April 28th, 2010 by Chanan

That is the question posed by Boston Globe columnist, Jeff Jacoby, in an op-ed today following last week’s Conference on Cyber Dissidents at the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas, Texas. With vastly superior modes of communications and digital technology, Jacoby wonders why today’s democracy dissidents in Syria or China are not as well-known as their Soviet counterparts in the 1970s and 80s.

David Keyes, the director of CyberDissidents.org, whose self-declared “mission is to make the Middle East’s pro-democracy Internet activists famous and beloved in the West” highlighted this very paradox at the event: “The Internet enables them [the dissidents] to reach the world… They push the ‘send’ button and thousands of people can instantly read their words. Yet not a single American in a million knows their names.’’

Another participant at the conference - Jeffrey Gedmin, president and CEO of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty - provided an answer last week in a USA Today piece entitled, “Democracy Isn’t Just a Tweet Away.” Gedmin argued that although the proliferation of social media has empowered political protests and dissent, it has also empowered authoritarian governments to respond and react in kind. “Tyrants, it turns out, like Twitter too,” he remarked. And even if these tools are helpful in coordinating demonstrations and other forms of activism, it ”won’t tell the opposition how to govern, how to develop democratic institutions or how to inculcate and defend the values, habits and behaviors that belong to democracy.”

Nonetheless, this did not prevent some attendees at the conference - many of whom are cyber dissidents - from expressing a sense of abandonment from the Obama administration and an apparent longing for Bush’s freedom agenda. One such dissident, Ahed Al-Hendi, was not hesitant from articulating his frustration: ”In Syria, when a single dissident was arrested during the administration of George W. Bush, at the very least the White House spokesman would condemn it. Under the Obama administration: nothing.” This is unfortunate, laments the Wall Street Journal’s Bari Weiss: “The peaceful promotion of human rights and democracy—in part by supporting the individuals risking their lives for liberty—are consonant with America’s most basic values. Standing up for them should not be a partisan issue.”

Posted in Freedom, Human Rights, Syria, Technology, US foreign policy, Uncategorized |