Unleashing an Internet Revolution in Cuba
By now the name of Yoani Sánchez has become common currency for those who follow Cuba. Through the use of New Media (blog, Twitter and YouTube) Yoani has challenged the Castro regime in a way that various U.S. government-sponsored efforts have failed to do before, earning the respect and tacit admiration of even those who continue to sympathize with the Cuban regime. As my colleague Ian Vásquez put it a few months ago, Yoani keeps speaking truth to power.
Although she’s a remarkable individual, Yoani is not alone in fighting repression with technology. Other bloggers are making their voice heard, and that makes the Castro dictatorship nervous. As Yoani wrote in a paper recently published by Cato, despite the many difficulties and costs that regular Cubans face when trying to access Internet,
… a web of networks has emerged as the only means by which a person on the island can make his opinions known to the rest of the world. Today, this virtual space is like a training camp where Cubans go to relearn forgotten freedoms. The right of association can be found on Facebook, Twitter, and the other social networks, in a sort of compensation for the crime of “unlawful assembly” established by the Cuban penal code.
As recent events in Iran and elsewhere have shown, once a technology becomes pervasive in a society, it is extremely difficult for a totalitarian regime to control it. A new paper published today by the Cuba Study Group highlights the potential of technology in bringing about democracy and liberty to Cuba. The document entitled “Empowering the Cuban People through Technology: Recommendations for Private and Public Sector Leaders,” also recommends lifting all U.S. restrictions that hinder the opportunities of companies to provide cell phone and Internet service to the island. For example, the paper reviews the current U.S. regulatory framework on technology investment in other repressive regimes such as Iran, Syria, Burma and North Korea, and finds that “the U.S. regulations governing telecommunications-related exports to Cuba are still some of the most restrictive.”
By removing these counterproductive restrictions, Washington could help unleash an Internet revolution in Cuba. More Yoanis will certainly bring about more change in the island than 50 years of failed U.S. trade and travel bans.
Was There a Libertarian Golden Age?
Recently I wrote an article arguing that there never was a golden age of liberty and that in particular libertarians should not hail 19th-century America as a small-government paradise, at least not without grappling with the massive problem of slavery. Jacob Hornberger, author of an article that I criticized, responded in Reason, and I then responded here. Meanwhile, an interesting discussion took place on a email list of libertarian scholars, and I’m pleased to have gotten the permission of several participants to include some of that discussion here:
Globalization: Curse or Cure?
Globalization holds tremendous promise to improve human welfare but can also cause conflicts and crises. How will competition for resources, employment, and growth shape economic policies among developed nations as they attempt to maintain productivity growth, social protections, and extensive political and cultural freedoms?
In a new study, Cato scholar Jagadeesh Gokhale offers policy recommendations for developed nations to reduce globalization’s negative effects and, indeed, harness it for solving economic challenges.
So Much for That Argument for War!
Remember when President George W. Bush was pushing war for democracy? Excited neoconservatives promised that a new wave of democratization was about to roll through the Middle East, sweeping out authoritarian and anti-American regimes.
Oops.
The most significant finding of the latest report is the decline in freedom in the Middle East, [Arch Puddington] said.
Three countries — Jordan, Yemen and Bahrain — were reclassified from “partly free” to “not free,” and freedoms declined in Morocco and Iran.
“Freedom House saw the region as a whole as headed slightly in the right direction after 9/11,” he said. “But that has changed.”
Not only are countries moving backwards, but America’s friends and allies are leading the parade: Jordan, Morocco, Bahrain.
So much for that justification for invading and bombing other lands.
Blasphemy Laws Are an Admission of Failure
The Washington Post feature “On Faith” today discusses Ireland’s new, profoundly misguided blasphemy law. Blasphemers there can now be fined up to $35,000. That’s a lot of money for a few little words.
Atheist Ireland is testing — and protesting — the law by publishing blasphemous quotations like the following:
“Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.”
“Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him.”
“May Allah curse the Jews and Christians for they built the places of worship at the graves of their prophets.”
“Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”
They are, respectively, from Jesus, Jesus, Muhammad, and Benedict XVI.
Maybe it’s an American thing, but the Post apparently couldn’t find any panelists to defend the law. These folks are all professional wordsmiths, of course, and these tend to be most supportive of the freedoms that they depend on the most. As I noted in my recent Policy Analysis, those who are most easily offended, and who value free speech the least, tend to gravitate not to newspapers, but to governments (and university administrations). That’s where the power is.
