingya Muslim majority regions by government death squads is also on-going, resulting in tens of thousands of casualties since 2017, with perhaps a million refugees fleeing to other countries, including Bangladesh, which is now the site of the largest refugee camp in the world.
Again, although we’d like to think: well, that’s Myanmar—we don’t commit such atrocities ourselves (although our nation certainly did in the past against the Native Americans)—take another look because Israel’s on-going genocide of Muslims in Palestine, now on a steady pace to reach some 100,000 lives—If you count those bodies rotting unrecovered in the apocalyptic rubble—has been paid for in large part by American military dollars, aided and abetted by both major political parties. I’d like to think that FDR would be appalled.
Freedom From Want: World-wide, during the next 24 hours, some 15,000 children five years of age and under will die from causes like starvation and curable diseases; dead not because there weren’t ways to prevent those deaths, but because the adults around them either did not have the willingness, or, for millions, far more likely the money to pay for the food and medical care necessary to prevent them—a damning indictment of the economic systems now in place throughout the world.
Let’s face it: we live in a completely topsy-turvy, upside-down world of egregious economic disparities where, shamefully, some corporate CEOs earn more money in a single day than many Americans earn in a year, and just a few people have, literary, billions of dollars, while billions of people have just a few or, more often than not—none at all—hence that terrible toll on the most vulnerable among us: our children.
Although many Americans often view this world of want as one that exists beyond our borders—that world of bloated bellies; stick-thin limbs, and eyes ringed with flies—we live in denial that much of these conditions prevail in our nation as well. No, we don’t see dead, emaciated bodies lying in the streets (although sometimes we do), we also don’t see (or want to see) that some one out of five of our children lives in poverty; food insecurity; and lack of adequate medical care.
Fortunately, studies now show that we have seen a steady decline recently in the death rates of the youngest among us, but still much want remains both in the world and in the U.S.—a want of nutritional food; a want of even just adequate health care; and a widely-known want of housing. It’s now estimated that some 70 percent of Americans cannot afford to buy a $400,00 average-priced house.
No, we don’t see the bodies in the streets, but we do see the tents on the sidewalks—a vivid daily reminder of how far we’ve fallen from FDR’s call for a freedom from want, and today it’s more obvious than ever that the entire world needs not just a minimum wage, but a “livable” wage for everyone. In other words, economic systems that ensure that anyone who’s willing to work full-time makes enough income from their efforts, whatever they may be, to afford at least adequate housing; nutritional, healthy food; and the ability to live in simple decency.
Freedom from Fear: FDR viewed this freedom through the lens of World War II, where murderous despots threatened the world’s citizens with death if they didn’t bow to their will, and our need to join in on the effort to end that threat. Since FDR was a thoughtful man, with a long-range view of history, he could see that our involvement was inevitable, but he also saw a need following the war for an end to any nation’s capacity to mount those threats in the future.
That goal was obtainable, he argued, through diplomacy; world law; and eventually effective disarmament, where wars are ended first because we’ve decided to do so, but then demonstrating that commitment to a world without war by ending the production of the weapons to wage them.
Although the formation of the United Nations in the summer of 1945, shortly after FDR’s passing in April seemed to indicate a budding commitment to his goals, with one of the UN’s stated purposes being an end to “the scourge of war,” war after war since then has steadily chipped away at his vision and the UN’s since then.
Signatories to the UN charter have not only failed to achieve a world without war, and a world without weapons, but many have also failed to obey some of its most basic resolutions, treaties, and laws; one of the most blatant examples of which was committed by the U.S. government in 2003 when it attacked Iraq with a “preemptive” invasion prohibited by the charter, which clearly states that one country can’t attack another unless it’s first been attacked or is about to be.
The world is still not free of those fears and continues to be (although these days, more often than not, it’s simply “background noise”) as long as the nuclear “Sword of Damocles” hovers over our heads with all those warheads, which still number well-over ten thousand in the hands of the nuclear powers. So, not only is the goal of nuclear disarmament still unachieved, far too many continue to think that it never can be—and so trillions of dollars since World War II have been and continue to be squandered to build weapons that, ironically, can never be used unless humanity wants to commit suicide.
