On January 6, 1941, President Roosevelt made a speech in which he addressed what are know called “Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms.” What are these “freedoms”? Do these four “freedoms” really make us more free? What has been the effect of the promotion of these “freedoms” in other countries?
This is what he said in his speech on January 6th:
“In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.”
His 1st speech was about freedom of speech and for the speech to be expressed his/her own way–everywhere in the world. His 2nd speech was about the freedom of every person to worship God in his own way–everywhere in the world. His 3rd speech is about the freedom from want (when translated into worldly terms) means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants. Lastly, his 4th speech is about fear (when translated into world terms) means a world-wide reduction of weapons 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.
Another quote of his, “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.”
From reading the 4 speeches, I can only see 2 freedoms out of all the 4 speeches and those freedoms are the freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
Do these “freedoms” really make us more free? Let’s think about this, If I were some journalist, and I were to say lots of bad things about a lawyer, politician, or say anything that I didn’t like, would it really harm anyone. It would mostly harm the lawyer or the politician, but since you have the freedom of speech as well, you could go out and say good things about this person to change public opinion. That is how the freedom of speech works.
As for freedom of religion, you have the freedom to worship as you want and I have the freedom to worship as I want. You may not force your religion on me and I can not force mine on you.
The third speech is about want and it gets kinda socialistic, because he wants a welfare program to give money to those who do not have enough. Well, you can’t just make money out nowhere. Right? So let’s take it from all of the other taxpayers! That sounds like you’re taking away my right to use that money how I wanted to. I could have given it to a homeless person if I had wanted to, but now I can’t, because the government just decides to take it.
The 4th freedom of speech which is about fear, it doesn’t exactly make us more free, because he said that we should somehow stop all of the nations in the world from fighting. I seem to recall something about that the UN other similar alliances were supposed to keep the world from fighting. As far as I can tell, it has caused more wars, because now we are all getting into everybody else’s business. George Washington warned us to keep out of alliances and other nation’s wars. Did we listen to him, no we didn’t.
In conclusion, out of the 4 freedom speeches given by Franklin D. Roosevelt only 2 of the speeches give us the ability speak out freely and to talk about religion freely. As for the other 2 speeches haven’t made us free much.
Thanks for reading this essay. I hope you liked it or learned something new. I’ll be posting more soon an have a great rest of your day!
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