02-03-2005, 02:56 AM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Wednesday, February 2, 2005
Ex-Dissident Sharansky Becomes Bush's Muse
By Megan Goldin
Reuters
JERUSALEM -- It's been a long and lonely road for former Soviet
dissident Natan Sharansky, who for years has been ridiculed for his
political theories of spreading democracy across the globe to obtain
world peace.
But the former Soviet refusenik, who is now a Cabinet minister in the
Israeli government, no longer walks alone. His companion in his
campaign to democratize the world is no less than U.S. President
George W. Bush.
To have the ear of the most powerful leader in the world after
decades of having his political ideology dismissed as naive and
eccentric is a pleasant change for the diminutive Ukrainian-born
mathematician.
"I am sorry that there are so few people who believe in these ideas,
but it's nice to think that one of these very few people is the
president of the United States," Sharansky, 57, said in his office in
Jerusalem.
Not only did Bush read Sharansky's <b>new book, "The Case for
Democracy," </b>with avid interest days after it was published, but he
gave a copy to his top adviser, new Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice, and said he personally bought a copy for British Prime Minister
Tony Blair.
"This is a book that ... summarizes how I feel. I would urge people
to read it," Bush told CNN.
Bush was so taken with the book that he summoned Sharansky to the
White House in November. The president spent an hour in the Oval
Office discussing Sharansky's ideology based on his years as a
dissident and prisoner in the Soviet Union.
"I told him: 'You are the real dissident. Politicians look at polls --
what is popular, what is not popular. A dissident believes in an
idea and goes ahead with it ... even when there are so many people
who disagree,'" Sharansky said.
Sharansky has espoused these views for more than two decades, but
said he had been largely dismissed "as a guy who has spent too much
time in a Soviet prison, so he is a bit crazy in the head."
Palestinians and Israeli peace activists see him as betraying the
values of freedom and human rights he says he holds dear because he
has not fought the Israeli occupation and has helped prop up a
succession of right-wing Israeli governments. Even Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon told him, "They are good ideas, but they don't
belong to this part of the world."
So it was with a feeling of vindication that Sharansky heard Bush's
inauguration address on Jan. 20, in which he called for "expansion of
freedom" around the world and an end to tyranny, phrases that could
have been taken from the pages of Sharansky's book. "I was very
excited, not only because the words were so familiar and the ideas
were so important. [But] the ideas were expressed with such
confidence ... not by an academic, but by the leader of the free
world who was going to implement them."
The soft-spoken Sharansky does not claim to have put words in Bush's
mouth. Rather, he says his book gave Bush a historical context and
political theory "for his instinctive feelings."
Sharansky's theories on "liberty" and "freedom" germinated while
working as an aide to leading Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov in the
1970s and during his eight years in a Siberian jail after the Soviet
authorities convicted him as a spy and traitor.
He became a symbol for the movement to free Soviet Jews, and under
enormous international pressure, particularly from the United States,
was released in 1986 as part of a prisoner swap with Moscow. He
immediately immigrated to Israel.
There, a painfully thin Sharansky, despite being force-fed at a
Soviet hospital before his release, was greeted as a national hero.
He later formed a party for Russian immigrants that joined the right-
wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996.
He resents being pigeonholed as a "right-winger," despite opposing
the 1993 Oslo peace accords with the Palestinians. He said his
political views are conceptually different from anything on the
Israeli political spectrum today. "Today I am called a right-wing
extremist. Tomorrow I will be called a left-wing extremist," he
said. "I am a refusenik."
The gist of Sharansky's view is that the "free world" should
encourage countries to democratize by linking international standing
and aid to their record on human rights and freedom of speech. It was
such linkage through the 1975 Helsinki Agreements that led to the
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, he said.
Sharansky said he firmly believes the world would be more stable and
extremism would fizzle out if all peoples, including those in the
Middle East, enjoyed freedom and democracy.
As with Bush's speech, Arab academics are somewhat skeptical about
Sharansky's view. "I can't swallow that he was a champion of human
rights in the Soviet Union and when he came over here he forgot his
past and was part of the scheme of occupying another people,"
Palestinian political analyst Ali al-Jarbawi said.
Sharansky does not spare criticism for the United States, saying it
tried to appease countries such as Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Saudi
Arabia. Washington, he said, should have linked relations and aid
with improved human rights and democracy.
He acknowledged Bush faced an uphill battle for democracy in the face
of the "realpolitik" that drives foreign policy. His advice to Bush:
Ignore the skeptics and stick to your ideals. "Dissidents are always
alone. ... You can only hope the logic of history is on your side.
