TIMELESS VALUES IN A SHIFTING WORLDTIMELESS VALUES IN A SHIFTING WORLD
It is impossible to pinpoint the exact moment at which we stopped looking for leadership from our leaders and started caring only about realpolitik and lesser evils. Before the last rivets of the Iron Curtain hit the ground, as the West patted itself on the back and squandered the peace dividend, voters and parliaments around the world began looking for managers instead of visionaries.
I was reminded of this very keenly on December 11, 2011. Death played a cruel twist when he took the poet, dissident, and human rights champion Václav Havel and the mad overlord of North Korea Kim Jong-il at nearly the same moment. The media response was predictable, ignoring the leader of the Velvet Revolution and unleashing a flood of conjecture about the twenty-eight-year-old Kim Jong-un becoming the leader of a nuclear-armed prison camp of a nation located right in the middle of Russia, China, and Japan. Concern was understandable, but it was ironic that all that guesswork was taken seriously when no one outside Pyongyang even knew Kim Jong-il was dead for forty-eight hours.
It was worse than ironic that Havel’s death, and, more importantly, his amazing life, were swept aside for tales about a lunatic’s love of movies and French cognac. Instead of speculating about an unknown heir in North Korea, what about asking about a successor to the great moral leadership of Václav Havel? Who is there to carry the banner of freedom from oppression in all its forms? The playwright Havel—the artist, the dreamer—lived two-thirds of his life under a Communist regime and knew that liberty had to be fought for with every weapon on every front.
I first met Havel in Prague in 1990, when he was a newly elected president. He was quick to use his new stature to promote the pro-democracy activities of others, especially in what was then still the USSR. I was invited to attend a conference of Soviet dissidents chaired by Vladimir Bukovsky, and Havel insisted that it take place in newly liberated Prague. Incredibly, he was forced to fight elements in his own government that were afraid of offending the Kremlin, and in my recollection Havel was the only senior member of the Czech administration to attend.
At various points during and after his tenure, Havel was criticized for not being an effective executive, for failing to become a politician and a deal maker. But looking at his achievements, especially with an eye on Moscow, such critiques ignore what matters most. Havel presided over the collapse of Czechoslovakia without a drop of blood being spilled at a time when Yugoslavia was in the middle of a horrific civil war. He created the foundations of a democratic establishment free of ties to the Communist and KGB past while Boris Yeltsin failed to root out the entrenched bureaucracy, the nomenklatura, and left a KGB successor. Today the Czech Republic and Slovakia are thriving democracies while Russians are fighting the battle for individual liberty all over again. Principles matter, results matter, and Havel succeeded like few others.
Such outspoken courage inevitably serves as a model. Havel served as an ethical tuning fork for Eastern Europeans the way Andrei Sakharov did for the Soviet peoples. His health was already fading when we met for the last time at the Czech embassy in Moscow in 2007, but his eyes saw Vladimir Putin clearly. He was disgusted by those who negotiated with evil instead of calling it what it was.
In a 2004 essay Havel wrote on North Korea, he spelled out the eternal truth about dictators: “Decisiveness, perseverance and negotiations from a position of strength are the only things that Kim Jong-il and those similar to him understand.” No talk of appeasement, no treating human rights like just another bargaining chip. If we had more leaders like Václav Havel, we would not have nearly as much to worry about from dictators like Kim Jong-il.
How did we come to such a sad state? When did we go from Soviet dissidents as celebrities and the belief that it was the duty of the free to help the unfree to a world where dictators pose for selfies with snowboarders and the victims of oppression are told to take care of themselves? Believe me when I say I am not harkening back to some never-was golden age of my imagination. I am neither too young to remember those times nor too old to have forgotten them.
November 9, 1989, was one of the most glorious days in the known history of the world. Hundreds of millions of people were released from totalitarian Communism after generations of darkness.
There is no shortage of scholarship and opinions about why the Wall came down when it did. I am happy to engage in those endless discussions, but we must recognize that looking for a specific cause at a specific moment misses the point. We do know that without the unity of the free world against a common enemy, without a strong stand based on refusing to negotiate over the value of individual freedom, that the Wall would still be standing today and I might still be playing chess for the Soviet Union.
