FREEDOM OF SPEECH

by Raoul Martinez (Co-Director of The Lottery of Birth)

It's a few days until the first film in the Creating Freedom series is released. In light of the recent revelations brought to the world by Edward Snowden it seems timely. Snowden's disclosures have raised important questions about freedom. The fact that the US government has been spying on its own citizens, tracking their movements online, listening to phone calls and reading their emails, forces us to ask ourselves what society we want to live in. The one size fits all justification for reducing the freedom of citizens is 'security'. 

There are a number of problems with this justification. First, what do we mean by security? Do we mean providing the ill, the ageing, the disabled with the security of universal healthcare? Do we mean secure employment, secure housing, a secure economy? What about environmental security, sustaining the conditions we all depend on to survive? No. That is not the security that government officials speak of. In fact, in every case the US government has significantly contributed to the erosion of these forms of security. The security they speak of is security against  'terrorists'. The inverted commas here are important, because who gets to decide who a terrorist is? The families of victims of Obama's drone strikes, 98% of whom are civilians according to a Columbia Law School study, no doubt regard Obama and the US government itself as partaking in terrorism.

People are told they can have freedom or safety, but this is a false dichotomy. Security depends on freedom. For citizens to be secure, they need civil liberties that protect them from the massive concentrations of state and corporate power. For citizens to be secure they need a well functioning democracy, and information is the oxygen of a democracy. Without it, the  governed cannot give their meaningful consent to those who govern, and our democracies suffocate. Those who value freedom and democracy are indebted to whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning and Daniel Ellsberg who empower us with a deeper understanding of the society we live in and the abuses of the powerful.

THE LOTTERY OF BIRTH opens theatrically in NYC Friday, June 21 - Thurs. June 27 at reRun Theater in Brooklyn.  (To buy tickets, visit:  http://reruntheater.com).  The film is also exclusively available online starting Friday, June 21st at www.mangu.tv.  

LIKE THE FILM SERIES CREATING FREEDOM at: www.facebook.com/creatingfreedomproject
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