That is what happened in the Soviet Union and that is what I hope
will happen in the Middle East."<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Ex-Dissident Sharansky Becomes Bush's Muse
By Megan Goldin
Reuters
JERUSALEM -- It's been a long and lonely road for former Soviet
dissident Natan Sharansky, who for years has been ridiculed for his
political theories of spreading democracy across the globe to obtain
world peace.
But the former Soviet refusenik, who is now a Cabinet minister in the
Israeli government, no longer walks alone. His companion in his
campaign to democratize the world is no less than U.S. President
George W. Bush.
To have the ear of the most powerful leader in the world after
decades of having his political ideology dismissed as naive and
eccentric is a pleasant change for the diminutive Ukrainian-born
mathematician.
"I am sorry that there are so few people who believe in these ideas,
but it's nice to think that one of these very few people is the
president of the United States," Sharansky, 57, said in his office in
Jerusalem.
Not only did Bush read Sharansky's <b>new book, "The Case for
Democracy," </b>with avid interest days after it was published, but he
gave a copy to his top adviser, new Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice, and said he personally bought a copy for British Prime Minister
Tony Blair.
"This is a book that ... summarizes how I feel. I would urge people
to read it," Bush told CNN.
Bush was so taken with the book that he summoned Sharansky to the
White House in November. The president spent an hour in the Oval
Office discussing Sharansky's ideology based on his years as a
dissident and prisoner in the Soviet Union.
"I told him: 'You are the real dissident. Politicians look at polls --
what is popular, what is not popular. A dissident believes in an
idea and goes ahead with it ... even when there are so many people
who disagree,'" Sharansky said.
Sharansky has espoused these views for more than two decades, but
said he had been largely dismissed "as a guy who has spent too much
time in a Soviet prison, so he is a bit crazy in the head."
Palestinians and Israeli peace activists see him as betraying the
values of freedom and human rights he says he holds dear because he
has not fought the Israeli occupation and has helped prop up a
succession of right-wing Israeli governments. Even Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon told him, "They are good ideas, but they don't
belong to this part of the world."
So it was with a feeling of vindication that Sharansky heard Bush's
inauguration address on Jan. 20, in which he called for "expansion of
freedom" around the world and an end to tyranny, phrases that could
have been taken from the pages of Sharansky's book. "I was very
excited, not only because the words were so familiar and the ideas
were so important. [But] the ideas were expressed with such
confidence ... not by an academic, but by the leader of the free
world who was going to implement them."
The soft-spoken Sharansky does not claim to have put words in Bush's
mouth. Rather, he says his book gave Bush a historical context and
political theory "for his instinctive feelings."
Sharansky's theories on "liberty" and "freedom" germinated while
working as an aide to leading Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov in the
1970s and during his eight years in a Siberian jail after the Soviet
authorities convicted him as a spy and traitor.
He became a symbol for the movement to free Soviet Jews, and under
enormous international pressure, particularly from the United States,
was released in 1986 as part of a prisoner swap with Moscow. He
immediately immigrated to Israel.
There, a painfully thin Sharansky, despite being force-fed at a
Soviet hospital before his release, was greeted as a national hero.
He later formed a party for Russian immigrants that joined the right-
wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996.
He resents being pigeonholed as a "right-winger," despite opposing
the 1993 Oslo peace accords with the Palestinians. He said his
political views are conceptually different from anything on the
Israeli political spectrum today. "Today I am called a right-wing
extremist. Tomorrow I will be called a left-wing extremist," he
said. "I am a refusenik."
The gist of Sharansky's view is that the "free world" should
encourage countries to democratize by linking international standing
and aid to their record on human rights and freedom of speech. It was
such linkage through the 1975 Helsinki Agreements that led to the
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, he said.
Sharansky said he firmly believes the world would be more stable and
extremism would fizzle out if all peoples, including those in the
Middle East, enjoyed freedom and democracy.
As with Bush's speech, Arab academics are somewhat skeptical about
Sharansky's view. "I can't swallow that he was a champion of human
rights in the Soviet Union and when he came over here he forgot his
past and was part of the scheme of occupying another people,"
Palestinian political analyst Ali al-Jarbawi said.
Sharansky does not spare criticism for the United States, saying it
tried to appease countries such as Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Saudi
Arabia. Washington, he said, should have linked relations and aid
with improved human rights and democracy.
He acknowledged Bush faced an uphill battle for democracy in the face
of the "realpolitik" that drives foreign policy. His advice to Bush:
Ignore the skeptics and stick to your ideals. "Dissidents are always
alone. ... You can only hope the logic of history is on your side.
That is what happened in the Soviet Union and that is what I hope
will happen in the Middle East."<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->