Natan Sharansky's Case for Democracy

Sharansky's Case For Democracy

Michael Ledeen noted at his AEI panel on the democratic revolutionary movement last week that Richard Perle assigned those present to readNathan Sharansky's The Case For Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror in order to understand what President George W. Bush is up to.

Well, I read it, and I see why Perle likes it, because the core argument of the book is that the Jackson-Vanik amendment was responsible for the collapse of the USSR as well as the release of dissidents and refuseniks like Sharansky. Since Perle was an aide to the late Senator Henry ("Scoop") Jackson, and was involved with the issue, it must be nice to read such a grateful testimonial.

Obviously, Sharansky's account of his suffering and the importance of the Helsinki accords and Jackson-Vanik amendment are compelling.

The problem comes in applying the lessons to the current situation. Because Sharansky notes that his mentor, Andrei Sakharov, called for changing the fear society of the USSR to a freedom society (Sharansky's terms) in order to compete with the West in a comptetitive race to the future. That is, the USSR and the USA shared the same Western enlightenment goals of human progress, scientific and technological development, and education. The prestige enjoyed by scientists and academicians in the former USSR gave Sakharov the status to make his views widely known -- Sharansky had also studied physics. Thus, the USSR and USA were ostensibly headed towards the same end, just by different means. In the case of the USA the means required freedom, in the case of the USSR the means required fear. Dissidents in the USSR shared the same goals as their American adversaries.

This is not true of some anti-American dissidents in unfree societies today.

Sharanky describes his prison life with harrowing accuracy, and what really sticks out is that Sharansky describes his fellow inmates, whether Russian Orthodox, nationalists, democrats, or Jewish refuseniks as committed to non-violence, tolerance, and other values even Voltaire would understand and support. That is, supporting Russian dissidents meant supporting allies of freedom and democracy.

When it comes to Israel, Sharansky does an excellent job of describing the hostility of the "Human Rights" NGOs to the Jewish state. And he talks at length about the importance of ending the fear societies in the Arab world, for the sake of their Arab populations. He says the West should champion oppressed Arab advocates of freedom societies. No argument there.

But there is something important missing from the book--and from Perle, Ledeen, et al. when they talk about supporting democracy.

What is to be done with those opponents of the fear societies who don't want freedom societies, who don't want progress, who don't value science, who don't believe in tolerance? What is to be done with those, who under the cover of "democracy" are actually advocating tyranny--who want to turn back the clock to the Middle Ages? That is, Islamist extremists who are poised to exploit "democracy-building" projects through the practice of "taqqiyeh"?

For example, what should Russia do about Chechnya? Sharansky does not discuss this. Yet is was the Chechen crisis that caused the collapse of the liberal democratic consensus in Russian politics. Given a choice between security and democracy, the population chose security--because "democracy" led to an Islamist extremist rogue state, governed by Sha'aria, tield to the Taliban and Bin Laden, that practiced kidnapping, drug-dealing, and oppression--and then launched attacks on neighboring Russian lands.

If an independent Chechnya turned into a disaster, eventually leading to the Second Chechen War, what might prevent a new state of Palestine from following that dismal path?

So, while convinced in principle that America should support democracy, helping those who seek to build a freedom society rather than a fear society, I think Sharansky and his advocates need to better work out some distinctions between those who are truly commited to democracy -- including the protection of minorities -- and those who might use it as a tactic toward seizing power, making matters worse than they are today.

Sharansky is well worth reading, and I'm glad Perle mentioned it. The book is well-written and thought-provoking. But it marks the beginning of a discussion, not the end.

Victor Davis Hanson: Bush Was Desperate After 9/11

Victor Hanson admits that Bush's "Democracy Revolution" agenda is a Hail-Mary pass born of fear and desperation:

Only democracy was new. And only democracy -- and its twin of open-market capitalism -- offered any hope to end the plague of tribalism, gender apartheid, human-rights abuses, religious fanaticism, and patriarchy that so flourished within such closed societies.