But, beyond the need for a freedom of fear from those “weapons of mass destruction” that FDR cited, it also needs to be mentioned that the fear of weapons in the form of the millions of firearms in our homes and neighborhoods, which not only end lives individually, but end many lives during our now routine and almost daily mass murders, is a fear many experience on a daily basis.
Because the U.S., and far too many other countries as well, have yet to decide that an armed population is not a safe population (despite all the propaganda to the contrary, the statistics show otherwise: i.e. Japan) many Americans these days are afraid to leave their homes because of the fear that they cannot do so without risking their lives.
We cannot go out to a restaurant; a music concert; a church; a mosque; a synagogue; a bar; a store; or, most tragically of all, an elementary school, without thinking of the realistic possibility that our brains will be blown out by a bullet from what seems to be an endless supply of madman bent on punishing the world—madmen wielding one or more of our many easily obtained weapons to do so—along with the almost always unspoken prospect of an even more gruesome future ahead of us as more and more sophisticated hand-held weapons are developed with the capability to kill more and more people.
So, where do we go from here? Although FDR wasn’t a perfect president (who could be?), and certainly had his own “feet of clay,” the most egregious example of which was his order to intern the Japanese Americans during World War II (where not only were his feet of clay, but perhaps his entire legs), unlike others I could name, he was a positive, and inspirational president, who, eighty-five years ago, looked to the future with confidence—confidence that the human race would make the choices necessary for a world enjoying the freedoms he envisioned.
Although there has certainly been some overall progress in the world in a number of ways, the picture I’ve just described is bleak, with international criminals on the march and in control of countries throughout the world—criminals who should not be in power, but in prison, along with the people who protect them. So, what then to do?
For me the most obvious first step now is to make sure that criminals are not running our own country, with leadership that not just gives lip service to obeying international laws; the UN charter; and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (the writing of which was helped immensely by FDR’s amazing wife, Eleanor), but actually does so.
Since the founding of our country, our government has defied and derailed many international laws and human rights on the basis of “American exceptionalism,” where we essentially say: do as we say, not as we do. By first ending that mindset, in so many ways we could set an example for the world by moving forward with law-abiding leadership, instead of kicking them to the curb as we’ve done so often in the past.
To name a few other moves we could make: we could sign on to the International Criminal Court, created to hold lawbreaking leaders accountable for their crimes (so far only done with third-world countries), but the U.S. has failed to do so. We could ratify the UN’s law banning landmines, but again, we have failed to do so. We could ratify their international treaty for the rights of children—but, shamefully, we remain the only UN country failing to do so. We could also obey the international law that says countries cannot preemptively attack other countries—but again, we have failed to do so. Finally, we could lead the charge in a total reform of the UN so that its laws are actually enforceable rather than talking points.
Sadly, the most recent examples of our country ignoring the UN charter; violating international law; and our own Constitution (just in case anyone still cares about that) was the attack on Venezuela earlier this month—an attack that killed some 50 to 100 people (including a mother of three, Johana Rodriquez Sierra, who was actually a citizen of Colombia) in order to arrest only two. We could stop acting like these sorts of terrible “trade-offs” are totally acceptable.
Of course, we need to remember that this is a country which once incinerated tens of thousands of elderly men; pregnant women; children and infants beneath two mushroom clouds over Japan without blinking an eye in order to end World War II. That option could stop, but the no first strike policy, which only India, and, surprisingly, China, currently adhere to, remains in place here.
We could also stop electing leaders who support torture; extrajudicial executions (by both major parties); and would never suggest that we could win the War on Terror by killing the children of terrorists to demoralize their parents, as the current leader of the “free world” has said—a leader who has turned stoking fear into one of his trademarks.
In 1941 this is not the sort of world Franklin Delano Roosevelt would envision by now, but it still could be if we decided to sincerely pursue those principles he proposed and began electing more people like him to make them a reality. These days FDR would weep, but—if you’ll allow me a small bit of poetry—we can stop those tears by ending the fears and replace them with the freedoms he spoke of.
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Phill Courtney was a high school English teacher and twice ran for Congress with the Green party. His email: pjcoutney1311@gmail.com