A Different Kind of Civil Rights Struggle

President Kennedy was in Berlin when he said that “Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free,” but it is true in China, as well.

An unlikely hero, Chen Guangcheng became blind as a small child. He overcame this disability, and assembled an improbable coalition of causes to attempt to pry some humanitarian concessions from the government: the physically handicapped, women, and landowners.

While the Chinese government issued regulations which, on paper, entitled the physically disabled to certain benefits, it failed in many cases to actually give those benefits.

While the Chinese government made statements which seemed to recognize human rights, it continued to force women to undergo abortions against their wills.

While the Chinese government claimed to respect liberty, it confiscated land, and did so with no reimbursement to the land’s owners.

Chen Guangcheng saw these three violations of freedom as related. For him, they were not three separate questions, but rather three different applications of one principle.

Melanie Kirkpatrick writes that, seeing the “desperate conditions endured by China’s rural poor,” he was and is known among them as ‘the barefoot lawyer,’ because of the agricultural regions in which he carried out his work.

The Chinese government, attempting to present itself to the world as a legitimate state, issued legislation which ostensibly gave certain rights to its citizens. In reality, the government is an authoritarian autocracy. Scholars debate about which type of socialism or communism best describes the current regime in China, but whichever version of Marxist doctrine is ascribed to it, it remains a totalitarian dictatorship.

Thus it was that “Chen advised his countrymen about their legal rights.” By feigning humanity, the government had made statements - statements it never intended to uphold - but Chen would hold the government to those statements.

Chen’s activism began with a seemingly trivial incident: A ticket collector on a bus refused to let him ride free, as mandated under China’s law regarding those with disabilities. His outrage at this mistreatment propelled him into advocacy for people with disabilities, first at his school in Shandong Province and then on a national level. He educated himself on disability law, petitioned the government in Beijing for better enforcement, and used the media to call attention to violations.

The Chinese had grown quite accustomed to hearing and reading noble-sounding statements from the government, and knowing that the statements were meaningless - that the government had no plan to act according to them.

Chen, however, set a new course. He saw the government’s words as a potential trap for the government itself. The regime could not long tolerate someone who so clearly presented its hypocrisies - someone who presented them in a way which could not be ignored. The government was relieved when Chen finally left the country.

But his work may have continuing effects for many years to come.

The Soviet Threat to England

In 1955, Harold MacMillan, a member of the Tory party, and at that time holding the title of “Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs,” offered a rousing defense of Kim Philby, who had worked in the legendary MI5, the British intelligence agency. Philby had been accused of secretly working for the Soviets.

MacMillan’s defense of Philby was successful. It was also the worst mistake of his political career: Philby was in fact a Soviet agent.

Bringing evidence against Philby was Col. Marcus Lipton, a member of the Labor Party, and a MP representing Brixton. As a Member of Parliament, Colonel Lipton used the legal concept of “parliamentary privilege” to carry out his investigation of Philby.

MacMillan was successful in his defense of Philby, not because of a preponderance of evidence, nor because he established a reasonable doubt about Philby’s guilt. The defense of Philby was based on an appeal to Philby’s social status and Lipton’s lack of it, not on logical argumentation. Historian Stan Evans recounts the scene:

The smooth-talking diplomat in chief, unflappable as ever, was blandly reassuring: Charges of pro-Red chicanery made against a former high official had been carefully looked into, and there was nothing to them. The accused had been unfairly named and had now been cleared by the security screeners. Just another case, it seemed, of wild allegations by reckless people who didn’t know the facts of record.

Lipton’s case against Philby was dismissed, not because it was irrational, but because it was unpopular, at least among the leadership clique.

Those in power felt that Philby was like them, and therefore couldn’t possibly be guilty. Their social affinity for Philby was so great that it caused them to overlook the evidence which indicated that he was a ‘Red’ - that he was working for the Soviets.

