A Staunch Believer, Dispelling Doubt

As a political and religious prisoner in the Soviet Union for nine years during the Cold War, Natan Sharansky, then known as Anatoly Scharansky, survived unspeakably cruel conditions by keeping faith in his wife and in God. His 1988 prison memoir, “Fear No Evil,” is a classic.Now, in the midst of a new war, Mr. Sharansky, with his co-author Ron Dermer, has written a new book, “The Case for Democracy” (PublicAffairs, 303 pages, $26.95). It is part memoir of Mr. Sharansky’s time since his release from prison, part argument for the policy of exporting freedom and democracy to those areas of the world that are bereft of them.It is the perfect gift this Chanukah or Christmas for friends or family members on the political right who think that the Arabs or Muslims are too primitive for freedom and democracy and who worry that for America to promote freedom and democracy in the Middle East would jeopardize American interests. It is also the perfect gift for friends or family members on the political left who think that freedom and democracy can’t be exported by America, or that to do so is a form of imperialism.Mr. Sharansky, now a member of Israel’s parliament and the minister for Jerusalem and Diaspora affairs in the government of Prime Minister Sharon, uses historical facts and political logic to dispel such doubts.“Just as they were wrong a generation ago about Russia, and two generations ago about Japan and Germany, the skeptics are wrong today,” he writes. “The formula that triggered a democratic revolution in the Soviet Union had three components: People inside who yearned to be free, leaders outside who believed they could be, and policies that linked the free world’s relations with the USSR to the Soviet regime’s treatment of its own people. Whether this same formula is applied to a great power like China or a weak despotism like Zimbabwe, a secular totalitarian regime like North Korea or a religious tyranny like Iran makes no difference. It will work anywhere around the globe, including in the Arab world.”Mr. Sharansky displays a gift for devastating anecdotes. Explaining how a lack of moral clarity can hamper the West in the effort to spread freedom, he recalls how the leader of Israel’s Labor Party, Shimon Peres, greeted a group of Soviet dignitaries visiting Israel in the late 1980s. “We have the kibbutzim, and you have the kolkhoz,” Mr. Sharansky quotes Mr. Peres as saying. Even the visiting Soviets were shocked at the comparison of Israel’s freely formed agricultural collectives to those Stalin created by starving and killing millions, Mr. Sharansky recalls.But Mr. Peres, a Nobel laureate in peace, has distinguished company on the list of Western leaders, diplomats, and editors who flinch in the struggle for freedom. Mr. Sharansky mentions a 1990 White House meeting at which he unsuccessfully attempted to talk President George H.W. Bush out of trying to keep the Soviet Union together. As the book recounts, Mr. Bush went ahead and delivered “his notorious ‘Chicken Kiev’ speech,” missing an opportunity to lead Ukraine and the other Soviet republics to independence and freedom.The New York Times editorialists are remembered for their argument in 1972, in the face of Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson’s introduction of an amendment linking Soviet trade privileges with America to emigration rights, that “we do not believe it is productive to try to enforce political changes in the Soviet (or any other) system through the unilateral use of economic pressure. The results are likely to be the opposite of those intended.” Mr. Sharansky recalls that the Times in 1974 editorialized that liberalization of the Soviet Union “is more likely to be prevented than accelerated by excessive outside pressure.”Mr. Sharansky doesn’t name President George W. Bush’s deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, but he does say he is sure that “Iranians fighting for their freedom felt a similar dejection when an official in the American State Department recently referred to their country as a democracy.” He reports warily that Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, told him that “she felt the Saudis should play a role in the peace process.”For the Saudis Mr. Sharansky reserves even more disapproval than he had heaped on the Times editorialists. “The Saudi family, by giving more and more power to the Wahhabi religious authorities within its kingdom and more and more money to spreading their virulent form of Islam around the world, has used external enemies to whitewash its own decadent lifestyle and justify its repressive rule. While it was posturing in the West as a close ally of the United States and a force for stability in the Middle East, the policies of the Saudi regime were actually destabilizing the entire region by mobilizing millions for war against the West, Christians, Jews, and even fellow Muslims,” he writes. “Thus the global spread of a fanaticism that now threatens our entire civilization is partly rooted in a nondemocratic Saudi regime’s need for internal stability.”For America, he suggests, the right policy is to link its relations with the Saudi regime to emigration policies and women’s rights in the kingdom. He writes, “If a country like Saudi Arabia responds to pressures to reform by choking off oil supplies, the free world will survive the blow. Saudi Arabia won’t.”Israeli politicians across the spectrum disagree with Mr. Sharansky. “My first priority is to make peace with the Palestinians. I do not believe it is up to me to educate them,” the author quotes the Labor Party’s Yossi Beilin as saying. Mr. Sharansky concedes his arguments couldn’t pierce the skepticism even of more hawkish politicians, like Mr. Sharon. He quotes the Israeli premier as telling him, “I understand that in the Soviet Union your ideas were important, but unfortunately they have no place in the Middle East.”Unlike in “Fear No Evil,” Mr. Sharansky touches on God and faith only in passing in this book. When he does so, though, he is characteristically trenchant. “A lack of moral clarity,” he says, “is why people living in free societies cannot distinguish between religious fundamentalists in democratic states and religious terrorists in fundamentalist states. It is why people living in free societies can come to see their fellow citizens as their enemies, and foreign dictators as their friends.”

A Staunch Believer, Dispelling Doubt

A Staunch Believer, Dispelling Doubt

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