Without nationhood and particularity, there can be no freedom

I wrote this e-mail to Jamie Glazov at FrontPage Magazine:

I read your interview with Natan (Anatoly) Sharansky. He’s such a good, intelligent, engaging man. Like you, I regard him as a hero. I’m not persuaded by his thesis that it’s possible to democratize the Moslem world, but he certainly makes an excellent case and he makes me think.

I like what he said in response to your question, why did he become a dissident?

Sharansky: I wrote in great detail about this subject in my first book, Fear No Evil. More broadly, I became a dissident the moment I left the world of doublethink—the moment I was willing to say what I thought. What gave me the courage to do so was the inner freedom I had found in reconnecting myself to the history and heritage of my people—a process that began for many Soviet Jews in the wake of Israel’s miraculous victory in the Six Day War.

“You see, a totalitarian regime is most powerful when an individual confronts it alone. But I was never alone. I was connected to thousands of years of Jewish history. I saw our struggle within the USSR as a continuation of my people’s ancient journey from slavery in Egypt to our promised land. I was strengthened by so many around the world, Jews and non-Jews, who were engaged in the struggle to free Soviet Jewry and to liberate hundreds of millions of people from under the boot of Soviet tyranny. And most important, I was strengthened by the vision of being reunited again with my wife Avital in Jerusalem. This feeling of interconnectedness is what enabled me to persevere all those years in the Gulag.”

In other words, to stand up against the Soviet system, he needed a cultural/national identity that was not provided by the Soviet system. Just being a “universal individual” believing in “freedom and democracy” was not enough. This shows that the belief in freedom, of which Sharansky himself is such an eloquent spokesman, is not enough. One must have a nation, a culture, a religion, a people. Yet Sharansky’s own ideology of universal freedom, especially in the way it’s pursued by the U.S., tends to undermine such cultural and national values. Or is it only Jews (and Poles, as in the case of Pope Paul II’s eloquent speeches to the Polish people in 1979) who get to have a national/cultural identity, while Americans are denied one? It would be nice to have a chance to ask Sharansky these questions.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 17, 2004 08:02 PM | Send