Guiding Principles
My Cause
Many lawyers regard law as essentially a game played by lawyers to see who is the most clever at the procedural frustration of their opponent while maintaining a pretence of cordiality. This is summarized by the philosophy: you fight the case but not the cause.
I believe law is the front line between the growing and insatiable appetite of the State for money, power, and prestige on the one hand and the rights and freedoms of the individual on the other. There is a war on freedom by the State and all power and control is on one side. In this war, every case is a battle and the war is won or lost by each battle. In this war, my cause is Freedom.
On Living Free
CONCLUDING REMARKS OF THE SPEECH OF DOUGLAS CHRISTIE GIVEN IN KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA,
THURSDAY, JULY 15, l999:
Where we are gathered together in the Spirit, we are promised hope. “Where two or three are gathered together in My Name there am I in the midst.” We were all created in the image and likeness of God. Everywhere these internationalists try to reduce us to the level of animals who carry burdens for the welfare of the state. We are more than wallets for bureaucrats. We are men and women with dreams, with vision, and with hope.
There are many times the government makes us feel outnumbered, alone, intimidated, and oppressed.
The government is a powerful and oppressive force. Should I just hide what I have learned here and use it for my own benefit, or should I talk about it and become a target of the government? Should I risk my security in the fight, or should I run away and hide my light under a bushel, so to speak?
I am reminded in that question of the words in the movie Braveheart attributed to Wallace as he faces his rag tag army before the Battle of Stirling Bridge. Upon seeing the huge arrays of heavy cavalry of the English some of his men are afraid. Wallace asks them, “What will you do? Will you fight or will you run?” Someone (the usual wise-cracker) shouts “We will run and we will live.”
Wallace replies, “Yes, you might live for a while and if you fight you might die, but years from now, dying alone in your bed, which one among you would not give all your days from this day to that for just one chance to come back here and show these English that they may take our land, they may take our lives, but they will never take our freedom.” Stirling Bridge was a historical battle in which for the first time men on foot defeated the whole array of English heavy cavalry, and the beginning of Scotland’s war for Independence.
In l996 as I stood on Abbey Crag from the huge height of the Wallace Monument and looked at Stirling Castle and thought of those days I realized the biggest enemy is still the same… fear itself is all that defeats us.
We can, with hope and faith, achieve miracles. We can turn the tide of history, for God knows there has never been a time when the government and evil forces conspired more to take away our freedom. Technology gives them the means to make George Orwell’s nightmare state come true, and they are doing it.
But never underestimate the power of truth and the power of goodness in the world. Never underestimate the effects of courageous virtue. Never underestimate yourself. Don’t run away. Stay and fight so you won’t have to wish for the chance to come back here and show these governments, tax collectors, socialist manipulators, that they can take our wealth and our lands, but not without a fight, and they can never take our freedom. For them we must have two words, “No Surrender.”
My ethnic roots are in Scotland. My heritage is there. What I am in my genes my spirit often derives from its history. So I think of the words of Robert the Bruce at Bannockburn in 1323, long after Wallace had been executed:
The Scots and English were locked in a pitched battle. 8000 Scots faced 25,000 English troops commanded by Edward II on June 23, l323 as a result of a wager with the Keeper of Stirling Castle made by Robert’s brother. The battle was a close and undecided event, and Angus MacDonald presented himself to Bruce on the field and he said, “My hope is constant in you”.
I, Douglas Christie, say to you my hope is constant in you for you have the God-given intelligence, the courage, and the strength of character to be undaunted in this struggle.
It is the struggle for your future, the struggle for your children and descendants. It is the struggle for your God given liberty to be who you are. Because, sure as I stand before you, we fail ourselves if we fail our children; if we fail our God, we will see a night of slavery, oppression, and spiritual death the likes of which this world has never seen. The power of government to seal and number, to watch, to regulate, to control and oppress, to catalogue, to monitor, to mark us and manipulate us of every nation and people, has never been greater.
But, neither has there been before such means to communicate, travel, educate and build a network of freedom.
The choice is ours. If not now, when? If not here, where? If not you and I, who?
We are the trusted ones. We are the builders of our destiny. Either we run or we fight. Either we surrender or we reorganize, educate, build and benefit. Either we reach out fearlessly to our fellow citizens and carry the message of freedom, or we sit forever in the back yard waiting for the inevitable.
Our life is God’s gift to us. Our actions in life are our gift to God. May our gift be as much as we can give, for we were given all that we need. I believe we can. I believe we will. God Bless You All.”
On Being a Defense Counsel
It has been my experience that the defense counsel is the final bulwark of freedom.
