Ian Boyne

Last Sunday, communist China unveiled a new set of restrictions on the type of news content foreign agencies can distribute in China and reasserted control of what is broadcast or published outside of the country, thus reaffirming its status as an enemy of freedom.

Sadly, there are Chinese capitalists and advocates of democracy living in the West who downplay their country's suppression of freedom of expression out of ethnic loyalty and over-exuberance over China's remarkable rise to global power. Just as there are sincere Muslims outside of the Middle East who are visceral and reflexively defensive over criticisms about the totalitarian nature of Islamic fundamentalism.

These Chinese and Muslims, blinded by loyalty borne of ethnicity and ideology, are joined by leftists who, turned off by the failure of bourgeois democracy to meet the social and economic needs of the poor and oppressed, downplay Cuba's suppression of freedom of the press and expression, because of its impressive social achievements.

Unfortunately, because of the glaring hypocrisy of United States foreign policy, George Bush's rhetoric about liberty and democracy-promotion are given short shrift and the democratic ideal is not given the profound significance which it holds. Because democracy is being promoted in an unbalanced and class-driven way. But, despite the myriad examples of double-standards in the rhetoric of the West about democracy, human rights and freedom, the fact remains that its concept of freedom, though limited in practice, is philosophically superior to its competitors, past and present.

The U.S. might have opposed Nazism and communism because of its own Great Power designs and hegemonic obsession, and even if it said that it opposes Islamic extremism for the same reasons, the truth is that American model of democracy is superior to that trinity.

It must be acknowledged that right-wingers and defenders of western democracy have been one-sided and jaundiced in their approach to human rights. They make civil and political liberties sacrosanct, but largely ignore economic and social rights, which are equally enshrined in United Nations conventions. Defenders of what is called 'bourgeois democracy' pay little or no attention to the fact that many of the vaunted freedoms and civil liberties which are proclaimed as religious dogma mean absolutely nothing to the poor and marginalised whose economic status put those freedoms and civil liberties outside their grasp. If we are really serious about freedom and democracy, then people have to be empowered to enjoy those rights.

Poverty, unemployment, discrimination and economic oppression rob people of their rights. The Left, therefore, is perfectly right to show up the cant of the Right which waxes self-righteous about democratic ideals while caring little about economic and social rights.

But the Left has no leg to stand on when it equally and conveniently belittles the suppression of human rights and civil liberties which goes under the name of "revolutionary democracy". A high-powered meeting has just concluded in Havana, Cuba, of the Non-Aligned Movement and many of these nations, while they took delight in attacking the United States and blasting George Bush would, find nothing reprehensible about the fact that the Cuban people don't have unrestricted right to travel to visit relatives or to receive any publication which they would like to read.

What matters

All that matters to them is that Cuba has stood up courageously to "US imperialism" and "the aggressors" and that the Cuban people have good health care, good educational facilities and that they don't suffer the economic and social indignities of the masses in the capitalist countries. Cuba retains its star status despite its suppression of freedom of the Press and freedom of assembly.

China has now set restrictions on the foreign Press operating not only on the mainland but also in Hong King. The wicked British maintained freedom of the Press and freedom of expression in the nearly 150 years that they were the colonial power there. Now that Hong Kong has been freed from British colonialism the country can't enjoy the luxury of information freely leaving the country. Now, under the usual guise of "protecting national security", the Chinese dictators have slapped restrictions on foreign news agencies operating in the city-state of Hong State.

It is interesting that the left would raise all kinds of convoluted arguments to justify this kind of suppression of information, using the same national security argument, and yet they would butcher Bush when he invokes it. They will raise all kinds of alarms about how Americans' freedoms are being taken away in the war on terror; how national security is being used by the Bush Administration to take away the people's liberties and yet when Cuba and China come up with the same canard it is accepted uncritically. Ideological blindness is a really a dangerous thing.

Communist laws

The Cubans in their country and the Chinese in theirs don't have the right of unrestricted access to the Internet. They don't have the right to get American television programming for their masters have determined that that will corrupt them politically and culturally. Big Brother knows what's best and the little ones must trust his judgement.

