Around the world, freedom is in peril

„The dinosaurs haven't sat around waiting for their inevitable extinction. They recognized the threat and mobilized, with old-fashioned methods and new. From China to Egypt to Cuba, political challengers were neutralized, as they always had been, by confiscation of property, imprisonment and torture, with the examples of a few chastening the many. The foolish mistakes of one regime -- allowing elections before seizing total control of the election machinery, as in Burma in 1990 -- were duly noted and not repeated.

Dictators have learned from each other to stamp out any buds of independent civil society by means of tax laws and supposedly neutral regulation. With China in the lead, they learned not only to neutralize the World Wide Web but to turn it into an effective weapon for propaganda, tracking and repression of their own citizens, and attacks against democratic rivals. Taking advantage of their control of television, they mobilized ideologies of nationalism and anti-terrorism to undermine the rhetoric of freedom.

So at decade's end, the correlation of forces, as the Communists used to say, looks bleak. Three assertive powers - China, Russia and Iran - not only resist democratization but actively seek to disseminate their model of authoritarian rule in their spheres of influence. Europe, the engine of democratization of the 1990s, looks inward, more interested in appeasing Russia than reforming it. Newer or less wealthy democracies such as South Africa, Turkey, Brazil and India seem stuck in anti-colonial mind-sets that discourage cooperation to promote democracy. And the Obama administration remains skittish about adopting a "freedom agenda" that its predecessor had tarnished in the minds of many Democrats.”