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What is a demagogue? According to the encyclopedia, a demagogue is a politician skilled in oratory, flattery, and invective, evasive in discussing vital issues, promising everything to everybody, appealing to the passions rather than the reason of the public, and arousing racial, religious, and class prejudices.
History tells us that personal liberty is most often the demagogue’s first victim, particularly when popular sentiment is whipped up against some internal or foreign enemy. In other words, liberty and demagogos cannot coexist. The ancient Greek word "demagogos" means simply a spokesman for the people or, more pejoratively, a leader of the mob. “Modern usage implies rhetorical gifts and the ability to arouse an audience, usually with the promise of radical change.”
We have been warned of three kinds of people: charlatans, demagogues, and politicians. And, more often than not, someone will rise up who is all three of these characters wrapped into one. Our liberty is the most precious possession. Many will aim to rob us of it and, by so doing, add to their own power, while trying to force us to become robots. We need to be vigilant and guard our liberty with our very lives.
Desperate situations spawn desperate measures. Not having learned the lessons of history, many people will turn to charlatans, demagogues, and politicians with dire consequences. Just a few old and recent cases of this tragic misstep should warn us not to be victimized in the future by frauds.
From the primitive land of the Arabian Peninsula of over 14 centuries ago rose Muhammad, an illiterate hired hand of a rich widow Khadija, claiming that he was the bearer of a perfect life prescription from God—the Quran. He claimed humanity could do no better than to follow its precepts as well as to emulate Muhammad’s own life example for a guarantee of bliss and salvation. In exchange for this, people must embrace Islam—surrender—by surrendering their Liberty to Muhammad.
Question: Why would the All-Wise Lord choose an illiterate desert-dweller, of all the people in the world, to be his messenger? Why choose a man who couldn’t read or write, a man who, over the course of 20 years, claimed to be receiving periodic revelations from God and had to rely on others who could write to jot down his recollections? These recollections were recorded as the word-for-word literal utterances and commandments of God. Furthermore, a dozen versions of the book of Allah, the Quran, turned up and a fallible Caliph selected one of them and had the rest burned. Burning books has ever since been a companion to Islam’s mission.
To this day, in places where Islam rules, many books are banned, newspapers and magazines are systematically either censored or shut down, and other non-print media are methodically blocked. Then liberty, deeply cherished by democracies, is replaced by submission—unquestioning obedience and adherence to the dictates and precepts of the all-knowing and all-wise Allah.
