January 5, 2003
NO PAINE, NO GAIN:
The Age of Paine: Thomas Paine was one of the first journalists to use media as a weapon against the entrenched power structure. He should be resurrected as the moral father of the Internet. (Jon Katz, May 1995, Wired)[W]e owe [Tom] Paine. He is our dead and silenced ancestor. He made us possible. We need to resurrect and hear him again, not for his sake but for ours. We need to know who he was, to understand his life and work, in order to comprehend our own revolutionary culture. Paine's odyssey made him the greatest media figure of his time, one of the unseen but profound influencers of ours. He made more noise in the information world than any messenger or pilgrim before or since. His mark is now nearly invisible in the old culture, but his spirit is woven through and through this new one, his fingerprints on every Web site, his voice in every online thread.If the old media (newspapers, magazines, radio, and television) have abandoned their father, the new media (computers, cable, and the Internet) can and should adopt him. If the press has lost contact with its spiritual and ideological roots, the new media culture can claim them as its own.
For Paine does have a legacy, a place where his values prosper and are validated millions of times a day: the Internet. There, his ideas about communications, media ethics, the universal connections between people, and the free flow of honest opinion are all relevant again, visible every time one modem shakes hands with another.
Tom Paine's ideas, the example he set of free expression, the sacrifices he made to preserve the integrity of his work, are being resuscitated by means that hadn't existed or been imagined in his day - via the blinking cursors, clacking keyboards, hissing modems, bits and bytes of another revolution, the digital one. If Paine's vision was aborted by the new technologies of the last century, newer technology has brought his vision full circle. If his values no longer have much relevance for conventional journalism, they fit the Net like a glove.
The Net offers what Paine and his revolutionary colleagues hoped for - a vast, diverse, passionate, global means of transmitting ideas and opening minds. That was part of the political transformation he envisioned when he wrote, "We have it in our power to begin the world over again." Through media, he believed, "we see with other eyes; we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those we formerly used."
One of the most troubling things about the Islamic world is that it has not yet produced a Common Sense, a political pamphlet that is passed from hand to hand, like samizdata in the Soviet Union, and read by all, laying the groundwork for the democratic revolution that the region so badly needs. Posted by Orrin Judd at January 5, 2003 2:02 PM
"One of the most troubling things about the Islamic world is that it has not yet produced a Common Sense, a political pamphlet that is passed from hand to hand, like samizdata in the Soviet Union, and read by all, laying the groundwork.." Yeah, but there's a problem. There is no room in "orthodox" Islam for such a pamphlet - or for a free press or free government. The Koran is the final say. If a person simply reiterates what's in the Koran (and supporting religious documents) then no progress is made and the person's time is wasted. But if the person writes something that deviates from the clerics' understanding of the Koran, then he is a heretic (or infidel) and can expect a fatwa.
Posted by: George Peery at January 5, 2003 1:17 PMYes, but the same was true in the Soviet Union and still it produced a Solzhenitsyn, a Sharansky, a Sakharov. Where are the Islamic dissidents?
Posted by: oj at January 5, 2003 2:22 PMShoot, Islam has not produced even an
aboveground theory of government that
goes beyond simple monarchy.
Even in its heyday, it never produced any
political theorists, even though it did, from
time to time, produce effective instruments
of government.
If you believe Michael Ledeen (sp?) from NRO, there are many in Iran, and a veritable uprising is on its way. Peplexingly, this is an issue where the gap between what is reported by the stablishment media and the insurgent's media (bloggsphere) is widest -- meaning, can all of this really be happening and the BBC still not heard about it...?
Posted by: MG at January 5, 2003 2:46 PMoj - The Soviet Union did not produce dissidents (at least, none who survived more than a year) until the revolutionary generation - mass murderers all - died off. The succeeding dictators didn't have the heart to kill the dissidents. The Middle East has too many murderers in power for dissenters to have a chance to build up a name; their reputation reaches the killers before it reaches the West.
Posted by: pj at January 5, 2003 3:00 PMIn terms of Pakistan, people have been turned off by the complete failure of democratically elected leaders to accomplish any progress while allowing their cronies to enrich themselves while the country goes to hell.
I suppose the Islamic world has yet to produce an intellectual in the 21st century who can convincingly present the ideals of democracy in a form understandable and palatable to the masses and not just the urban, Westernised elites.
The vast amount of illiteracy doesn't help either.
Posted by: M Ali Choudhury at January 5, 2003 3:40 PMpj:
Of course the dissenters took up arms and then fled, so it's hardly fair to say there were none.
I didn't mean to say there were no resisters, just that we don't remember their names, and they didn't get a chance to greatly influence their countrymen.
Posted by: pj at January 5, 2003 6:37 PMHow about Yevgeny Zamyatin http://dannyreviews.com/h/A_Soviet_Heretic.html
)
Vasily Grossman
http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/596
)
Boris Pasternak
http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.authlist/author_id/532
)
and
Isaac Babel http://events.calendarlive.com/top/1,1419,L-LATimes-Books-F!ArticleDetail-49450,00.html
)
Vasily Grossman's work was mostly censored after WW2.
I'd recommend Life and Fate though.
A better Russian novel than War and Fate.
oops.
War and Peace.
Your examples go only so far to refute my point . . . the Zamyatin review begins "Zamyatin is not as well known as later Soviet dissidents such as Solzhenitsyn, perhaps because he never renounced his Marxism and because his opposition to Stalinism was artistic rather than political"; the Babel article notes only his literary works, indeed I've read some of his fiction but am not aware of political dissent by Babel.
Grossman is a new name to me, sounds good.
"We" was a wonderful novel and it
challenged the very bases of Leninism/Stalinism,
on realistic not merely artistic grounds.
But very few people in Russia got to read it.
Harry and I agree, for once, about We.
Babel was disappeared:
http://query.nytimes.com/search/full-page?res=9C06E6D9123DF936A15752C1A960958260
Babel's writing, like Shostokovich's music, was by its very nature, political dissent.
Though to be fair, not only Babel's; and not only Shostakovich's.
A kind of courage we in the West, mercifully, can't even begin to understand.