The Red Square…red of blood:
Let us not give in when anyone questions the values of the Enlightenment, those humanist values that inspired our Europe, the Europe of Erasmus, Voltaire, Goethe, Leonardo da Vinci.
By Arlette and André-Yves Portnoff – Journalists, Scientists, and Writers – February 28, 2022: translated from the French version: https://www.dirigeant.fr/points-de-vue/la-democratie-doit-etre-constamment-defendue/https://www.dirigeant.fr/points-de-vue/la-democratie-doit-etre-constamment-defendue/
It was a beautiful night in Moscow, almost twenty-five years ago. Yeltsin had ousted Gorbachev the reformer. We were walking on Krasnaya Ploshchad, the Red Square, with a couple of Russian journalists. They were in disarray. A few years ago,” they confided, “we hardly dared to tread this sacred ground with our soles. We were convinced that the USSR would bring happiness to the whole world. And now we know that our 15-year-old daughter will not experience an improvement in the quality of life in Russia.” Amazed, still believing in perestroika, we objected that everything would change with the arrival of democracy. The answer of our two friends disturbed us: “We cannot become a democracy because in every generation our leaders have massacred the most intelligent among us! We are not ready to become a democracy.” Alas, so far, events have proven their skepticism right!
Democracy, the key to development
We had been invited to Moscow by the French Embassy to prepare a seminar like those we had organized in all the capitals of Central Europe. We allowed researchers, entrepreneurs and economists to express their hopes of succeeding in the “Intelligence Revolution” and to build the development of their countries thanks to freedom and democracy. We were often chilled by their testimonies. Young Romanian doctors revealed that, during the time of the dictator Ceausescu, tuberculosis had been officially eradicated because doctors were only allowed to declare “pulmonary diseases” and that there was no AIDS because homosexuality and prostitution were forbidden.
In Moscow, after one week, we had to give up organizing a seminar, in order not to compromise the personalities who would have dared to participate. Similarly, we did not return to Beijing where, in 1988, we had been very officially invited to give conferences and to work with journalists and researchers on the theme of the necessity of democracy for development. Six months later, the Tiananmen massacre showed us that the totalitarian tendency of the Chinese Communist Party had ousted the reformist tendency that had invited us.
Three very dangerous letters
What happened to the Chinese journalists and researchers with whom we had understood each other so well? We did not contact them anymore to avoid compromising them. And our couple of friends from Red Square? Are they part of the thousands of courageous people who were brutally arrested because they went down to demonstrate against the war on Pushkin Square, a stone’s throw from Red Square and in more than fifty Russian cities? Dmitri Muratov, Nobel Peace Prize 2021 and editor-in-chief of the opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta, expressed his “shame” on a video. How long will he remain free?
Many Russian women are currently braving the power, such as Elena Kovalskaya, director of an official theater, who has just resigned “so as not to owe her salary to an assassin.” 664 Russian researchers and scientists have dared to sign an open letter demanding “an immediate stop” to an unjustified aggression against a democratic country. Thousands of doctors, nurses, actors, architects did the same and, symbolically, the founders of the organization in charge of preserving the memory of the dead of the Second World War, called for “a ceasefire”.
So we should no longer say that THE Russians are invading Ukraine. It is Russians obeying their dictator! It is THE Chinese who lied to hide the arrival of the Covid, while THE Chinese dared to give the alarm at the risk of their lives. The three letters t,h,e, are very dangerous: they lead us to generalizations that are at first benign, “the English do this, the Italians like that…”, then perverse, at the origin of xenophobia, racism, everything that incites us to forget that the Other is a human being just like us. This is what the Hitlers, the Stalins, the Mao’s and the Putins deny, for whom the Other is either an enemy to be destroyed or a subject to be exploited. The current events must reinforce our reference points.
A thousand-year-old struggle
For more than two millennia, the history of the world has been a constant struggle between the law of the strongest and the principles of tolerance and fraternity, that is to say, freedom for oneself but also for others. These are the foundations of democracy, an ideal that has never been achieved and is always under attack, which is all the more reason to defend it constantly. And we take less risk in doing so in our private, professional and civic lives here in Western Europe than in Russia, Hungary, Turkey, China and in so many other countries. Let us be aware of this privileged situation in order to preserve this altruistic freedom which is so threatened in the world. One day, during a national meeting of the CJD (Center of Young Entrepreneurs), the minister Francis Mer gave a talk on his way back from China. He recalled that China was a totalitarian country. A young entrepreneur took the floor, objecting that we were also in a dictatorship, we could no longer drink, eat or smoke as we wished… He had probably never spent an hour in a real dictatorship and did not know how lucky he was to live in a country where one could utter such untruths without ending up in prison.
Putin’s fear
Putin has demonstrated in a scathing, bloody way that totalitarians do not support that a country, Slavic moreover, proves, as Ukraine began to do, that economic and human progress passes by the values of democracy. They are afraid of this aspiration to freedom of thought, expression and choice of life, which so many Chinese, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Poles, Serbs, Czechs, Romanians, Kosovars and Macedonians enthusiastically expressed during our seminars, happy to leave the totalitarian regimes that had made them suffer so much. But, today, we could not go back to Budapest, Warsaw, Istanbul and even less to Moscow or Beijing for such communions. Let us not give in when anyone questions the values of the Enlightenment, those humanist values that inspired our Europe, the Europe of Erasmus, Voltaire, Goethe, Leonardo da Vinci. Not the Europe of Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and (Ras)Poutine! We owe it to ourselves, to our own people, to all those who, in the world, are suffering, at this very moment, from their violations.
Arlette and André-Yves Portnoff.
February 26, 2022
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