The success and rise to prominence of Western civilisation was fueled by liberty.

That liberty comprised a fair degree of freedom to express and exchange ideas and a system of just laws based upon the mores and customs of the people, the principle that a person is innocent until proven guilty and is entitled to a fair trial, the recognition of human rights.

Yet those freedoms were far from complete, often abused, often more PR than reality and did not extend to peoples such as Native Americans, Native Australians and Blacks who were oppressed by those ascendant western nations.

They were incomplete and inconsistent, where they were real at all, and often little more than the idea or belief that freedoms existed.

But they just happened to be, warts and all, an improvement on anything else available to much of humanity at the time.

Our civilisation was energised and flowered thanks to that imperfect modicum of liberty or the belief that liberty existed.

This tells us that Man thrives in Liberty, even in the wan glow of promised liberty.

And as that wan light of liberty flickers and dies, as the belief that it exists fades, as examples of its corruption and demise proliferate, the civilisation it invigorated sickens and dies.

Imagine then, if we REALLY made liberty and justice in their fullest sense available to ALL people everywhere without fear or favor, quibble, waffle, insincerity, compromise or prevarication.

Imagine if we REALLY delivered the promise and dream of Liberty and the protection of true justice. Not pale promises of liberty and justice but the real things in their fullest sense?

If the aforementioned pale ghost of liberty could so propel our civilisation forward, how much would our civilisation flower and surge to greatness where Man's spirit is freed to to the fullest, sincerest degree to rise to greater heights?

The corollary of that is this: to the degree that liberty and justice are not extended to all, to the degree that they are withdrawn and become the privilege of some at the expense of the many, to the degree that some are exempt from just laws and others are denied he protection of justice, the civilisation sickens and fails.

And we are watching this phenomenon play out in front of our eyes.

Liberty and justice for all without fear or favour or exemption are not luxuries or something that would be "nice".

They are the foundation stone upon which a civilisation fit for the broad human community stands.

To the extent that true liberty and justice are missing, we have barbarism and human misery.

Look around you.

The direction to go in, then, is to extend liberty and justice, the rights and responsibilities thereof, to all human beings without exemption.

If we only that and nothing else (even though there is a good deal more we can do), we'd win the prize of a happy and more peaceful world and a better game for all.