There were alliances and rivalries and stretches of realpolitik for decades. Individuals played a part on both sides, from Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to Lech Walesa and Pope John Paul II, to Mikhail Gorbachev unleashing forces he could not control. The critical theme was as simple as it was true: the Cold War was about good versus evil, and, just as importantly, this was not just a matter of philosophy, but a real battle worth fighting. Society supported the efforts of those great leaders, and society supported the fight and the principles behind it.
The Wall fell and the world exhaled. The long war of generations was over. The threat of nuclear annihilation that hung over all our heads was ending. Victories, however, even great victories, come at a cost, even if that cost is just letting down one’s guard. There were no truth commissions for Communism, no trials or punishments for the epic crimes of these regimes. The KGB changed its name but it did not change its stripes.
And, of course, Western complacency has enabled all its enemies, not just Putin. Today’s dictatorships have what the Soviets could scarcely dream of: easy access to global markets to fund repression at home. Not just the petro-states like Russia, Iran, and Venezuela, but the manufacturing states as well. The idea that the free world would use engagement for leverage against dictators on human rights has been countered by the authoritarian states because they are willing to exploit it without hesitation, while there is no similar will in the free world.
Engagement has provided dictatorships with much more than consumers of the oil they extract and the iPhones they assemble. They use Interpol to persecute dissidents abroad; they sponsor or create political parties and NGOs to lobby for their cause; they write op-eds in the New York Times full of hypocritical calls for peace and harmony. And all of this while cracking down harder than ever at home. This is engagement as a one-way street. This is engagement as appeasement. This is a failure of leadership on a tragic scale.
Even the greatest ideals and traditions can lose focus after a radical change in the landscape. Symbols help us find that focus, leaving us vulnerable when those symbols disappear. America going to the moon was not so remarkable because there was anything of value there. John F. Kennedy understood that it would become a symbol of American progress, of challenge, of difficulty, and, of course, of superiority over the USSR.
A generation of new technology was developed thanks to the space race, technology that would power American industrial might into the computer age. But not long after this incredible feat was achieved, the space race fizzled significantly. The symbol was gone and no man has walked on the moon since Eugene Cernan in December 1972. The symbol of challenge, the symbol of progress, was confused with the challenge itself. When the moon was reached, the great quest it represented was quickly forgotten. As with Hitler and Stalin, a man traveling to the moon is mostly remembered today as mythology.
The Berlin Wall was more than a symbol, of course. It literally divided a city and represented the divide between the free and unfree worlds. When it fell, it was easy to forget that those two worlds, the free and the unfree, still existed even though the Wall did not. The symbol was gone and so what it represented was forgotten. Suddenly, evil no longer had a familiar form. As 9/11 taught us, the dangers are real even though the battle lines are unclear. Allies of convenience have replaced alliances based on history and values. This is the natural result of over twenty years of treating everyone like a potential friend, a practice that emboldens enemies and confuses true allies.
But enemies do exist, whether we admit it or not. They are the enemies of what America and the rest of the free world stand for. Whether it is Putin or ISIS, these forces cannot be defeated with engagement. No, to defeat them will require the unity and the resolve and the principles that won the Cold War. In chess terms, our great predecessors left us with a winning position twenty-five years ago. They gave us the tools to bring down dictators and showed us how to use them. But we have abandoned these tools and forgotten the lessons. It is past time to relearn them.
There is a global war under way that most people, even many of its casualties, are unaware is even taking place. I don’t have to look back beyond a few months’ headlines to count this war’s many casualties. A hundred forty-seven murdered at a university in Garissa, Kenya. Sixteen killed in terror attacks in Paris at the magazine Charlie Hebdo and at a kosher supermarket. The thousands killed in Eastern Ukraine. The opposition leader gunned down on a bridge on his way home in Moscow. Then there are the countless wounded and imprisoned victims of this global struggle.
Globalization has effectively compressed the world in size, increasing the mobility of goods, capital, and labor. Yet this compression takes place across not only space but time as well, as the twenty-first century’s borderless technologies and ideas collide with once sheltered cultures and regimes intent on existing as in centuries past. This is less the famous clash of civilizations than an attempt by these “time travelers” to hold on to their waning authority by stopping the advance of the ideas of an open society.
