Bret Stephens: Natan Sharansky versus John Lennon
[Mr. Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.]
This month is the 20th anniversary of the founding of Sajudis, one of the most consequential national liberation movements of the 20th century. Here's betting that you've either never heard of it or, if you have, that you've long since forgotten what it was about.
Sajudis was the Reform Movement of Lithuania, organized by the Baltic state's leading intellectuals just days after Ronald Reagan met publicly with Soviet religious figures and dissidents in Moscow. In a speech to Russian university students that May, Reagan spoke of the moment "when the accumulated spiritual energies of a long silence yearn to break free."
Within weeks, 100,000 Sajudis activists took to the streets to demand greater liberalization. Within months, a quarter-million poured out in protest of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which secretly consigned the Baltic states to Stalinist rule. A year later, two million linked hands in a human chain 300 miles long. In March 1990, Lithuania became the first Soviet republic to declare (or affirm) its independence. Fourteen other "republics" soon followed, bringing the evil empire to an abrupt end.
The Sajudis anniversary came to mind after a meeting in New York last week with Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident turned Israeli politician turned political theorist. Mr. Sharansky has a new book, titled"Defending Identity." It would be equally accurate to call it"The Case Against John Lennon."
Or, more specifically, the case against"Imagine," Lennon's anthem to a world with"no countries . . . nothing to kill or die for/And no religion too." For Mr. Sharansky, a nine-year resident of the Perm 35 prison camp, that's a vision that smacks too much of the professed beliefs of the ex-Beatle's near namesake, Vladimir Ilyich.
Mr. Sharansky's argument is that man's quest for identity – for the human and communal particulars that set him apart from others – cannot be separated from his quest for freedom – the universal set of values to which he and everyone else lay an equal claim. He argues that a freedom that"does not include the freedom to be significantly different" is no freedom at all. And he believes that while a politics that expresses itself purely through identity is bound to be tyrannical, a democracy that ignores its own identity – or attempts to suppress the various identities within it – betrays its deepest principles and puts its long-term survival at risk...
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This month is the 20th anniversary of the founding of Sajudis, one of the most consequential national liberation movements of the 20th century. Here's betting that you've either never heard of it or, if you have, that you've long since forgotten what it was about.
Sajudis was the Reform Movement of Lithuania, organized by the Baltic state's leading intellectuals just days after Ronald Reagan met publicly with Soviet religious figures and dissidents in Moscow. In a speech to Russian university students that May, Reagan spoke of the moment "when the accumulated spiritual energies of a long silence yearn to break free."
Within weeks, 100,000 Sajudis activists took to the streets to demand greater liberalization. Within months, a quarter-million poured out in protest of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which secretly consigned the Baltic states to Stalinist rule. A year later, two million linked hands in a human chain 300 miles long. In March 1990, Lithuania became the first Soviet republic to declare (or affirm) its independence. Fourteen other "republics" soon followed, bringing the evil empire to an abrupt end.
The Sajudis anniversary came to mind after a meeting in New York last week with Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident turned Israeli politician turned political theorist. Mr. Sharansky has a new book, titled"Defending Identity." It would be equally accurate to call it"The Case Against John Lennon."
Or, more specifically, the case against"Imagine," Lennon's anthem to a world with"no countries . . . nothing to kill or die for/And no religion too." For Mr. Sharansky, a nine-year resident of the Perm 35 prison camp, that's a vision that smacks too much of the professed beliefs of the ex-Beatle's near namesake, Vladimir Ilyich.
Mr. Sharansky's argument is that man's quest for identity – for the human and communal particulars that set him apart from others – cannot be separated from his quest for freedom – the universal set of values to which he and everyone else lay an equal claim. He argues that a freedom that"does not include the freedom to be significantly different" is no freedom at all. And he believes that while a politics that expresses itself purely through identity is bound to be tyrannical, a democracy that ignores its own identity – or attempts to suppress the various identities within it – betrays its deepest principles and puts its long-term survival at risk...