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Shunning a 'fear society'
By SAUL SINGER
The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror
By Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer
George W. Bush loves Natan Sharansky's new book, and it is easy to see why. The cerebral former Soviet dissident and the more-earthy Texan president might seem to have little in common. Yet Sharansky has written a book that explains, better than Bush himself could, the intellectual underpinnings of the president's core beliefs.
The fact that Bush lacked more of a theoretical infrastructure to bolster his faith in democracy is not his fault. Few, if any, non-Americans since de Tocqueville's Democracy in America have captured this quintessentially American idea with such depth and power.
The Case for Democracy is a polemic, in the best sense of the word. It does not attempt to exhaustively treat the mechanics of promoting democracy, or all the pitfalls along the way. As the title states, it is the "case for" democracy as the critical tool in the war that we are now fighting. It presents a way of understanding our world, and provides a paradigm for taming it that, despite its idealism, is more realistic than that of the "realists" have proven to be.
Sharansky's fundamental idea is that the world can only be understood by distinguishing, first and foremost, between "free" and "fear" societies. This is a deeper distinction than its more common cousin, the distinction between democracies and dictatorships. The term democracy is often used loosely to refer to a place that has elections, without looking at the more essential measures of a free society.
Sharansky and his co-author, former Jerusalem Post columnist Ron Dermer, posit a simple "town square" test of freedom: "Can a person walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment or physical harm? If he can, then that person is living in a free society. If not, it's a fear society."
We must know how to identify a free society, because only such societies can be trusted to live in peace with their neighbors. The converse is also true: A fear society is incapable of maintaining peace. As the authors put it, "the mechanics of tyranny make non-democracies inherently belligerent."
Since 9/11, the idea that dictatorship breeds violence and democracy brings peace has become almost banal. Yet this certainly was not so before 9/11, and there is a huge gap between this realization and truly infusing it into national policies.
Twice, for instance, and not coincidentally right after Sharansky had long meetings with Vice President Dick Cheney (in June 2002) and last month with Bush, the president turned Mideast policy upside-down by pinning the responsibility for Palestinian statehood, not on Israel, but on Palestinian adoption of democratic government.
In one of the most fascinating aspects of the book, Sharansky describes his meetings with various Israeli and American leaders.
In the main, these leaders reacted to Sharansky as if he were from another planet. Not that they disagreed with the importance of democracy and human rights. Just not this minute.
For example, when Sharansky met the senior Bush in January 1990, Bush explained it was preferable to keep the then disintegrating Soviet Union together because Gorbachev was a man with whom the US "could do business."
Sharansky disagreed, suggesting that "nothing could or should be done to convince Lithuanians, Latvians, and Ukrainians to reject the independence they had craved for so long." America should, rather, focus on helping all parties manage the transition to democracy.
Bush, Sharansky reports, went on to ignore this advice and instead, in August 1991, went to Ukraine to give his embarrassing "Chicken Kiev" speech in which he warned that country against "suicidal nationalism," just months before they opted for independence.
If anything, Sharansky met with even greater skepticism from Israeli leaders. The greatest conflict came in Rabin's time, when Sharansky warned, at the height of the Oslo euphoria, that encouraging Arafat to create a fear society would doom the prospects for peace.
But Sharansky did not fare that much better in persuading prime ministers of the Right, such as Netanyahu and Sharon, that the name of the game was not finding a Palestinian leader with whom Israel could "do business," but whether the Palestinians lived in a free society.
One might think that at least with human rights groups, Sharansky would find a common language. Yet when he had an emotional reunion in Israel with his Amnesty International comrades who fought for his release, he could not understand the reports they were putting out. These global surveys seemed to portray democracies, such as Israel, as greater human rights violators than Saudi Arabia.
Sharansky proposed a simple solution to this imbalance, which was born in part by the ease of garnering information in free societies. Why not divide their annual report into three parts - for totalitarian regimes, authoritarian dictatorships, and democracies?
"Without these categories" Sharansky explained, "Amnesty was creating a dangerous moral equivalence between countries where human rights are sometimes abused and countries where they are always abused." Amnesty rejected this approach on the grounds that it "does not support or oppose any political system." This baffled him. How could a human rights organization "be impartial about political systems that are inherently hostile to human rights?"
When Bush invited Sharansky to the White House to discuss his book [last month], Sharansky gave him the ultimate compliment: He called Bush a "dissident."
The irony is that, even in our post 9/11 world, Sharansky and Bush are almost alone in their belief that democracy has practical, not just theoretical, power to transform the world. When the rest of the world comes around, The Case for Democracy will be recognized as a seminal and prescient classic.
Some of us know and live the idea of freedom, and live in a free and open society. :thumbsup:
Some of us don't.
Required reading for those of you that still don't understand that the seeds have been sewn for a new century and the seeds are the low maintenance variety.