It was not just idealism but rather abject desperation that fueled the so-called neoconservative quest to try something new.

Hanson's confession rings true, yet reminds one that while necessity may indeed be the mother of invention, "abject desperation" does not always lead to the correct solution to any particular problem.

Not to quibble with Hanson, but neither democracy nor capitalism are new to the Middle East, and they are no guarantee against terror. For example, Lebanon had both, before it was destroyed in a calamitous civil war, a base for fanatics, extremists, terrorists, and so forth.

Inside the Pew Charitable Trusts

Martin Wooster takes on the big foundation's multi-million dollar lobbying campaign: "What is striking about this confession has less to do with campaign-finance reform--a bust anyway--than with the stealth politics of Pew and foundations like it. There are certain do-good entities, and Pew is one of them, that enjoy a charmed life: On NPR and in David Broder columns, to take a couple of leading indicators, they are treated as benign truth-tellers, so high-minded as to be beyond politics. But they are, naturally, as partisan as any 'special interest' could be."

Bush Wins Nobel Peace Prize (April Fool!)

In a surprise announcement, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has announced that George Walker Bush, President of the United States, has been selected to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for 2005.

In its announcement, the Norwegian Nobel Committee cited Bush's lifelong commitment to world peace, democracy, and human development. He was congratulated for swiftly sending two US Presidents to South Asia with Tsunami relief; overthrowing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein; increasing trade with Africa; supporting democracy in formar Soviet republics of Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan; and improving relations with the EU, Russia, and China. In addition, the Nobel Prize Committee said President Bush deserved special recognition for his work to end the Arab-Israeli conflict, noting "the American President's steadfast support for a Palestinian state living in peace with her Israeli neighbor."

President Bush will receive his award in Oslo this October from the King of Norway.

Instapundit on the Sandy Berger Scandal

Instapundit.com seems to think Clinton's former National Security Advisor is a crook who got off with a slap on the wrist: "So Berger stole, and destroyed, classified documents as part of a politically motivated coverup. Let's just be clear about that. Criminal penalties, aside, the man's career in public life should be over, and he certainly should never have access to classified documents again. Unfortunately, the penalty he'll actually receive looks rather light -- certainly lighter than most folks who stole and destroyed classified documents would undergo. That makes it all the more important that the details of his misbehavior get plenty of attention, and that they're remembered long-term."

House of Fools

Richard Perle's comment yesterday that he couldn't imagine anyone choosing slavery over freedom set me to thinking about Andrei Konchalovsky's stunning Russian dramaHouse of Fools. In the tradition of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and King of Hearts, it has a different mentality. For in this film, the mad are not sane and the sane are not mad. Rather, the mad are really mad. The sane are really sane. But the situation and the suffering they face when put into each other's worlds is the conflict that makes the movie. What they have in common is their humanity. Mad and sane, Russian and Chechen, they are all human.

House of Fools is set during the first Chechen War (1996), in a small mental hospital on the border of the breakaway republic. As fighting nears, the doctor and nurse abandon the patients--a cross-section of the Russian public including everyone from dissidents to poets to Armenians and Muslims--ostensibly to find a bus in order to evacuate the hospital. Left to their own devices, the patients run amok. Then, the Chechens arrive, occupying the hospital. Some Russian troops follow, return a dead soldier, and sell the Chechens ammunition in exchange for drugs. The Chechen and Russian commander discover that they had been comrades-in-arms in Afghanistan, so the Russian lets the Chechen keep the dollars he had promised him ("for your mullah"). A beautiful and sensitive mental patient falls in love with one of the Chechen fighters, and tries to marry him--betraying her personal icon, Canadian singer Bryan Adams, to whom she has erected a shrine in her hospital room. (Canadians are saints, apparently, and heaven is a song and dance party on a passing train).

In the end, fighting resumes, so the wedding is not completed.

Then a band of Russians takes over the hosptital, chasing out the Chechens. Blood and death everywhere. The gates of the hospital are open, the patients could escape--but they decide to stay, and wait for the doctor to return. He does, and the patients remain in their "House of Fools," as the Russian soldiers leave.