Radical Islamists set the time machine to the Dark Ages and encourage the murder of all who oppose them. Vladimir Putin wants Russia to exist in the great power era of tsars and monarchs, dominating its neighbors by force and undisturbed by elections and rights complaints. The post-Communist autocracies, led by Putin’s closest dictator allies in Belarus and Kazakhstan, exploit ideology only as a means of hanging on to power at any cost. In the East, Kim Jong-un’s North Korea attempts to freeze time in a Stalinist prison camp bubble. In the West, Maduro in Venezuela and the Castros in Cuba use socialist propaganda to resist increasing pressure for human rights. Boko Haram warlords employ religion as an excuse to slaughter their rivals. Others, such as the religious monarchies in the Middle East, are guilty by association for creating favorable conditions for violence with their archaic restrictions on free society.
What unites the time travelers is their rejection of modernity, their fear and hatred of what we should simply call “modern values” to replace the obsolete and condescending term “Western values.”
Globalization has brought these relics into contact and competition with the modern world that threatens to destroy their environments and authority. This contact also provides them with markets for their natural resources and with the technology they use for murder and repression, so they cannot disengage entirely. The time travelers cannot fight head to head with the ideas and prosperity of the free world, so they use the only weapons they have: ideology, violence, and disregard for the value of human life. They combat the lure of free speech and free markets with irrationality: radical religion and nationalism, cults of personality and dogma, hatred and fear.
Despite the denials of many politicians and pundits it is quite possible to lose a fight you refuse to acknowledge you are in. Even worse, ignoring the reality of the conflict puts more innocent victims on the front lines instead of trained soldiers and law enforcement. There are no easy solutions for homegrown terrorists or nuclear-armed dictators, but we must begin by ending this culture of denial.
I’ve argued elsewhere that history is cyclical; it turned out that the great victory for democracy was not eternal but seasonal. It just took time for the backlash to manifest against our excessive optimism. The mullahs, monarchs, and dictators are pushing back against the threat to their medieval ecosystems. This is the common thread connecting Putin’s attack on Ukraine and the murderous Islam-derived ideology that drives al-Qaeda and ISIS, and that drove the Kouachi brothers in Paris and so many others like them. They are pushing back against the modern world, brutally demonstrating the fallacy of “the end of history.”
Our goal must be to help those stuck in the past to join the present, and it cannot be done only by force. We must be sincere and make an overwhelmingly attractive case. But this does not mean coddling or tolerating violent extremists or those who create them, at home or abroad. An open society that cannot defend its citizens will not be open for very long. A society that won’t fight for freedom will lose it, a truth immortalized by Reagan’s statement that freedom “is never more than one generation away from extinction.”
Symbols matter in this fight, symbols like Charlie Hebdo and the “Bring Back Our Girls” campaigns, and photographs of world leaders marching together for free speech. It is not enough to tell our immigrants, our citizens, and the billions of souls still living in the unfree world that these ideals matter; we must show them. The terrorists and their teachers and the dictators and their enablers are quick to point out every hypocrisy, every double standard. We cannot compromise for, as Victor Hugo wrote in Les Travailleurs de la Mer, “Men grow accustomed to poison by degrees.”
Boris Nemtsov, my longtime friend and colleague in the Russian opposition, was murdered in cold blood in the middle of Moscow on February 27, 2015. Four bullets in the back ended his life in sight of the Kremlin, where he once worked as Boris Yeltsin’s deputy prime minister. Photos from the scene showed a cleaning crew scrubbing his blood off the pavement within hours of the murder, so it is not difficult to imagine the quality of the investigation that followed.
Putin actually started, and ended, the inquiry while Boris’s body was still warm by calling the murder a “provocation,” the term of art for suggesting his enemies are murdering one another in order to bring shame upon his innocent brow. He then brazenly sent a message of condolence to Nemtsov’s mother, who often warned her fearless son that his actions could get him killed in Putin’s Russia.
Hours after Boris’s death, reports said that police were raiding his home and confiscating papers and computers. Putin’s enemies are often victims and his victims are always suspects. Boris was a passionate critic of Putin’s war in Ukraine and was about to finish a report on the presence of Russian soldiers in Donbass, a matter the Kremlin has spared no effort to cover up. But “Did Putin give the order?” rings as hollow today as it did when journalist Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down in 2006 or when MH17 was shot down over Eastern Ukraine last year.
