June 16, 2015

Word: Magna Carta's silent 800th birthday

Pablo Julian Davis, Interfluency - June 15, 2015 marks an astonishing, almost inconceivable anniversary: 800 years since the signing of Magna Carta, at Runnymede, and with it the foundational idea that there are limits upon the power of the sovereign. That our rulers must not be above the law.

Apart from Biblical matters, commemorating events so far in the past is unknown to us....

The barons who forced King John to sign Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215 were fighting for what they saw as their rights and prerogatives as noblemen. They could not have known that the document would become immortal, serving over the centuries as a touchstone in the struggle for human liberty and constitutional government.

Does anyone care? In what passes for right, center, and left on the debased landscape that is the American media, there was scarcely a mention. The websites of Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC each ignored the anniversary. All the New York Times website could manage was an op-ed by Tom Ginsburg scolding us to “stop revering Magna Carta.”

Stop revering it! What an idea! Just who is doing the revering, when the silence on the 800th anniversary is almost deafening.

(National Review and The Nation, at least, have given the anniversary some of the serious attention it deserves. But from what this writer could tell from checking on a dozen mass media sites, the anniversary has passed almost entirely unnoted and unnoticed.)

What is the document about? Strictly speaking, it was a peace treaty between English nobles in revolt against arbitrary royal power, and the monarch, John (“Bad King John,” to countless generations of English schoolchildren, in contrast with “Good Queen Bess”).

After their victory at Runnymede, the rebels forced John to sign a declaration of rights and liberties the king would be bound to respect.

Written in Latin, the Magna Charta Libertatum (Great Charter of Liberties) contained 63 articles, most famously the 39th:

“No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor send upon him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” The 40th article is often cited as well: “To no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay, right or justice.”

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1 comment:

Bruce S said...

I too thought this was a significant event and was dismayed that it did not receive more coverage.

Democracy Now! did cover the event though. If you want the news, ignore mainstream media and come here or check out Democracy Now!