Susan Jacoby, for whom I have the utmost respect, even calls the law Pythonesque, likening it to the Ministry of Silly Walks. Of course, there’s this as well:
Blasphemy laws are oddities, because they concede an awful lot of emotional power to the blasphemer. They tell the world: My feelings are so very fragile. Or perhaps they say: My god is so very weak — so weak that he needs state protection against other gods, or even against mere potty-mouthed humans. Either way, it’s an embarrassing admission, but hardly the business of government. If your god can’t take the heat, he’s hardly a god at all.
Jesus and Mo put it very well indeed:
Are You a Conservative Yet?
Cato senior fellow Johan Norberg writes on his blog:
14:49 – A LIBERTARIAN WITH A DAUGHTER:
A Swedish conservative columnist recently expressed surprise – she found it strange that I am still a classical liberal even though I have discovered family happiness and love my son. But she hoped that I would change my mind if I got a daughter: “A conservative is a libertarian with daughters.”
Well, we are about to find out. Because this weekend, my wife gave birth to the cutest little girl I’ve ever seen. They’re both in great condition and so far Alexander is just happy and curious about the little gift we brought from the maternity hospital.
Obviously, I will focus on the family in the coming weeks, so my activity here and elsewhere will be reduced. So any conservative symptoms yet? Well, preliminarily I can only say that I am delighted that she is born into a part of the world and in an era when women have greater freedoms and more equality than they have ever had anywhere else, as a result of liberal reforms over the last 150 years – reforms that conservatives objected to.
Congratulations, Johan and Sofia. And remember: the best conservatives are the ones who embrace and defend the advances that libertarians (liberals) fought for.
One Nation Under Double Jeopardy
The Senate is about to vote on Defense Department funding with an expanded federal “hate crimes” bill. This well-intentioned piece of legislation threatens to make violations of the fundamental right against Double Jeopardy a routine practice, as federal courts will now have the power to re-prosecute defendants for what are traditionally state crimes.
The House removed language that the Senate put in place to ensure that the “hate crimes” provisions did not stretch to encompass free speech, threatening to attach criminal liability to core rights of free expression.
This expansion of federal jurisdiction guarantees that high profile cases will be retried until a guilty verdict is obtained to satisfy political factions. This politicization of justice will only harm our courts and our freedoms. The Senate should vote down this threat to the fundamental rights of all Americans.
Now for some quick background reading:
Totalitarian Leftovers in Eastern Europe
The Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago. A hideous symbol of the suppression of liberty, it should remind us of the ever-present threat to our freedoms. Even two decades later the legacy of repression continues to afflict many people in Eastern Europe. For instance, those in countries formerly behind the Iron Curtain still struggle with the knowledge that their friends and neighbors routinely spied on them.
Stelian Tanase found out when he asked to see the thick file that Romania’s communist-era secret police had kept on him. The revelation nearly knocked the wind out of him: His closest pal was an informer who regularly told agents what Tanase was up to.
“In a way, I haven’t even recovered today,” said Tanase, a novelist who was placed under surveillance and had his home bugged during the late dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime.
“He was the one person on Earth I had the most faith in,” he said. “And I never, ever suspected him.”
Twenty years ago this autumn, communism collapsed across Eastern Europe. But its dark legacy endures in the unanswered question of the files — whether letting the victims read them cleanses old wounds or rips open new ones.
Things have never been so bad here, obviously, but that gives us even more reason to jealously guard our liberties. Defend America we must, but we must never forget that it is a republic which we are defending.
The New Puritanism
H. L. Mencken described puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
The new puritanism is the fear that someone, somewhere, may be learning.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune has a story today in which public school educationalists wring their hands over the fear that suburban whites may be getting a good education in charter schools. This, somehow, is perceived to be a bad thing for urban minority kids.
Um. No.
What is bad for any child is a paucity of high quality education options from which to choose. The focus of policymakers should be on ensuring that more and better education options are constantly coming within reach of all children, regardless of the contents of their parents’ wallets, the pigmentation of their skin, or their ethnic background. This, the research shows, can most reliably be achieved by harnessing the freedoms and incentives of a competitive education marketplace.
Can the charter school system create such a marketplace? Can it relentlessly spawn new excellent schools and scale up the established ones to reach a mass audience? For a discussion of those questions, drop by Cato on October 2nd.
Obama Intel Chief Sought National ID?
While Republican members of the Senate Intelligence Committee have written a letter objecting to the experience level of National Intelligence Council Chairman Chas Freeman, Ashley Rindsberg at the Huffington Post reveals that Freeman advocated creating a national identity system in the US as a part of the “war on terror.”
During a 9/11 Commission interview, Freeman remarked that of three major changes the US government should make to effectively combat terror, one was that “the United States should implement a national identity system, so we better know who is who.”
Seems Freeman lost track of why we have intelligence and security – to preserve our freedoms. We don’t abandon our freedoms to preserve our intelligence. Not that a national ID would help with that . . . .
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