In Saudi Arabia, Christians and Buddhists -and all non-Muslims-have no right to build places of worship or to propagate their religion. The Islamic rulers know what's best for the population and they know the mind of Allah. Too bad for you if you think that your God is directing you otherwise.

The genius of the Western democratic ideal is that it is built on some profound philosophical principles. It is first of all built on fallibilism. That is, the notion that human beings can err and that, in fact, they are prone to err. Human knowledge is fallible, tentative, and provisional. None of us has a God's eye view of everything, if of anything. There is no Theory of Everything no Archimedean point. This is an important philosophical stance.

It clashes violently with the ideological foundation of totalist ideologies like (in the past) Nazism, communism and Islamism which proclaim separately that it knows definitely, authoritatively and certainly what is the best path. Fortunately for us, we got rid of the Christian totalitarians and the advocates of a political Christendom, and secularism triumphed over militant Catholicism. Thank God!

The world is a much safer place today because the totalitarian ideology of the Christian Crusaders and the Roman Church was decisively routed by the secular state. Do not believe that militant Islam is necessarily more vicious and more violent than a militant Fundamentalist or resurgent Middle Ages Catholicism would be. The Christian fanatics and theonomists can find enough texts in the Old and even New testaments to butcher us unbelievers (in their particular sectarian doctrine), just as the radical Islamists can find Quranic justification for terrorism. There is something pernicious and scary about the Fundamentalist mindset.

In Jamaica you encounter some mindless Christian fundamentalists who, if they had their way, would ban certain television programmes, certain movies and certain books and would even seek to impose dress-length standards on our women to fight the scourge of dancehall fashions. Don't think it's just the Taliban who has this kind of mentality. Talk to your fundamentalist, Bible-thumping neighbour and see how open-minded he or she really is.

In the 1940s the outstanding thinker Sir Karl Popper wrote his Open Society and Its Enemies book-set which remains as relevant today as when they were written. The Open society still has its enemies. Its primary and most powerful enemy today is militant Islam. But actions such those taken last weekend by the communist dictators who run China and the continued denial of civil liberties on our doorstep in Cuba show that militant Islam has its allies.

Degradation and marginalisation

Western democracy is flawed and fails to live up to its ideal. The level of poverty, degradation and marginalisation which exist in capitalist societies are an affront to its democratic ideals. It is inexcusable, whatever the right-wingers want to say. But while there are inadequacies, at least there is some room to change regimes peacefully, publish and broadcast stridently against in Western democracies (some of the harshest criticisms of America are published and broadcast there!) and to be exposed to information from outside.

Progress Publishers, a major propaganda arm of the Soviet communists before the fall of communism, could freely send its books into the United States and other Western states. (My library has many of them, collected diligently in the 1970s.)

What does an economically and culturally powerful nation like China have to fear from freedom of the Press except its hold over the minds of people? (Incidentally, China's suppression of freedom of the Press and freedom of expression gives the lie to the view that Cuba's repression is really America's fault because of its "criminal blockade". No, it's the nature of communist regimes to suppress civil and political liberties) Some leftist wrote me after a recent criticism of Cuba to say I had ignored Cuban elections and the various democratic mechanisms in Cuba. My question is simple: Are reactionary or religious parties allowed to enter the electoral contests? America and Europe allow groups which radically oppose them to freely garner votes.

Actually, Franklin D. Roosevelt's famous Four Freedoms speech of January 1941 really sums up the balanced approach to freedoms which should be embraced. Defining what he correctly called "the four essential human freedoms", he said "the first is freedom of speech and expressionÉThe second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own wayÉThe third is freedom from want- which translated ... means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants ... The fourth is freedom from fear which ... means a worldwide reduction of armaments ..." America has not been as committed to the third, and right-wingers have generally not been, just as leftists and assorted religious ideologues have been openly contemptuous of the first two.

An independent intellectual cadre must continue to push for a third path between the enemies of freedom on both sides.

Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist who may be contacted at ianboyne1@yahoo.com