FDR’s Four Freedoms and a Pussy Riot in Russia

Fred W. Hill  

During his State of the Union address of January 6, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt enumerated what he held were “four essential human freedoms”:  freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.  At the time, the United States was not an active participant in any war, but totalitarian regimes dominated much of Europe and Asia and had launched wars of conquest.  The U.S. itself was hardly squeaky clean, stained by religious and racial bigotry, Jim Crow laws that made a mockery of constitutional rights and the terrorist activities of the Ku Klux Klan abetted by state and local governments.   Roosevelt was advocating an ideal, but one he believed a “basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.” 

History, however, tends to mock our grandest, humanist aspirations.  The worst regimes of 1941 were eventually overcome or eventually gave way to more moderate governments, and even Jim Crow laws were finally eradicated in the wake of media coverage of atrocities committed to put down non-violent protests that became too embarrassing to ignore in the context of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to win the hearts and minds of people around the world who tended to be dark-skinned – just like the black Americans they saw being oppressed in the “land of the free”.  That the Cold War itself ended with a few whimpers by disgruntled hard-line Communists rather than a series of catastrophic nuclear bangs was a relief to many of us who came of age during that era.  Russia, the largest shard of the shattered Soviet Union, would now become a constitutional federal republic, with guarantees of free speech and religion.  We won the arms race and now our old rival had become more like us!  Suddenly it didn’t seem too far-fetched to imagine that there would be a tremendous peace dividend – that billions then spent on weapons of mass destruction and the military infrastructure might be redirected towards providing greater public education for more people, and doing more to ensure no one is left in want of nutritious food and adequate shelter, among other lofty goals.   Making FDR’s high hopes a reality seemed possible.  The attacks of September 11, 2001, and the resultant “War on Terror” broke that illusion. 

Anyone paying attention, however, couldn’t have been all that surprised.  The threat of nuclear annihilation may have ebbed, but there was still plenty of violence around the world.  Another cause for fear, however, came from our very success in being fruitful and multiplying our numbers and living in comforts brought by massive consumption of energy at the expense of a healthy environment.  Even as severe drought has ravaged a large chunk of our nation for several years and underground water reservoirs built up over thousands of years are being rapidly depleted due to excess use, most of our elected representatives (and the people who vote for them) continue to deny the reality of global climate change brought about by human activity, as recognized by “an overwhelming consensus of scientists”. 
 Despite rightwing griping about government restrictions meant to protect the environment, we still have plenty of freedom to cause much damage but not enough freedom from fear and ignorance to face up to the long-term consequences of that damage.  Moreover, China’s shift from Maoist Communism, under which the predominant freedoms for the masses were to shut up and starve, to a form of state-run capitalism with little or no regulations to protect the environment or the general well-being of the population, has hardly resulted in a paradise.  A few can now become immensely rich, just like in the U.S., but at the cost of air pollution bad enough to reduce life expectancy in the increasingly over-populated cities; grand scale desertification over 25 percent of the nation; and the intensified slaughter of elephants, rhinos, tigers, and other endangered animals to provide trinkets, quack medicines and supposed aphrodisiacs.We may yet learn to fear the horrors of unrestrained human greed as much as human belligerency.

Meanwhile, freedom from want hasn’t gone away.  Globally, an estimated “25,000 people die every day of hunger or hunger-related causes”, a consequence of severe poverty.  And exercising freedom of speech and religion too extravagantly, such as by going on a mission to North Korea to convince some locals about the wonders of Christ, opining in a college in Pakistan that the prophet Mohammed may actually have been wrong about something; or openly denying the existence of god in Saudi Arabia, may not only land you in legal hot water, but may cost you your head. 

Even in the no longer quite so evil empire of Russia, criticizing the church and the once and future President isn’t a good idea – unless you’re willing to put up with a few years of hard labor for your ideals, as members of the guerilla performance punk feminist band Pussy Riot can attest.  Three members of the group were arrested and charged with hooliganism based on religious hatred after they took part in a performance of a “punk moleben” (supplicatory prayer) on the altar of an Orthodox church in Moscow, urging Mother Mary to become a feminist and get rid of Prime Minister Putin and criticizing the close ties of church and state in Russia, the subservience of the Russian people to the church and the church’s traditionalist views of women.  One member was eventually released but the other two, Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, were convicted and sentenced to two years in a penal colony for having “crudely undermined the social order” and showing “complete lack of respect”.  Yes, in Russia it is illegal to hurt the feelings of religious believers.  To be fair, as noted by Christopher Stroop of the Religious Dispatches blog, Russian legislators are considering a bill to expand the protect the feelings of atheists as well, which would mean in Russia it will be more than just good manners to avoid discussing religious differences over dinner – it will be the law!

Roosevelt was a much better politician than a prophet.  Certainly, there are now many nations that protect the right of free expression and to worship or not however one likes, as long as doing so doesn’t cause unjustified harm to others and however unlikely it seems now, perhaps eventually freedom of speech and religion will be realities in every nation.  And it’s worth trying to eliminate starvation and abject poverty and prevent war and other forms of violence.  While we exist and think, however, we’ll never be entirely free of want and fear, nor should we be as they can be engines of aspiration although we should not let them overwhelm us to the point of rapacious greed, irrational hatred or incapacitating dread.  And in closing I’ll freely express my hope that a vast majority of humans will one day come together to peacefully resolve our global problems and free themselves from belief in any supernatural being that only leaves them in expectation of salvation from beyond that will never come.

Fred W. Hill is a member of www.Firstcoastfreethoughtsociety.org and this article was first published in their September newsletter.