Shunning a 'fear society'
By SAUL SINGER
The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror
By Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer
George W. Bush loves Natan Sharansky's new book, and it is easy to see why. The cerebral former Soviet dissident and the more-earthy Texan president might seem to have little in common. Yet Sharansky has written a book that explains, better than Bush himself could, the intellectual underpinnings of the president's core beliefs.
The fact that Bush lacked more of a theoretical infrastructure to bolster his faith in democracy is not his fault. Few, if any, non-Americans since de Tocqueville's Democracy in America have captured this quintessentially American idea with such depth and power.
The Case for Democracy is a polemic, in the best sense of the word. It does not attempt to exhaustively treat the mechanics of promoting democracy, or all the pitfalls along the way. As the title states, it is the "case for" democracy as the critical tool in the war that we are now fighting. It presents a way of understanding our world, and provides a paradigm for taming it that, despite its idealism, is more realistic than that of the "realists" have proven to be.
Sharansky's fundamental idea is that the world can only be understood by distinguishing, first and foremost, between "free" and "fear" societies. This is a deeper distinction than its more common cousin, the distinction between democracies and dictatorships. The term democracy is often used loosely to refer to a place that has elections, without looking at the more essential measures of a free society.
Sharansky and his co-author, former Jerusalem Post columnist Ron Dermer, posit a simple "town square" test of freedom: "Can a person walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment or physical harm? If he can, then that person is living in a free society. If not, it's a fear society."
We must know how to identify a free society, because only such societies can be trusted to live in peace with their neighbors. The converse is also true: A fear society is incapable of maintaining peace. As the authors put it, "the mechanics of tyranny make non-democracies inherently belligerent."
Since 9/11, the idea that dictatorship breeds violence and democracy brings peace has become almost banal. Yet this certainly was not so before 9/11, and there is a huge gap between this realization and truly infusing it into national policies.
Twice, for instance, and not coincidentally right after Sharansky had long meetings with Vice President Dick Cheney (in June 2002) and last month with Bush, the president turned Mideast policy upside-down by pinning the responsibility for Palestinian statehood, not on Israel, but on Palestinian adoption of democratic government.
In one of the most fascinating aspects of the book, Sharansky describes his meetings with various Israeli and American leaders.
In the main, these leaders reacted to Sharansky as if he were from another planet. Not that they disagreed with the importance of democracy and human rights. Just not this minute.
For example, when Sharansky met the senior Bush in January 1990, Bush explained it was preferable to keep the then disintegrating Soviet Union together because Gorbachev was a man with whom the US "could do business."
Sharansky disagreed, suggesting that "nothing could or should be done to convince Lithuanians, Latvians, and Ukrainians to reject the independence they had craved for so long." America should, rather, focus on helping all parties manage the transition to democracy.
Bush, Sharansky reports, went on to ignore this advice and instead, in August 1991, went to Ukraine to give his embarrassing "Chicken Kiev" speech in which he warned that country against "suicidal nationalism," just months before they opted for independence.
If anything, Sharansky met with even greater skepticism from Israeli leaders. The greatest conflict came in Rabin's time, when Sharansky warned, at the height of the Oslo euphoria, that encouraging Arafat to create a fear society would doom the prospects for peace.
But Sharansky did not fare that much better in persuading prime ministers of the Right, such as Netanyahu and Sharon, that the name of the game was not finding a Palestinian leader with whom Israel could "do business," but whether the Palestinians lived in a free society.
One might think that at least with human rights groups, Sharansky would find a common language. Yet when he had an emotional reunion in Israel with his Amnesty International comrades who fought for his release, he could not understand the reports they were putting out. These global surveys seemed to portray democracies, such as Israel, as greater human rights violators than Saudi Arabia.
Sharansky proposed a simple solution to this imbalance, which was born in part by the ease of garnering information in free societies. Why not divide their annual report into three parts - for totalitarian regimes, authoritarian dictatorships, and democracies?
"Without these categories" Sharansky explained, "Amnesty was creating a dangerous moral equivalence between countries where human rights are sometimes abused and countries where they are always abused." Amnesty rejected this approach on the grounds that it "does not support or oppose any political system." This baffled him. How could a human rights organization "be impartial about political systems that are inherently hostile to human rights?"
When Bush invited Sharansky to the White House to discuss his book [last month], Sharansky gave him the ultimate compliment: He called Bush a "dissident."
The irony is that, even in our post 9/11 world, Sharansky and Bush are almost alone in their belief that democracy has practical, not just theoretical, power to transform the world. When the rest of the world comes around, The Case for Democracy will be recognized as a seminal and prescient classic.
Some of us know and live the idea of freedom, and live in a free and open society. :thumbsup:
Some of us don't.
Required reading for those of you that still don't understand that the seeds have been sewn for a new century and the seeds are the low maintenance variety.
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