As long as Putin is in office we’ll never know who gave the order, but there is no doubt that he is directly responsible for creating the conditions in which these outrages occur with such terrible frequency. Putin’s early themes of restoring the national pride and structure that were lost with the fall of the USSR have slowly run out of steam and been replaced with a toxic mixture of nationalism, belligerence, and hatred. By 2014, the increasingly depleted opposition movement, long treated with contempt and ridicule, had been rebranded in the Kremlin-dominated media as dangerous fifth columnists, or “national traitors” in the vile language they frequently borrowed from the Nazis.
To match the propaganda, Putin shifted more support to the most repressive, reactionary, and bloodthirsty elements in the regime. Among them are Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov and chief prosecutor Alexander Bastrykin, who recently declared that the Russian constitution was “standing in the way of protecting the state’s interests.” In this environment, blood becomes the coin of the realm, the way to show loyalty to the regime. This is what Putin has wrought in order to keep his grip on power: a culture of death and fear that spans all eleven Russian time zones and is now being exported to Eastern Ukraine.
Boris Nemtsov was a tireless fighter and one of the most skilled critics of the Putin government, a role that was by no means his only possible destiny. A successful mayor in Nizhny Novgorod and a capable cabinet member and parliamentarian, he could have led a comfortable life in the power vertical as a token liberal voice of reform. But Boris was unqualified to work for the Putin regime. He had principles, you see, and could not bear to watch our country descend back into the totalitarian depths.
And so Boris launched his big body, big voice, and big heart into the uphill battle to keep democracy alive in Russia. We worked together after he was kicked out of parliament in 2004 and by 2007 we were close allies in the opposition movement. He was devoted to documenting the crimes and corruption of Putin and his cronies, hoping they would one day face a justice that seemed further away all the time.
Along with a report on Russian soldiers in Ukraine, he had been working hard on the protest march planned for that Sunday in Moscow, a march that became his funeral procession. Boris and I began to quarrel after Putin returned as president in 2012. To me it signaled the end of any realistic hopes that there could be a peaceful political solution to regime change in Russia. But Boris was always hopeful. He would tell me I was too rash, that “you have to live a long time to see change in Russia.” Now he will never see it.
We cannot know exactly what horror will come next, only that there will be another and another as long as Putin remains in power. The only way Putin’s rule will end is if the Russian people and Putin’s elites understand they have no future as long as he is there. Right now, no matter how they really feel about Putin and their lives, they see him as invincible and unmovable. They see him getting his way in Ukraine, taking territory and waging war. They see him talking tough and making deals with Merkel and Hollande. They see his enemies dead in the streets of Moscow.
Statements of condemnation and concern over Boris’s murder quickly poured forth from the same Western leaders who have done so much to appease Putin in recent days, weeks, and years. If they truly wish to honor my fearless friend, they should declare in the strongest terms that Russia will be treated like the criminal rogue regime it is for as long as Putin is in power. Call off the sham negotiations. Sell weapons to Ukraine that will put an unbearable political price on Putin’s aggression. Tell every Russian oligarch that there is no place their money will be safe in the West as long as they serve Putin.
The response so far is not encouraging, a phrase I tire of writing. Many of the habitual statements of concern and condemnation call for Putin to “administer justice,” a plea that could almost could be considered sarcastic. Western media inexplicably continues to give a platform to Putin’s cadre of propagandists without challenging their blatant lies.
We may never know who killed Boris Nemtsov, but we do know that the sooner Putin is gone, the better chance there is that the chaos and violence Boris feared can be avoided. It is a chance Russia and the world must take.
Looking back through history, great changes in the framework between nations have been necessary after a period of great conflict. In 1648, the Peace of Westphalia created the modern age of Europe after the Thirty Years’ War. The War of the Spanish Succession was ended by the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht. In 1815, the Congress of Vienna created a new European map after the defeat of Napoleon’s France. At the Berlin Conference of 1879 the equilibrium was reestablished after the Russo-Turkish War. At the end of the nineteenth century, the general belief was that this balance would lead to a golden era of peace. Utopian and pacifist literature dreamed of a world without borders right up to the beginning of World War I.