What is striking about this film is that the Russian mental patients find life in the hospital is preferable to life outside. That is, where Jack Nicholson chooses freedom in Milosz Forman's film, Yulia Vsotskaya chooses to stay in confinement rather than go into the raging war between Russians and Chechens. The Russian hospital is a true asylum, a shelter from the violence and fear of the outside world. And while the American hospital is run by sadistic nurse Ratched, Dom Durakov's Russian hospital is commanded by a kindly doctor, who really does have his patients at heart.

So, whether one chooses freedom or security, it seems to me, depends on what is happening outside. Compared to the Chechen insanity, the mental hospital, as crazy as it is, is better. Now, it is pretty clear that the hospital is a symbol of the old USSR, the doctor leaving the collapse of the old system, the insanity that followed the chaos of the "bandit captialist" period, and the Chechen War--the Chechen War. The cast of characters is just so Russian--poets, dancers, dissidents, whores. The old saying that Russia has two problems--Roads and Fools--this is about the fools that are Russia,and humankind.

I can't recommend "House of Fools" highly enough. It is the Clash of Civilizations on a truly human scale. It is tragic, comic, and profound in turns. And should be required viewing for all "democracy revolutionists..."

Bush's plunge in polls

... tied to domestic issues - The Washington Times: " Unfortunately for Mr. Bush, Gallup also found that only 35 percent of Americans approve of his handling of Social Security, compared with 56 percent who disapprove. While other surveys show greater approval of the president's Social Security stance, he generally polls worse on domestic issues than foreign."

Bottom Line: Bush is squandering his second honeymoon on an unpopular domestic agenda. If he can't deliver, it may even weaken his hand in foreign policy matters, because weakness is contagious. My 2 cents: Bush should pick a couple of battles he can win.

Victor Davis Hanson Talks to Saudi Arabia

VDH's Private Papers has an interesting interview by Idris A. Ahmed, editor of Al-watan, a Saudi newspaper, where Victor Hanson contemplates the state of the world without the United States (something some people in Saudia Arabia might be praying for?)...

Roger L. Simon: Oil-for-Food Cover-Up?

Roger L. Simon: Mystery Novelist and Screenwriter suggests the Volcker report may be just that: "To my knowledge the committee has never gone to Nigeria, or anywhere in the developing world, to pursue its investigation. They have restricted themselves to the more comfortable venues of New York, Paris, London and Geneva. But the heart of Africa and the Middle East is where the information on Oil-for-Food can be found."

You Say You Want A Revolution...(II)

John Fund, in today's Wall Street Journal, calls for an uprising--against President Hillary Clinton, after she's elected in 2008...

More on Kofi Annan from Roger L. Simon

He's not happy that the media is reporting that Annan has been "exonerated:"

The NYT has a superficially stern but also superficially naive editorial on the Volcker Committee interim report this morning. They assert that the panel "largely exonerated Mr. Annan of personal corruption in the awarding of a contract to a company that employed his son." But that's not quite true. They must realize the committee found no evidence of such corruption so far. Quite a different thing. And the Times' writers (you can be sure this was a thoroughly vetted editorial) were also aware (it is briefly alluded to near the bottom of the editorial) that three years' worth of Oil-for-Food documents were shredded by Annan's deputy. You don't have to be Woodward and Bernstein to smell a rat here.

That they do not call for Kofi's resignation is also interesting. The Times itself moved quickly to change executive editors when it was found that a reporter, Jayson Blair, had fabricated stories. Yet Oil-for-Food, even at the level that it is currently understood, is far worse than a few made up tales. It concerns mass thievery, the starvation of children and the very nature of Security Council decision-making leading up to war. If this isn't a firing-offense, what is?

You Say You Want a Revolution...

Well, you know, we all want to change the world... (in the words of Lennon-McCartney).

