Thursday, December 02, 2004

Hating freedom

Anne Applebaum's column The Freedom Haters in yesterday's Washington Post (free registration required) contains some pithy and much-needed insights into the not-so-very-new phenomenon of leftist intellectuals who hate freedom. The piece begins with some nicely-judged sarcasm, directed against all those who have tried to question the moral integrity of the brave hundreds of thousands who have frozen for freedom on Independence Square in the past week:

Just in case anyone actually thought that all of those people waving flags on the streets of Kiev represent authentic Ukrainian sentiments, the London Guardian informed its readers otherwise last week. In an article titled "US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev," the newspaper described the events of the past 10 days as "an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing." In a separate article, the same paper described the whole episode as a "postmodern coup d'etat" and a "CIA-sponsored third world uprising of cold war days, adapted to post-Soviet conditions."

Neither author was a fringe journalist, and the Guardian is not a fringe newspaper. Nor have their views been ignored: In the international echo chamber that the Internet has become, these ideas have resonance. Both articles were liberally quoted, for example, in a Web log written by the editor of the Nation, who, while writing that she admired "citizens fighting corrupt regimes," just as in the United States, she also noted darkly that the wife of the Ukrainian opposition leader, a U.S. citizen of Ukrainian descent, "worked in the Reagan White House."

Versions of this argument -- that pro-democracy movements are in fact insidious neocon plots designed to spread American military influence -- have been around for some time. Sometimes they cite George Soros -- in this context, a right-wing capitalist -- as the source of the funding and "slick marketing." Sometimes they cite the evil triumvirate of the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute and Freedom House, all organizations that have indeed been diligently training judges, helping election monitors and funding human rights groups around the world for decades, much of the time without getting much attention for it.

The whole essay is well worth reading and reflecting on.

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