After the First World War we had the Versailles Treaty and the creation of the League of Nations. The League was a failure and the unwillingness to accept this fact led to World War II. On March 5, 1946, in Fulton, Missouri, in his renowned “iron curtain” speech, Winston Churchill spoke about the new dangers to freedom, this time from Communism. It is almost forgotten that he also warned how the newly formed United Nations could fail.
Churchill said of the new organization, “We must make sure that its work is fruitful, that it is a reality and not a sham, that it is a force for action, and not merely a frothing of words, that it is a true temple of peace in which the shields of many nations can someday be hung up, and not merely a cockpit in a Tower of Babel.” Unfortunately, Churchill’s prophecies have come to pass and today we are stuck with an outdated organization that was developed after WWII to prevent a nuclear clash between superpowers. The old stalemate diplomacy of the Cold War will not help us against suicide attacks and hybrid war. Instead of an entity that exists to freeze conflicts, we need one that can offer real solutions based on modern values.
United military intervention to protect human lives and the greater good must also be kept on the table. The value of human life and the value of human freedom in a new Magna Carta must be defended as if they were borders, for that is what they are. They are borders of time and space, separating those who want to live in the modern world and those for whom modernity is a mortal threat.
I advocate for a return to many of the principles and policies that were dominant in the West during the Cold War. But that does not mean I want to turn back the clock. As the Bible says, “No one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined.” We cannot pour the modern wine of globalization and the multipolar world into the old wineskin of obsolete Cold War institutions and regulations. Times change. Circumstances change. Institutions must change. But our values must not.
What is to be done? Each situation, each crisis, has its own requirements, of course. The shift of a single pawn changes the entire position. This is why I like to say that I advocate principles, not policies. When you have solid principles and the entire world knows what they are, the policies tend to be much easier to develop and enforce.
It is for leaders, for those who are responsible to their people, to form policies. It is for leaders to consult with experts, to evaluate their options, to consider the consequences, to weigh the short term versus the long term. Making recommendations without the authority to enact them or the responsibility to be held accountable for them is an extravagance. It lends itself to the worst kind of posturing and folly. But I realize that this response, however honest and accurate it may be, is also a form of evasion. No one would be pleased with a doctor who diagnoses you with a deadly illness and then declines to suggest a remedy.
There are many steps that can be taken that require only courage and will. A global Magna Carta is one of them, a document that leads to the creation of a united Democratic nations that upholds and enforces the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Democracies can take steps now to protect and support those under attack from the dictators, the oppressors, and the time travelers. The free world possesses wealth and power beyond imagining and it must be used to help the unfree to join us or it is power wasted.
Another reason specific policy recommendations are unsatisfactory is that they are inevitably outdated or entirely obsolete. Over the years I have made a long list of things that should be done to respond to Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship, for example. Even now, after he has proven my worst fears correct and everyone is telling me how right I was, few of those recommendations have been enacted. Others have been carried, such as sanctions and ejecting Russia from the G7, but too feebly or too slowly to have the deterrent impact I had in mind.
Most of the specific proposals I made nearly a year ago regarding dictatorships, Putin, and Ukraine still stand and I have referenced them throughout the book. Isolate dictatorships that exploit engagement to support oppression. Keep human rights and the value of human life as the backbone of policy, including foreign policy. This does not preclude negotiation or trade within certain parameters, but it must never be doubted that relations will always have strict limits as long as repression exists.
Ukraine should be defended as if it shares a border with every free nation in the world. This means providing arms with which it can defend its borders and financial aid to stabilize the economy Putin is trying so hard to destroy. Take a close look at what America and Europe get from Russia—oil, gas, supply lines—and develop substitutes for them. This is why Putin fears fracking and other technologies that make the West less dependent on his energy exports. And yet this very week, at the end of April 2015, it was reported that the Pentagon has asked Congress for permission to use Russian-made rocket engines. When the leading nations of the free world put their militaries at the mercy of the bad guys, what hope can the victims of the bad guys have?
