HOMO ISLAMICUS:

-LECTURE: Democracy for Peace (Natan Sharansky, June 20, 2002, AEI World Forum)

Today, it is no longer the heavy shadow of communism, but rather the shadow of terror, that looms over us. If we are to prevail over it, we must learn very quickly--from both our great achievements and our great mistakes. We must do so not in order to write another academic book, and not for the annals of history, but in order to apply the acquired historical knowledge in today's quickly developing reality.

Let me take you back to 1972. It was a time of grave concern for us dissidents in the former Soviet Union. We felt that we were about to witness the free world's acceptance of the Soviet Union, its appeasement of the country that we knew to be the Evil Empire. The West was on the verge of recognizing the borders of occupation of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union's privilege to control the peoples of the Baltic Republics. The West was about to accept the Soviet Union's right to exist as a communist dictatorship--and, at the same time, to receive its friendship by bribing it with most-favored-nation trading status and a great amount of economic assistance.

Very few spoke out against this tendency. It seemed to us that the clarion call of the late Andrei Sakharov to the West could not have been clearer: Do not trust governments more than governments trust their own people. Link all ties with the Soviet Union to the encouragement of democracy and human rights inside Soviet Union. But very few heard him.

We understood the arguments of those who wanted to appease the Soviets, the arguments of those who created this wonderful, but very dangerous, word, detente. Instead of relying upon the wisdom of Andrei Sakharov, they were relying upon the philosophy of the nineteenth-century French diplomat Talleyrand: Every people has the government that it deserves. Hence, Soviet communism is par for the course of the Homo Sovieticus. [...]

[W]e must understand that it is not only individuals who are equal, but also the nationalities of this world that are equal. They all deserve to live in democracy, to live under a government that depends on them. Sakharov said, "You cannot trust a government more than it trusts its own people." I would propose a corollary: "The world cannot afford to depend on those leaders who are not dependent on their own people." It is not the friendly dictators--but rather the leaders who depend on their people--who can be partners for making the world a more secure place.

The danger that the great Natan Sharansky identifies here does seem to be quite real. There's a disturbing tendency by many in the West to simply assume that Muslims are not well-suited to democracy, just as many assured us that Eastern Europeans were ill-suited to it. One suspects, and fervently hopes, they are as wrong now as they were then.
Posted by Orrin Judd at December 11, 2002 10:21 PM