The Israeli minister for Jerusalem and Diaspora Affairs, Natan Sharansky, has been in London promoting his book, The Case for Democracy, which has been wowing a number of people in Britain as much as it appears to have bowled over President Bush. Sharansky, such a physically small, unassuming man, is surely one of the titanic moral figures of the age. Having faced down Soviet totalitarianism from the inside of a labour camp cell, and having seen the regime that tyrannised and murdered so many collapse like a pack of cards, he has been afforded an insight given to few others – a deeply personal understanding of the universal yearning for freedom, and the innate weakness of even the most brutal and repressive of tyrannies in the face of that yearning.

This is surely what gives Sharansky his rock-solid confidence that, given the kind of support from the rest of the world than gives courage to the persecuted, the tyrannies in the Middle East can be toppled if the people will it, and all ‘fear societies’ can be transformed into ‘free societies’. When people say Arab countries can never become free, he remembers people saying the same thing about the Soviet Union. Okay, he says, these societies may not become democracies as we know them, but they can become places where people can live free of doublethink, free of the fear of the knock on the door from the secret police.

And again drawing on his personal experience, he observes that we do not – but should – call those brave Muslims who fight their own tyrannies by their proper name: ‘dissidents’. For dissidents is indeed what they are. And as he says, Soviet dissidents like himself or Andrei Sakharov attracted huge demonstrations or petitions in the west protesting at their plight. We should surely do the same for Arab dissidents, to give them the same kind of crucial encouragement and support and help them blow down their own packs of cards.

Because apart from the need for all peoples to be free, as Sharansky says – and President Bush has understood – it is only free societies, answerable to their populations, which have no desire to wage war or oppress other peoples. And so it is not enough for Arab leaders to promise to ‘crack down’ on terrorists, or hand them over for trial by other countries. To prove their good faith in ending the violence with which they are associated, they have to build the institutions of a free society. Only then will this terrible scourge under which so many live, and which threatens the freedom of others, be ended.

Sharansky has been saying this for years. Suddenly, to his amazement, there’s a President in the White House who agrees. But the really amazing thing is that so many others in the free world not only do not agree but loathe and detest this message and its messengers. As he says, the common response to tyranny by free peoples is to appease it. It is only when the price of that appeasement becomes so high that the self-delusion can no longer be sustained that tyranny is fought – and by then, the difficulties are enormous, and the price is even greater human tragedy.

Posted by melanie at March 2, 2005