By Roger Cohen
ATHENS — Perhaps you know the story of the parrot in Soviet Russia that escapes from its cage and flies out the window. Its owner rushes out and hurries down to the Ministry of State Security.
“I just want to assure you,” he tells the Soviet agents, “in case the situation arises, that my parrot’s views are not my own.”
None of us wants to live in a society where we worry what our parrots might say. Nor for that matter in a society where the presidential parrot would repeat: “I am a genius! America first! Witch hunt! Coup!”
China has banned Winnie the Pooh online and in theaters. Pooh, who memorably said, “People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day” — among other incendiary remarks. A society that bans Winnie the Pooh, because of a supposed resemblance to its Great Leader, is a society with some serious issues.
As the three-decade mark of the fall of the Berlin Wall approaches, free speech must be safeguarded with great tenacity, for when it dies, as when truth dies, the worst becomes possible and probably inevitable.
I have been attending the Athens Democracy Forum, a gathering organized in association with The New York Times. There, I met Magdalena Adamowicz. Her husband, Pawel Adamowicz, was murdered earlier this year in Gdansk, the quintessentially European city in Poland of which he was mayor.
She reminded me, with the solemn force of her dignity, that we must do better in the regulation of hate speech. But freedom of expression also protects — and perhaps above all protects — the ideas we hate. That is the price of freedom, and freedom must be relearned every day. I will hear echoing in my mind for some time Adamowicz’s appeal: “Education, education, education.”
When her husband was stabbed to death, one of his last words was “solidarity,” with a small “s”, as Donald Tusk, the outgoing president of the European Council, observed. This, then, was a frenzied attempt to take a knife to the universal human connection — above and beyond barriers of class, race and religion — that the walls of nationalists are built to deny.
Digitized democracy in the 21st century cannot be the democracy of the 20th century. At the same time, even as institutions must adapt and the connective tissue of our societies must be rewoven and our economies reinvented, an obligation exists to defend the values that provided the framework of the 20th century’s international order: freedom and openness; the rule of law; human rights; democracy and self-determination; security; and free-market opportunity.
Protesters in Hong Kong in September.CreditAn Rong Xu for The New York Times
No wrongheaded American abdication can diminish the importance of this task.
I do not believe this undertaking can be advanced through nationalism and barriers, mythmaking and drum rolls, incitement and xenophobia. Been there, done that, suffered. The end point of nationalism, as François Mitterrand observed, is war.
That is no less true today than it was at the Normandy landings — when, yes, the Kurds were unpardonably absent. President Trump does take your breath away. Perhaps he intends to resettle the Kurds in Greenland.
Words are fine, but without deeds they fade into the mist.
The doers admonished everyone in Athens. Nathan Law, a Hong Kong politician and activist, said: “We stand with the defenders of liberty everywhere. In Hong Kong we are in the forefront of a clash of authoritarian and liberal values. If Communism prevails, that will threaten all liberal democracies.”
I agree.
Kassem Eid, author and brave survivor of the Syrian blood bath: “If you don’t fight for democracy, you don’t deserve it.” I bow my head.
Kassem Eid outside the United Nations in 2014.CreditMichael Appleton for The New York Times
Paul Polman, the former head of Unilever, on the lesson of the Great Recession of 2008: “Banks were too big to fail and people too small to matter.” I have not heard a better summation.
Ivan Krastev, a political scientist, on the power of myth: “More Hungarians believe they have seen an unidentified flying object than believe they have met a refugee.” Yet xenophobic illiberalism works for Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Hungary. Nothing is easier, or more dangerous, than cultivation of hatred of the stranger.
We must be humble and listen and heed the forgotten voices. As Kyriakos Mitsotakis, prime minister of Greece, put it: “There has been a massive failure of elites to understand the new cleavages.” Complacency and contempt have been liberal democracy’s worst enemies.
It is not the prerogative of the globalized city dweller to ignore the concerns of all those living on what the French call the periphery. Democracies have the merit of giving expression to discontent. This is what we have witnessed in the recent nationalist wave: a reaction by the invisible and marginalized to globalization’s masters of the universe.
“Life,” as some sage once observed, “is a predicament that precedes death.” Our struggles are not as new or as different as we imagine. The tension between freedom and equality is not new. The struggle between humanity and the machine is not new. The human susceptibility to folly is not new. What is new, above all, is the means we now have, if only we would use them right, to build a connected world of dignity and decency.
For a long time, over the course of my life, I watched liberty and democracy and openness spread, not steadily but in spurts, not smoothly or evenly, but falteringly and unevenly. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the wars of Yugoslavia’s destruction were pivot points of my life that cemented the link between America and freedom, America and peace. Alone among nations the United States could make me an insider overnight. That is why New York is my home.
Today, American patriotism, as I understand it, requires this: the defense of the Constitution, the rule of law, truth, freedom and the planet itself against the ravages issuing from the White House and its increasingly deranged occupant.
Each of us has a journey. I am a Jew of South African descent raised in Britain, shaped by France, an American now. These are the threads of my story, and where they have left me is right here in Athens, where democracy began, as part of a conference I cherish. I am a bridge not a wall person. How could I be anything else?
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