Program 6: The American Declaration of Independence, Gettysburg address and Mandela's Presidental speech

This program contains the above speeches in full, to allow people to 

contrast the aspirational to the historical relaity.

Hard copy to download

Any constructive comments or feedback can be directed to:

ideasthatshapehumanhistory@gmail.com

Transcript

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Ideas that have shaped human history as expressed in poetry, speeches, myth, and documents. A podcast by Alan Anfort.

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This program is about the American Declaration of Independence that was adopted on the 4th of July, 1776, and is coming up for its 250th anniversary. American War of Independence commenced in April of 1775 with the battles of Lexington and Concord. On the 10th of May that year, King George III declared American states to be in rebellion. John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman to draft and present a declaration. Adams persuaded the committee to charge Jefferson with the writing of the original draft, which the Congress then edited. The Declaration gives itself a formal explanation why the Continental Congress voted to declare American independence from Great Britain. The Declaration has proven an influential and globally impactful statement on human rights. The Declaration was viewed by Abraham Lincoln as the moral standard which the United States should strive. He considered it a statement of principle through which the Constitution should be interpreted. The Declaration reads When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitles them. A decent respect to the opinion of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to separation. We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that amongst these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights governments are instituted amongst men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed. That when any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness. Prudence indeed will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes, and accordingly all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpation, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism. It is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient suffering of these colonies, and such is now the necessity which constrained them to alter their former system of government. The history of the present king of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having a direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid will. He has refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained, and when so suspended he utterly neglected to attend to them. He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the rights of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only. He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records for the sole purposes of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures. He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people. He has refused for a long time after such dissolutions to cause others to be elected, whereby the legislative powers incapable of annihilation have returned to the people at large for their exercise, the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without and convulsion within. He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these states for that purpose, obstructing laws of naturalization of foreigners, refusing to pass others to encourage the migration hither, and raising the conditions on new appropriations of land. He has obstructed the administration of justice by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judicial powers, he has made judges dependent on his will alone for the tenure of their officers and the amount at payment of their salaries. He has erected a multitude of new offices and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance. He has kept among us in time of peace standing armies without the consent of our legislature. He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power. He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws, giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation, for quartering large bodies of armed troops among us, for protecting them by mock trials from punishment for any murders which they commit on the inhabitants of these states, for cutting off our trade with all parts of the world or for imposing taxes on us without our consent, for depriving us in many cases of the benefit of trial by jury, for transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offences, for abolishing the free system of English law in a neighbouring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government and enlarging its boundaries, so as to render it once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these colonies, for taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws and altering fundamentally the forms of our government, for suspending our own legislatures and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever. He has abdicated government here by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us. He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. He is at this time transporting large army of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny already began with circumstances of cruelty and profidity scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages and totally unworthy of the head of a civilized nation. He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or fall themselves by their hand. He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us and has endeavoured to bring the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions. In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms. Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice magnanimity, and we have conjured them by ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voices of justice and consanguinity. We must therefore acquiesce in necessity which denounces our separation and holds them as we hold the rest of mankind enemies in war, in peace friends. We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America in General Congress assemble, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World for the rectitude of our intentions, do in the name and by the authority the good people of these colonies solemnly publish and declare that these united colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states, and that they are absolved from all allegiances to the British crown, and that all political connections between them and the state of Great Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved, and that as free independent states they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and do all other acts and things which independent states may have right to. And for the support of this declaration with the firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honour. Signed by order and in behalf of the Congress John Hancock President. On the eleventh of february nineteen ninety, Nelson Mandela was released from Robins Island prison where he had been imprisoned from nineteen sixty two until his release. Four years later he became president of South Africa following a fully democratic elections after the fall of the apartheid regime. On the tenth of may nineteen ninety four, in Pretoria, he delivered the following speech Your Majesties, your Highnesses, distinguished guest, comrades and friends. Today all of us do by our presence here and by our celebrations in other parts of our country and the world confer glory and hope to newborn liberty. Out of the experience of extraordinary human disaster that lasted too long must be born a society of which all humanity will be proud. Our daily needs as ordinary South Africans must produce an actual South African reality that will reinforce humanity's belief in justice, strengthen its confidence in the nobility of the human soul, and sustain all our hopes for a glorious life for all. All this we owe both to ourselves and to the peoples of the world who are so well represented here today. To my compatriots, I have no hesitation in saying that each of us is as intimately attached to the soil of this beautiful country as are the famous jacaranda trees of Pretoria and the mimosa trees of the bushfeld. Each time one of us touches the soil of this land, we feel a sense of personal renewal. The national mood changes as the seasons change. We are moved by a sense of joy and exhilaration when the grass turns green and the flowers bloom. That spiritual and physical oneness we all share with this common homeland explains the depth of pain we all carry in our hearts as we saw our country tear itself apart in a terrible conflict and as we saw it spurned, outlawed and isolated by the peoples of the world precisely because it has become the universal base of the pernicious ideology and practice of racism and racial oppression. We, the people of South Africa, feel fulfilled that humanity has taken us back into its bosom, and we who were outlaws not so long ago, have today become given the rare privilege to be the host to the nations of the world on our own soil. We thank our distinguished international guests for having come to take possession with the people of our country of what is, after all, a commentary for justice, for peace, for human dignity. We trust that you will continue to stand by us as we tackle the challenges of building peace, prosperity, non sexism, non racialism, and democracy. We deeply appreciate the role that the masses of our people and their political mass democracy, religious, women, youth, business, traditional and other leaders have played to bring about this conclusion. Not the least among them is my second deputy president, the honourable FW Declerc. We would also like to pay tribute to our security forces in all their ranks for the distinguished role they have played in securing our first democratic elections and the transition to democracy from bloodthirsty forces which still refuse to see the light. The time for healing of the wounds has come. The moment to bridge the chasm that divide us has come. The time to build is upon us. We have at last achieved our political emancipation. We pledge ourselves to liberate all our people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discrimination. We succeeded to take our last step to freedom in conditions of relative peace. We commit ourselves to the construction of a complete, just and lasting peace. We have triumphed in an effort to implant hope in the breasts of millions of our people. We enter into a covenant that we shall build the society in which all South Africans, black and white, will be able to walk tall without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity, a rainbow nation at peace itself and the world. As a token of its commitment to the renewal of our country, the new internal government of national unity will, as a matter of urgency, address the issue of amnesty for various categories of our people who are currently serving terms of imprisonment. We dedicate this day to all the heroes and heroines in this country and the rest of the world who sacrificed in many ways and surrendered their lives so that we could be free. Their dreams have today become a reality. Freedom is their reward. We are both humbled and elevated by the honor and privilege that you, the people of South Africa, have bestowed on us as the first president of a united democratic, non racial, non sexist South Africa to lead our country out of the valley of darkness. We understand it still that there is no easy road to freedom. We know it well that none of us acting alone can achieve success. We must therefore act together as a united people for national reconciliation, for nation building, for the birth of a new world, let there be justice for all, let there be peace for all, let there be work, bread, water and salt for all. Let each know that for each the body, the mind and the soul have been free to fulfil themselves. Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another and suffer the indignity of being the skunk of the world. Let freedom reign. The sun shall never set on so glorious a human achievement. God bless Africa. Thank you.