Freedom Archives - Public Seminar

Thinking About Freedom in Wartime Ukraine

The philosophical implications of Zelensky’s decision to stay in Kyiv

September 30, 2024 • by Timothy Snyder

This lecture was delivered as part of a benefit conference for the Ukrainian academy that Aaron James Wendland organized in March 2023 at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. The benefit conference was designed to provide financial support for academic and civic ...

Thinking About Freedom in Wartime Ukraine

Genocide

Left on a Mountain to Die

An excerpt from Under the Naga Tail: The escape from the Cambodian Genocide

March 22, 2023 • by James Taing and Mae Bunseng Taing

An excerpt of Under the Naga Tail, the memoir of a refugee who escaped the Killing Fields in Cambodia....

Europe & Central Asia

Putin’s New Iron Curtain

Freedom and democracy are both impossible if we do not take responsibility for the other

March 22, 2022 • by Lucas Fain

Let us recognize that freedom and democracy are both impossible if we do not take responsibility for the other. This is the call of ethics. It is required to imagine another future, to free the world from arrogant barbarism, to break out of the world in which we now find ...

North America

The Future of the GOP

Has the Republic National Committee firmly dragged the Republican Party into Trump’s war on our democracy?

February 8, 2022 • by Heather Cox Richardson

Coming as the statement did, just after former President Trump said that Pence had the power to “overturn the election” and, that if reelected, Trump would pardon those who attacked the Capitol, it has put the Republican Party openly on the side of overturning our democracy....

Democracy

Gun Violence Is as American as Apple Pie

But gun ownership only became popular after World War II, when conservatives united to prevent desegregation

April 21, 2021 • by Heather Cox Richardson

_____ America today is caught in a plague of gun violence. It wasn’t always this way. Americans used to own guns without engaging in daily massacres. Indeed, it always jumps out at me that the infamous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929, when members of one Chicago gang set up and killed ...

Gun Violence Is as American as Apple Pie

Politics

We Must Concede That By Tolerating Shooting Massacres, We Are Choosing Not to Be Free

Democracy is the path toward greater freedom for all

March 25, 2021 • by John Stoehr

_____ The Republicans in the US Congress insist the right to bear arms is a constitutional Second Amendment issue. The Democrats say gun control is a common sense safety issue. The press corps, which prefers binaries as a matter of professional convenience, frames the question as, well, a question, as a tension between the right to bear arms ...

We Must Concede That By Tolerating Shooting Massacres, We Are Choosing Not to Be Free

Uncategorized

Is America Going Down Like Custer?

When defiance is the coin of the realm

September 24, 2020 • by Deanne Stillman

These flags are not just warnings posted in their front yards or near fences at the edge of their property. They are a statement of identity, a definition of self, one that manifests whenever it feels threatened or is called forth. And now, that thing we all learned in third grade ...