The state has unlimited funds, professional witnesses, experienced and trained to testify, an army of experts who sometimes bend their evidence to suit the highest and most powerful bidder which is almost always the state. The state pays the judges and all the court staff, even down to the person who cares for the jury. In the end it is the state who even pays the jurors”” lunch and provides for its every need, while it is sequestered.
The state has in most cases, a sympathetic media which has enormous power in advance of a trial, to precondition the public including a potential jury, to the desired outcome.
The state has the respect and deference of the judge whom the state has appointed and more often than not, the state-appointed judges come from the same background and preconditioning as the prosecutor, having worked directly for the state as a prosecutor or for one of the large, established law firms.
All the power, prestige, credibility, professional training and psychological conditioning is on the side of the state.
The defense, on the other hand, has merely a defense counsel, usually one person, alone, isolated, under-funded, depressed and disrespected, unlikely to receive favors from the state if he or she fights too hard or is terribly effective.
Being defense counsel is the toughest job of all. This is particularly true for the representation of unpopular accused or person previously vilified in the media. for all those against the accused, the defense counsel must give his undivided loyalty to the client, subject only to ethical obligations to break no law him or herself.
There are too many half-hearted defense counsel whose primary loyalty is to themselves. If the client has money, they take it. If the client wins, it””s their efforts that did it. If the client loses, it””s their own tough luck and bad judgment. This rationale is the end product of too many hard knocks and disillusionments of defense counsel.
Defense counsel must place their client””s interest and justice above their own. It is the most demanding job in the world, but when it is done right, the most rewarding, morally, and sometimes even materially. It is a vocation which demands the highest ethical commitment of character.
The state sanctions its presence and merely tolerates it but seldom honors its best practitioners. For those who “identify” too much with their clients, it is much like it was said of Him who dined with tax collectors and forgave prostitutes and ate with unclean hands.
But without the passionate commitment of defense counsel, what does the accused have? He has nothing between him and the well-organized, well-paid, highly respected army of the state.
It is only the defense counsel who has the potential to make the presumption of innocence a reality and restore the possibility of a fair fight to what would otherwise be nothing but a lynch mob.
On Principle
In my opinion, freedom is the source of all that is good in human beings. Everywhere in the modern world, the socialist state is using fear, intimidation, and oppression of one form or another to take away freedom and turn people into mindless, heartless, tax-paying treadmill automatons for the bureaucratic state.
My life””s work has been to fight for the freedom of the individual to seek truth in his or her own way and having found what they believe to be truth, the freedom to express it, to live it and cherish it without fear, subject only to the limit of allowing others the same freedom.
Truth has no need of coercion. Those who seek to coerce usually fear truth. I have seen the state seek through its monopoly on power to attempt to create and artificially maintain through force, a monopoly on truth.
My entire life has been dedicated to fighting and defeating this coercive and destructive spiritual tyranny being created by the various states of the world. I stand for the individual as the noblest creation of God.
I stand with the individual through any and all persecution, by the forces of conformity and oppression. I stand for freedom because without it, there is no hope for truth and no need for it, as truth requires a commitment of the heart and mind to be appreciated. Without freedom, truth becomes a hollow platitude devoid of any love or personal commitment. Men who speak the truth under coercion honor truth with their lips but not with their hearts.
How to Deal with Attacks
All my life I have been treated as an outcast. In my youth, I could not fit into the 60””s generation, being too conservative, not drinking or doing drugs. As a young lawyer, I was not within the accepted mold. As a middle-aged lawyer, I was called upon to defend the heretics of our time, the alleged racists, anti-semites and holocaust deniers. I came to realize there were reasons for each of my clients”” beliefs and expressions which were misrepresented and misunderstood by the malicious media, but once heard directly, were often both rational and plausible, but more importantly, that they had the right to think what they chose. To defend them on that basis I too became identified as a modern-day heretic to the liberal establishment, which brooks no dissent and is fervent in its quest to destroy its critics.
I discovered my office windows smashed so many times I had to board them up. Graffiti covered my office walls. Meetings where I spoke were destroyed by a clamoring mob unwilling to allow the process of reasoned discourse to take place, if any prior public notice was given whereby people might hear directly from me and judge for themselves. I discovered the media generally preferred to run their own smear campaign rather than allow the public to form their own opinions and hence anything I said was subject to snide editorial comments rather than any direct quote from me.
I have discovered that principle has a high price, but offers an even higher reward. I am friends with some of the great and noble souls of our time who dare to defy the mob and its low-life concept of group-think.
Generally I deal with attacks by ignoring them, and go on to do the job as best I can of defending principles I believe in. After all, it is God whose final judgment I hope for, not the national media of the New World Order.