Home. CNN.com International. Yahoo! News. Mother Jones. Reuters Business & Financial News. The Motley fool. 10 Reasons The U.S. Is No Longer The Land Of The Free. Below is today’s column in the Sunday Washington Post. The column addresses how the continued rollbacks on civil liberties in the United States conflicts with the view of the country as the land of the free.
If we are going to adopt Chinese legal principles, we should at least have the integrity to adopt one Chinese proverb: “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.” We seem as a country to be in denial as to the implications of these laws and policies. Whether we are viewed as a free country with authoritarian inclinations or an authoritarian nation with free aspirations (or some other hybrid definition), we are clearly not what we once were. [Update: in addition to the column below, a later column in the Washington Post explores more closely the loss of free speech rights in the West]. Every year, the State Department issues reports on individual rights in other countries, monitoring the passage of restrictive laws and regulations around the world.
War crimes.