This morning I heard Richard Perle, Michael Novak, Michael Rubin, Laurent Murawiec,and Michael Ledeen discuss the worldwide democratic revolution at the American Enterprise Institute, at a symposium called Is It a Revolution or What?. I'll give them credit for this, they seemed committed to the proposition that liberty is spreading throughout the world, thanks to the Bush doctrine. But one had to pause when Ledeen concluded the session with words from a dead Bolshevik: "It's not a revolution in one country, for those comrades who remember these things..."

You should be able to watch the whole thing by clicking the "video" link on the AEI website. Perhaps David Horowitz might be able to tell us precisely where the Bush Democratic Revolution fits into the Marxist-Leninist theoretical paradigm of "Permanent Revolution."

Unfortunately, as the grand words rolled on and on during the session, I couldn't help remembering the German Democratic Republic and the People's Democratic Republic of Kampuchea, not to mention Iran, which is officially a democracy.

At the seminar, Perle said he couldn't imagine people actually choosing slavery over freedom, but it has happened throughout history--especially when people fear for their safety and security. Unless America is very careful, there is a risk that some of today's "democrats" may develop into tomorrow's tyrants. You don't have to look far from home. For example, the United States supported Fidel Castro as a democratic reformer, against Batista, in the early days of the Cuban Revolution. And President Carter favored the overthrow of the Shah of Iran.

Remembering Harold Cruse

Today's New York Times has an obituary of the well-known author of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual:

Harold Wright Cruse was born in Petersburg, Va., on March 8, 1916, and moved with his father, a railway porter, to New York City as a young child. After graduating from high school, he worked at several jobs but was ambitious to become a writer. He served in the Army in Europe during World War II.

After the war, he attended the City College of New York briefly but never graduated. In 1947, he joined the Communist Party and wrote drama and literary criticism for The Daily Worker, although he was never doctrinaire. In the 1950's, he wrote several plays, and in the mid-1960's he was co-founder, with LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka), of the Black Arts Theater and School in Harlem.The more he learned about the arts, the more he deplored what he saw as a white appropriation of black culture, particularly as exemplified by George Gershwin's folk opera "Porgy and Bess." He called for blacks to embrace their cultural uniqueness.

His later books include "Rebellion or Revolution?", "Plural but Equal: A Critical Study of Blacks and Minorities and America's Plural Society" and "The Essential Harold Cruse: A Reader" edited by William Jelani Cobb with a foreword by Stanley Crouch.

Harold Cruse impressed me when he attended a symposium on the future of the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities we organized in 1996 at New York University. He made a passionate and personal presentation, and permitted us to publish his text in our book, The National Endowments: A Critical Symposium. In our panel discussions, Cruse was intelligent, irreverent, and afraid of nobody. His very participation--at a time when we were being shunned by the intellectual and cultural establishment who would permit no criticisms of the cultural agencies--was a very much appreciated gesture.

His book Plural But Equal was not only thought-provoking and original, it probably will be read for many years to come. Interestingly, the writer who introduced his collected writings, Stanley Crouch, was also a member of our NYU symposium.

One didn't have to agree with everything he had to say, to agree that Harold Cruse said many things worth saying. It was a privilege to have met him.

Agustin Blazquez is Angry With His Local PBS Station...

Here's why, the Cuban-American filmmaker sent us a copy of his complaint:

Ms. Sheryl Lahti, Director of Audience Services

WETA Channel 26
2775 South Quincy Street
Arlington, VA 22206
703 998-3407
Slahti@weta.com

Dear Ms. Lahti,

On Saturday, March 26, 2005, while watching “Viewer Favorites” on your public television station, I was shocked and offended by the singer Eric Burton - formerly of the group “The Animals” – wearing a Che Guevara shirt while performing a song on a segment of your presentation.

As a Cuban American, as a writer and a filmmaker, I am acquainted with the Che as a mass murderer who executed, without trial, many Cubans at La Cabaña fortress in Havana as well as in the Sierra Maestra Mountains before 1959.

Below I enclose a recent open letter from the famous saxophonist Paquito D’Rivera to the famous guitarist Carlos Santana who sported a Che t-shirt while performing at the last Oscar Awards ceremony.

