All this week (Monday through Friday) we are paying homage to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s most famous State of the Union speech—particularly the paragraphs known as The Four Freedoms. On Jan. 6, 1941, Roosevelt presented his justifications for American involvement in World War II, making the case for continued aid to Great Britain and greater production of war industries at home. “In helping Britain,” Roosevelt explained, “the United States was fighting for the universal freedoms that all people possessed.” Those freedoms are:
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Freedom of Speech
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Freedom of Worship
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Freedom From Want
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Freedom From Fear
Bringing this into the present, the world is threatened by an ever growing arsenal of deadly weapons. They are not nuclear but arguably have the same power to obliterate liberty, if not life. As the election cycle begins anew and strategies for cyber warfare are made ready, The Daily Heller asked Viktor Koen to conceive what we call “The Five Cyber Freedoms.” Koen’s illustrations are not done in the style of Norman Rockwell, who famously rendered Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms in four consecutive issues of The Saturday Evening Post (Feb. 20–March 13, 1943), as well as on posters to sell war bonds. Here, Koen takes on threats to our basic freedoms during this time of digital trolls and cyber wars. His are not romantic, but cautionary depictions of the loss of freedoms during the social media conglomerate/Trump era.
Please stay tuned every morning this week for the rest of The Five Cyber Freedoms. (For a printable JPG, click here.) Our first is arguably the most critical and fragile freedom we have.
Viktor Koen for Printmag.com
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