Shepherd, Sheep, and Wolf

I watched CCTV-4 (aka, China Central Television) news; the reporter said the President-elect Barak Obama (1961 - , his Presidency, 2009 - ) repeated the train route from Philadelphia to Washington, DC on January 17th, 2009, as President Abraham Lincoln (1809 – 1865, his presidency, 1861 -1865) did in 1861. It is more accurate to say Obama publicly finished the journey which Lincoln did not go though. In truth, Lincoln left the train at Philadelphia and secretly entered Washington, DC for an intelligent report indicated there was an assassination plot against his life in Baltimore.

Shortly after the Senate passed the Thirteenth Amendment in 1864, which was ratified in 1865 and totally abolished slavery, Lincoln went back to Baltimore first time since 1861 and made a short speech, which some historian regarded as one of his best speeches, but least known. In this speech, Lincoln said that “The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty. We all declare for liberty, but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.” He further clarified that “The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as a destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep is a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today among us human creatures, even in the North, and all professing to love liberty. Hence we behold the processes by which thousands are daily passing from under the yoke of bondage, hailed by some as the advance of liberty, and bewailed by others as the destruction of all liberty.” The slavery abolishment costs America heavily, but the Union is preserved and the Nation moves forward.

There was an incident that many Chinese do not know of. In 1855, Charles Sumner (1811 – 1874), a slavery abolitionist and a senator from Massachusetts, was beaten unconsciously on the Senate floor with a cane by Preston Brooks (1819 – 1857), a congressman from South Carolina. It took three years for Sumner to recover from that beating. Brooks was regarded a hero and re-elected by his voters, while Sumner was regarded a martyr and re-elected by his voters. Lincoln’s metaphor exactly described this difference of “liberty”.

Many Chinese are discouraged by seeing the brawls in some assemblies in Asian, and conclude that democracy is not suitable to China; the Chinese government is more than eager to emphasize such congressional ugliness for its own interests. To make myself clear, I absolutely denounce such violence in congress; but they do not want to admit that democracy is a long journey, even in America. Rome was not built in one day, was it?

Charles de Montesquieu (1689 – 1755), who was a widely accepted anti-slavery enlightenment thinker and regarded as the father of liberalism by some, separated slavery into two categories: one is the state of political slavery, and the other is the state of civil slavery. He said that “In despotic countries, where they are already in a state of political slavery, … In democracies, slavery is contrary to the spirit of the constitution”. When democracy is rejected by the Chinese government, the inequality among the Chinese people is preserved. The Chinese Communist Party is indeed a master of a kind of political slaves – the exiled dissents. Those exiled dissents could not redeem their divested liberty to settle down back in China, they even could not be allowed to make a family reunion in China, whether the members of their families in China are dying or not, whether those exiled dissents are dying or not. Those political slaves of the Chinese Communist Party remind me some prominent Renaissance thinkers who had experienced exile: Francesco Petrarch (1304 – 1374), the father of Renaissance and the first modern man, was a born exile with his parents; Niccolo Machiavelli (1469 – 1527), the founder of modern political science, was exiled and imprisoned for a time, like some Chinese exiled dissents; Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463 – 1494), the author of humanist manifesto, was a self-exile (fled from persecution) and imprisoned for a time, like some of the Chinese exiled dissents who fled out of China after June Fourth Massacre in 1989. But these above mentioned Renaissance thinkers were re-accepted by churches of the Medieval Ages afterwards. Despite to be called the Dark Ages by Petrarch and bitterly criticized by Machiavelli, the churches of Medieval Ages even gave both of them the ceremonious funerals after they died. By contrast, is it the era of Chinese Communist darker than the Medieval Ages? Who will be the shepherd for those political slaves of the Chinese Communist Party?

The Chinese Communist is so paranoid that it is afraid of hearing the word of “dissent” for it censored the communism and dissent parts from President Obama’s inaugural speech; yet it defended its awkward behavior as exercising its “editorial rights”. The freedom of press is in America’s Bill of Rights, it means a free, but responsible, press right. The freedom of press is rooted from the case of Cosby versus Zenger. John Peter Zenger (1697 – 1746) was accused for libel in his The New York Weekly Journal by the Governor of the New York and New Jersey, William Cosby; but jury found Zenger not guilty, for they were convinced that a newspaper could have a right for expressing whatever it wishes, as long as what it expressed was true. This was jury nullification at that time. When the CCTV manipulated information and distorted the facts around Obama and other matters, do you believe a jury – the people, will find CCTV not guilty? When the spokeswoman of China talked about the free “editorial rights” for throwing contempt to a challenge, didn’t she act as one of the slaves in the Allegory of the Cave for laughing at the returned freedman and saying that he had gone up only to come back with his sight ruined? When Montesquieu said that “We see in the history of China a great number of laws to deprive eunuchs of all civil and military employments; … It seems as if the eunuchs of the east were a necessary evil”, will Chinese examine what else evils living in its culture or simply label him an anti-Chinese?