If appeals to morality and values do not move you, America does indeed have vital interests in Ukraine. As the world’s largest economy, military power, and energy consumer, the United States reaps great benefits from global stability. (While big fossil fuel exporters like Russia benefit from instability, which tends to raise the price of oil.) Even if you are a cynical realist or a libertarian isolationist, it is cheaper and more practical to take a stand now over Ukraine than to let it go and then have to worry constantly about even stronger American commitments to the Baltics and Poland, who are NATO members. It is also much safer for Americans, Europeans, and everyone else to maintain a robust global American security umbrella than to encourage rampant military proliferation by closing that umbrella.
It’s important to remember that appeasement reflects the overall climate, not just the personal weakness of our elected leaders. From Chamberlain in 1938 to Obama in 2015, the people get what they demand—for a while. Main Street and Wall Street reward politicians who produce attractive short-term results no matter how bad the long-term consequences are. There are few rewards and many penalties for the rare politician who tries to talk about the big picture and the long-term consequences of inaction. Hypothetical questions are dismissed as if it’s an unfair “gotcha” to inquire about the future. With no guiding strategy to stick to, democracies lose out to opportunistic dictatorships that can act much more quickly with no checks and balances or people to be accountable to. We cannot wait to act until after the catastrophe is under way. This “wake me up when they take Poland” attitude was foolish in 1938 and it’s even more foolish in 2015 because we have the lesson of September 1939—when Poland was invaded—and the six horrific years that followed, to inform us. At least Chamberlain didn’t have a history book to tell him what was coming.
I will not say that we are reaching a crisis point or a fork in the road because the tragedy is already unfolding. The decisions made by the leaders of the free world—and by the voters who select them—will decide how tragic it will be. The aggression of Putin and ISIS caught the complacent free world off guard, but that excuse cannot be used any longer and we still have no plan of action. Any politician running for national office should be asked what they will do to make the world safer. Candidates and leaders cannot be allowed to hide behind the flimsy mask of “domestic priorities” in a world of globalized economies and globalized violence.
Whether it is in Ukraine, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, or Nigeria, the free world should be ready to act to support those who want to live in freedom and to live free from fear. Not just act militarily, after the crisis has already exploded, but act to educate, to build, to help construct societies that appreciate modern values. Even the cynics and isolationists should admit that it is far more moral, economical, and effective to invest in preventing the poverty, fear, and ignorance that often lead to radicalization than punishing that radicalization after it becomes violent. Each billion dollars spent building schools, training teachers, and connecting the isolated to the rest of the world saves $10 billion of war later, after another generation of hungry, angry young men have become vulnerable to the propaganda of anti-modernity because modernity has done nothing for them.
I was honored to participate in the Women in the World Summit in New York City in 2013. I was on a panel with Phiona Mutesi, a teenage chess champion from Uganda, her coach Robert Katende, and Marisa van der Merwe, who co-founded the Moves for Life chess-in-schools program in South Africa. The life experiences of these two remarkable women could not be more different, but they both speak to the importance and power of education, especially in the developing world.
Phiona came from the slums of Katwe in the Ugandan capital of Kampala, growing up in deprivation and fear that few members of our New York audience could imagine. Her discovery of Robert’s local chess club became a miracle for Phiona, showing her what she could achieve intellectually. More important than how her chess talent has allowed her to travel the world, she now plans to be a doctor. This is the first and most powerful gift education can provide: a self-confidence that transforms a child’s view of his or her potential. Very few kids can truly expect to turn success at football or other physical sports into an education or career. This is also true for chess, but the knowledge that you can compete, succeed, and enjoy yourself on an intellectual level applies to everything you undertake in life.
If there is anything I have learned from my extensive travels all over the world to promote chess in education it is that talent exists everywhere. The question is how to give it the opportunity to express itself and to thrive. This opportunity that education creates is what is lacking in so much of the undeveloped world—and in parts of the developed world as well if we are honest—a shortfall that has wide-ranging and damaging effects. Education is the most effective way to address poverty and violence, even to tackle complex issues of terrorist groups and vicious warlords.
