John Kampfner, a British foreign correspondent and former editor of the leftist New Statesman, is a man with a theory. The gist lies in the title of his new book, Freedom for Sale: How We Made Money and Lost Our Liberty.
His argument runs like this: Peoples around the world, in the democratic as well as the authoritarian camp, have a pact with governments whereby they sacrifice their freedoms and submit to selective repression in return for a measure of prosperity and security.
To prove his point, Kampfner roamed the world, from Russia, China, India, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates to Italy, the UK and the US. Though the circumstances differ, he says, the tendency to barter liberty for cash is everywhere the same.
In Russia he shows how, in the guise of the popular Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the country’s historic taste for political brutalism lingers. In China, an autocratic Communist Party seems set to retain power while it produces the goods. And in India, a sense of community has been sacrificed to capitalist development and corruption, he claims.
Grim reading, though there are nice touches, such as Putin’s un-modern remark that the relationship between governments and journalists resembles that between men and women: It’s the government’s role to make advances, and the media’s to resist.
Kampfner is a fine reporter and a stylish writer, yet it’s possible to admire the book and to disagree with his thesis. The snag is that he stretches it way too far Westward.
“The dividing lines between countries deemed to be authoritarian and countries deemed to be democracies are not as clear as people in the West believe them to be,” he writes.
TWO PLUS TWO
One is tempted to invoke a question posed by the anti-rationalist hero of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground. What if, he asks, two plus two equals five? One possible answer: Stand your imagined five feet from the railroad tracks when an express train is passing and see how you get on.
So it is with this book. If freedoms in Britain and America have been eroded to the point where there’s little to choose between them and authoritarian lands — an irrational view it seems to me — try writing volumes like this in Russia or China. See what happens.
Yes, the US and UK overreacted to terrorist attacks on their soil. But Kampfner overreacts in his turn, notably when describing America after Sept. 11, 2001.
“In the months immediately after 9/11, some 80,000 people were rounded up in dragnets across the country. Most were of Middle Eastern origin, many of them ‘illegals,’” he intones. “The notions of guilt and innocence were discarded.”
Sounds scary, but think about it. Why is it unreasonable to detain illegal immigrants from the Mideast after terrorists from that region have incinerated almost 3,000 people in the Twin Towers, many of them, incidentally, from the Mideast?
As for the collusion of America’s citizens in the trashing of their own rights, and their political apathy, how does that square with the millions of new voters who helped elect US President Barack Obama in a fine democratic race? Where is the similarity with Russia or China?
Kampfner is on firmer ground when he writes of the rising clout of authoritarian regimes, yet he fails to follow through. Most commentators, even Americans, nod sagely when it’s suggested that the US should be cut down to size in favor of a brave new multipolar world.
But these tough, newly rich and nationalistic regimes are mostly the governments that Kampfner so eloquently chastises. If the US declines to deal with such regimes, it gets accused of being confrontational. If it does have truck with them, it is charged with sharing their cynical values: We’re as bad as they are, the argument goes.
There’s good stuff in this book, and the author is as well read as he is widely traveled. Too bad his bibliography doesn’t include The Case for Goliath, a cooler, non-partisan look at America’s place in the world by Michael Mandelbaum.
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