Today, I have a piece on democracy: what it means; why it’s important; who its friends are; who its foes are. The people who value democracy the most, probably, are those who are deprived of it. In my piece, I discuss the efforts of democrats in Cuba, China, and elsewhere. Some are willing to die for this thing, democracy, and have. People lucky enough to have been born in a democratic country are often blasé, or worse.
Here on the Corner, I’d like to recommend a piece by Mike Smeltzer, of Freedom House. It was published last week. “Democracy,” Smeltzer notes, can be the favorite word of dictators. I bring this up in my own piece, too. In fact, let me quote a paragraph or two from that piece:
Like “love,” “peace,” and many another word, “democracy” has been subject to abuse. To take an especially hideous example: The genocidalists of the Khmer Rouge renamed Cambodia “Democratic Kampuchea.”
In Europe, for 41 years, there was a country called the “German Democratic Republic.” Some observed, mordantly, that this was three lies in one — for that state was not a republic, not democratic, and not altogether German, given control by Moscow.
At the beginning of his piece, Smeltzer quotes a sentence: “The sides share the understanding that democracy is a universal human value, rather than a privilege of a limited number of states, and that its promotion and protection is a common responsibility of the entire world community.” Smeltzer then writes,
One could be forgiven for assuming this quote was from the March 2023 Declaration of the Summit for Democracy, signed by 73 world governments committed to strengthening global democracy. But in fact, the line was pulled from a joint statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China in the weeks prior to Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
There you go.
Smeltzer further says that the appearance of democratic elections is “an important piece in the autocrat’s toolkit, enabling all sorts of dissembling about the ‘will of the people.’” Yeah. On the same day that this piece was published, I read an extraordinary sentence in a report from NBC News: “The Russian president, facing an election in nine months . . .”
Facing an election? He has arrested and imprisoned his chief competitors. A dictator such as Putin takes no chances. And, of course, he has a great many fans in the free and democratic West. Tyrants have always had fans in free countries. It tells you something — something grim — about human nature.
More from Mike Smeltzer:
In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has advocated for “illiberal democracy,” declaring that liberal democracy — a robust form of democracy that entails the protection of a full array of individual and collective rights — is in irreversible decline.
It is in decline, sure. But I don’t believe in this irreversibility. Democracy’s fortunes wax and wane. People must not sit in their hands, however. “Freedom is never more than a generation away from extinction,” Ronald Reagan liked to say. You have to fight for freedom, democracy, and human rights, always. Their foes never rest. Their friends can’t afford to either.
In recent days, I have looked, once again, at what Oswaldo Payá and other democrats strove for in Cuba; and what Liu Xiaobo and other democrats strove for in China. They knew the value of democracy. We lucky ducks who were born in free countries can know it — or renew our knowledge of it, if this knowledge has collected dust — too.