Position Paper #2

Position Paper #2

By: Amber Copp

           

Would you suspend your rights and freedoms in order to guarantee the preservation of democracy? A democracy is a state of society where you embrace the equality of rights and freedoms. It’s a government made by the people for the people. So would you give up an amount of your rights and freedoms to better to rights and freedoms for all? The author of the source is a Liberal but suppressing human rights goes against liberal principles. As a young adult in today’s society I would embrace giving up some of my rights in an act of security or desperation but only to a certain point. I would not give up my rights and freedoms if I knew it would harm other people’s rights/freedoms like the patriot act did. The patriot benefited people like me who are white Canadians but it did not protect people like Muslim Americans.  I would give up some of my rights and freedoms if I knew my country was going into economic crisis like what is happening in the USA. If giving up some of my rights/freedoms meant that employment rate would increase I would do it. But there is a down fall to giving up some of your rights/freedoms we saw this with Hitler’s rise to power. He promised the people many things and the people were so desperate at the time they listened and Hitler drove Germany into complete economic crisis. That is one example of it not working out but who says if it’s executed properly why it wouldn’t work.

The patriot act was put in place to prevent terrorism after the 9/11 attack on the United States.  In theory the patriot act would suppress terrorism before it got out of hand and killed many innocent civilians.  People gave up some of their rights and freedoms in order to feel secure but what actually happened was many people lost much of their rights and many innocent people were harmed by the patriot act. The government tapped into phone conversation, personal computers, and medical records, searched people’s homes without even evidence that these people were committing or associated with terrorism acts. Many of these individuals were of Muslim ethnicity. By giving up some of your rights and freedoms to the government some people lost more than others which is unfair and juvenile, so in this case giving up some of your rights and freedoms didn’t go well if you were a part of the wrong religious or racial group.

If you economy was going through a crisis then giving of some of your control to the government wouldn’t be so bad. In the United States today their dollar is low on the world market making it harder for them to purchase what their country needs. Their unemployment rate is extremely high making it harder for the economy to buy their necessities. Since there dollar is low things are more expensive for them to purchase and the unemployment rate is high making the people have less money to spend. This will soon result into an economic crash and for another recession to hit. In this case many people would not want to experience another great depression like what happened in the thirties, so giving up some of your rights and freedoms so the government can stabilize the economy and promote a stronger democracy would benefit the entire country. This would only work if the person you’re giving up your rights and freedoms for was responsible.

Hitler got his rise to power when Germanys economy was in much worse shape then the United States is in today. The People of Germany were quite desperate. Hitler came in and promised economic stability. Hitler gave people jobs, 6 million Germans were unemployed in 1932 by 1936 there were less than 1 million. Hitler got people working on building and roads, Hitler also took this opportunity to build a larger military force. Life was looking up for the Germans but by the time they thought they could get their individual rights and freedoms back Hitler already took them all away by discriminating against the Jewish religion. Hitler took his large army that he called the Nazi’s and murdered many Jews resulting in the Holocaust. In this particular case giving up some rights and freedoms resulted in a negative mass murder of one particular group and Germany never saw a democracy.

Democracy can be a good thing when we are looking at a place like Canada, but getting to a stable democracy can he hard like what we saw in German. Giving up rights and freedoms can be a huge decision because it doesn’t take much to lose all of them. For Muslim Americans most of them lost many of their rights and freedoms with the patriot act. Jews in German in the 1940’s lost all their rights and freedoms. So the real question is how much would you give up in order to see democracy? That all depends on your economy and the faith you have on your political and economic leaders. It did not work in German when Hitler was in power but in the United States they already have a democracy and could safely give up some right in order to stabilize their economy. In order to have a liberal democracy you would have to give up some of your liberal principle like individual rights and freedoms.