Programs that spend billions on distributing medicine and food to impoverished areas are of course wonderful. Foundations that combat disease and hunger in Africa have saved countless lives. While life may be the most precious gift, it is not enough to play sorcerer only in the morning, to create the sky and not the earth. When you look around the world’s trouble spots you see that when kids don’t have access to education, many of those who are being saved by Western aid are destined for lives of misery and violence.
Do not misunderstand me. This is of course not an argument against providing life-saving drugs or a denunciation of the brilliant and caring people and programs that provide them. But do not turn away as soon as the babies are born and fed. Do not turn away at all. Look at the young boys enslaved by drug gangs and armies of every stripe, at the unemployed young men who find purpose and profit in victimizing their neighbors, at the girls and women who are inevitably the greatest victims of violence.
The only medicine that can cure these plagues is safe and equal access to a classroom. The best proof of the truth of this may come from the other side, from the brutal groups that burn down schools and shoot schoolgirls in cold blood. It’s rare to hear about coordinated attacks on aid that brings medicine and food. These things pose little threat to the Taliban, the regional warlords, or to the corrupt politicians who steal funds that could go to help their people. Religious fanatics, mercenaries, and armies all need healthy recruits, after all.
What these thugs cannot abide is the flourishing of education, with the noteworthy exception of militant religious teaching that often closes minds instead of opening them. They despise the possibility of an educated population, knowing it would mean the end of their kind in a generation. So the Taliban did not just close the schools where fifteen-year-old Malala Yousafzai lived in Swat, Pakistan, they destroyed them. They did not just tell Malala not to go to school, they shot her.
Education in the developing world means far more than keeping at-risk children off the streets. It is the only way to build an economy that can compete in the twenty-first century, as globalization demands. Healthy bodies are not enough as entire populations move from the countryside into cities and as even agriculture becomes a high-tech enterprise. Reading and writing cannot be luxuries at a time when access to the Internet is more prevalent than access to decent plumbing.
Even the most pragmatic know education aid is a good investment. It costs far less to protect and educate children than it does to send in soldiers and cruise missiles to kill them after they have been abandoned and then recruited by thugs into violence and terror. An educated population is less vulnerable to propaganda and more capable of producing the entrepreneurs and leaders who can create economic opportunity.
There are programs that pay opium and cocaine farmers the difference to grow less pernicious crops. It’s cheaper and far less violent than fighting a militarized drug war on the borders and in the streets of our cities. Why not invest the same way in kids? How many schools and supplies could be built for the cost of producing and operating one drone? How many teachers, vocational trainers, and guards could be hired for the cost of one special ops deployment?
The Human Rights Foundation works to aid and unite brave people working for individual liberty and justice around the world. Our annual Oslo Freedom Forum brings together hundreds of dissidents, activists, philanthropists, journalists, and policy makers from all over the world. The goal is for every participant to learn and to share and to return home with new strength and new ideas.
In 2014, I presented our Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent to Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot. It is not often I agree with the Putin regime, but in their case I must make an exception. Their startling performance, their ridicule of Putin, their courage to take a stand with their art, this was not just a cheap prank as their defense lawyer attempted to argue. It was political and it was powerful.
And their trial in Moscow was no trivial persecution. Dictatorships must be feared to survive and so they cannot bear to be mocked. Unlike most observers, Putin, with his dictator’s animal instinct, immediately perceived the seriousness of the threat. The result was two years in prison for a performance that lasted fifteen minutes.
And so my last policy recommendation is to listen to the dissidents, even if you do not like what they have to say. They are the ones who reveal to us the dark realities of our societies, the realities that most of us have the luxury to turn away from. Listen to the dissidents because they warn us of the threats that target minorities first and inevitably spread to the majority. Every society has its dissidents, not just dictatorships. They speak for the disenfranchised, the ignored, and the persecuted. Listen to them now, because they speak of what is to come.
“Winter is coming” is a warning, not an inevitable conclusion. The good thing about the seasons of political and social change is that we can affect them if we try hard enough. If we rouse ourselves from our complacency and relearn how to stand up to the dictators and terrorists who threaten the modern world we have built, we can alter our course. Anti-modernity is a dangerous virus, and to remove a virus a reboot or a reset is not enough. We have to build a values-based system that is robust enough to resist the virus at home, smart enough to stop it before it spreads, and bold enough to eradicate it where it grows.