Sunday, June 03, 2007

The Four Freedoms.

It is important to remember what the promise of freedom means to the people of the world. Here is a clear articulation of what this struggle is all about:

"In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.


The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world.


The second is Freedom of worship. That is, freedom of every person to worship whomever (be it God, or any other deity/deities) in his own way — everywhere in the world.


The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants — everywhere in the world.


The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor — anywhere in the world.


That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called "new order" of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb."


— Franklin Delano Roosevelt, excerpted from the Annual Message to the Congress, January 6, 1941

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