Can’t Jail Freedom, Can’t Incarcerate Democracy Forever
This week the Chinese government sentenced Liu Xiaobo to eleven years’ jail time. Eleven years is close to a death sentence. During this same week the Chinese executed a British national for drug trafficking. He was caught traveling with nine pounds of heroin. He claimed it wasn’t his. Maybe it wasn’t. We’ll never know. Liu Xiaobo was incarcerated for advocating peaceful change and such diabolical doctrines as freedom, democracy, and rule of law. The problem he had is he advocated such thoughts in China. For his thoughts he now has the opportunity of breaking rocks in a Chinese prison.
In the last thirty years there probably has been no more forcefully poignant photograph than that of the solitary figure standing in Tiananmen Square in front of tank after tank after tank during the 1989 protests. That lonely figure is certainly far from the twenty-eight-year-old mother attending P.T.A. in St. Paul, Minnesota last Tuesday. And it is certainly far from the smoke, terror, and turmoil in the streets and the campus riots in Tehran, Iran. There, university students were objecting and dying over the issue of legitimate elections and whether the state should support any religion, especially a religion that excludes all other beliefs and forcefully hides women under burkas and cloaks them in ignorance.
The irony, if there is one, is that these scenarios and a thousand like them were being played out yesterday, last year, in 1969, and every year in between. Since time immemorial, the United States has been trying to export democracy, trying to save the world from totalitarian powers, dictators, unruly despotic kings, and just plain old war lords ranging from the mountains of Afghanistan to the jungles of Southeast Asia and the killing fields of Cambodia. Lives have been terminated and blood spilt, all in the name of something called world peace. Unless you are plain deaf, dumb, blind, and totally ignorant, locked inside a cave, and fed ravioli all of the days of your existence, you must realize there is no peace. There never has been. Men everywhere eventually will rebel against rule under the thumb of violence. People just don’t like prison whether it has walls or not.
Ever since 1945 our government has been going about its foreign policy all wrong. I think all of those wars and those deaths of our eighteen-year-old kids have been in vain; not that their courage under fire should not be praised and admired and eulogized in song, their names etched on tall black marble walls. The end result is always more blood, more death, more sacrifice.
We should do something diabolical. We should simply educate the young of any country, any person that wants an education. Imagine for a moment that the streets of Tehran were filled with kids educated in Norman, Oklahoma, Alabama State University, Yale, MIT, Harvard ,and the ten thousand college campuses spread across the United States. Look at our Berkeley experience. Look at Kent State. No government is safe from their young. Imagine if we’d been educating these kids since 1945. The foreign policy for world revolution: Educate their young. Give them an education and send them back to their countries for a mandatory sentence of five or ten years. Give it to them free, if they’ll just study. If we’d done that . . . well, they could run their own governments, provide for their own domestic tranquility as well as the common defense of what people everywhere hold sacred. I know it’s simplistic, but didn’t the student riots in Berkeley eventually get us out of the war in Vietnam? Simple works.
Shouldn’t we get started so that our young people don’t have to spill their sacred blood in the poppy fields of Afghanistan and the dozen other Afghanistans that are sure to follow? Shouldn’t we get started so we don’t have to shoot the hell out of the citizens of Iraq Vietnam, and Cambodia? When will we ever learn? If we started today, in four years the first group of domestic insurgents would be going back to their own countries from our universities. Isn’t such an educational gift cheaper than the life of even one American soldier? Isn’t it a gift that keeps on giving?
What government can withstand the collective will of their own people, especially if we educate them at their request?