Below D’Rivera’s letter I am enclosing one of my published articles, this one about Che.

It is shocking that your educational public television station is not aware of Che’s criminal record and let pass such an insensitive and offensive display of disrespect to Che’s victims and the Cuban American community in the U.S. If Mr. Burton had worn a Hitler shirt, he wouldn’t have been presented – rightfully so - in order not to offend the Jewish victims and Holocaust survivors.

I think your public television station should apologize.

Sincerely,
Agustin Blazquez
Writer & filmmaker
Silver Spring, MD
ABIP.USA@verizon.net

cc. Michael Pack and John Prizer of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
Paquito D’Rivera and various publications

When is a TV Ad not a TV Ad? When it's on PBS...

I had to laugh, once again, at The New York Times (login required) today, reading Nat Ives' article about PBS's non-commercial commercials, and coming across this:

The 15-second commercial for Chipotle, a Mexican restaurant chain owned by McDonald's, will accompany 'How to Cook Everything: Bittman Takes On America's Chefs,' on some 150 public television stations across the country. The program features Mark Bittman, a cookbook author who writes a column for the Dining section of The New York Times, which is a sponsor of the program.

In the story, the Times repeats PBS's claims that their ads are not ads. How come?

The Chipotle spots had to toe some very fine lines. For example, the guidelines allow people in the spots to consume a product as long as they do not appear to enjoy it overtly. So the producer instructed the actors in its pledge drive spoof not to look too thrilled.

Maybe the New York Times is becoming a humor magazine...

Terri Schiavo's Case is an Exception

Andrew McCarthy says that the facts are unusual: "It is not for nothing that we say bad cases make bad law. We have no reason to believe Terri's situation is more a paradigm than an aberration. For most husbands in Michael Schiavo's shoes -- anxious to get on with new lives and aware that a stricken wife's family was willing and able to take on the burdens of care -- we can reasonably hope that ending the wife's life would not become an obsession. Most men or women in Michael's circumstances would step aside. Many, if they'd entangled themselves in new relationships, would avail themselves of the ready legal framework for ending the marriage. Most spouses would not suddenly remember, seven years after the fact, that their partners had evinced a carefully considered wish to die rather than be sustained if they were ever to become incapacitated."

Is Kofi Annan A Crook?

That's the main question underlying Roger L. Simon's story on the UN's Oil-for-Food Investigation. Paul Volcker's report is scheduled for release tomorrow. Simon claims it shows that Annan may have been closer to his son's scandalous business activities than previously revealed.

The Future Belongs to Blogs

Says Roger L. Simon: Mystery Novelist and Screenwriter:

Let This Prediction Be True!

Buried several paragraphs down in an interesting World Peace Herald analysis of blog influence on the 2004 election is the following prediction by Scott Anthony:
...20 years from now, there will be an entirely new industry based on blogs. Just a few years ago, he noted, when eBay was launched, it was selling novelty items, such as Pez candy dispensers. Today, it is a major retail force that even sells automobiles.

Who's Scott Anthony, you ask? (I did.) He is the co-author of 'Seeing What's Next' (Harvard Business School Press, 2005), and a partner in Innosight LLC in Watertown, Mass. Let's hope he does - see what's next, I mean."

Bruce Thornton on "Dhimmitude"

From VDH's Private Papers
a review of Bat Ye'or's book on Islamism's triumph in Europe and aspirations in America : "As Ye'or documents, the key to Islamist terrorism is Israel, but not in the way most people think. For the jihadist mentality, Israel must be destroyed, if not by bombs and tanks, then by piece-meal concessions and sheer demography. It make take fifty years, it may take a hundred, but like the medieval Crusader kingdoms, this manifestation of the dynamic power of Western cultural ideals cannot be allowed to survive as a constant reminder of Islamic civilization's failure. Israel's war is our war, and until we forcefully assert that linkage in our public pronouncements and more important in our actions, everything else we do just buys some time, in which the forces of appeasement and the murderous energy of the jihadists will do their work."