The combative lawmaker who brought the charges wasn’t buying. He had further evidence on the matter, he said, the nature of which he couldn’t reveal but would give to the appropriate committee. This prompted cries of “smear” and demands that the accuser make his outrageous statements off the floor, without legislative privilege, so that he could be sued for slander.

This legal scene in England in the 1950s had its roots two decades earlier. By the early 1930s, Philby, whose full name is Harold Adrian Russell Philby, was already a Soviet agent. His father was a British diplomat, and Philby studied at Westminster and Cambridge. He seemed to be the right sort of person, and acquainted at an early age with powerful people of his generation.

The socialists in England and some European countries hoped that their version of socialism would be seen, and accepted as the antidote to Hitler’s national socialism. Thus presenting themselves as people of goodwill, they hoped that nobody would suspect them of secretly collaborating with Stalin’s intelligence agencies.

As the 1930s intellectual ferment fed the Communist malaise, it had other adverse effects as well. An alternative answer to the cultural breakdown was the Nazi version of the godless faith, which had just come to power in Adolf Hitler’s Germany. As the Brown and Red despotisms fought for supremacy in Europe, each posed as the remedy for the other.

The more moderate socialists of the middle class embraced the volatile Leninist-Marxists as fellow anti-fascists, either not knowing, or ignoring, that the stated goal of these communists was violent revolution in the western democracies.

“For many in England,” Stan Evans writes,

the Communists and the USSR would thus gain added luster as alleged antidotes to Hitler. (A conflict capsuled in the Spanish Civil War of the latter 1930s, as Western leftists flocked to the Loyalist government in Madrid, supported in its fashion by the USSR, in battle against Gen. Francisco Franco, backed by the Italian Fascists and the Nazis.)

Sadly, while resisting the horrific evils of Hitler, many dupes in western democracies played into the hands of Stalin, who was orchestrating a different set of mass murders as he killed millions of Ukrainians in planned famines.

“From this maelstrom came the” generation of willing accomplices, idealistic and naive, who would either knowingly enlist in Stalin’s service as Philby did, or unwittingly cooperate with Soviet agents, “and many others like them, who would be the traitors of our histories.”

From the 1930s through the 1950s to the 1980s, Soviet agents were active in Britain, exporting confidential information and classified national security documents to Moscow. They also steered domestic discussions of policy, manipulating British policy so that it favored the Soviet Union rather than the interests of Englishmen.

China's Barefoot Lawyer

Rarely does a lawyer become a folk hero. But Chen Guangcheng managed to become exactly that among the peasants who suffer under China’s current government.

In addition to hard work and poverty, the farmers in China are subject to arbitrary land seizures in which the government takes their land and then sells it. Local officials rely on this corrupt practice for revenue.

Defending this simplest and most basic of rights, the right to property, Chen Guangcheng became known as the ‘Barefoot Lawyer,’ given both his rural origins and the rural focus of his work. He also amazingly overcame a significant physical handicap to carry out this work, as the New York Times reports:

Blinded by a childhood illness, he helped the disabled win public benefits and aided farmers fighting illegal land seizures. But in 2005, Shandong officials turned against him when he tried to defend thousands of victims of a coercive family-planning campaign. A year later, in a trial that many legal experts described as a sham, a local court convicted him of destroying property and organizing a crowd to block traffic while he was under house arrest.

Cheng Guangcheng identified the underlying connection between economic freedoms, like property rights, and personal freedoms. Thus his defense of property rights is of a piece with his defense of rights for the physically handicapped and for women.

The Chinese government did not long tolerate Chen’s work. Scholars debate whether the government is more accurately labeled ‘communist’ or ‘socialist,’ but in any case, it accepts no limits on it scope or power. Melanie Kirkpatrick writes:

Chen Guangcheng seemed an unlikely hero. Born in 1971 to a poor family in rural China, blind since infancy, and illiterate until his late teens, Chen became his country’s most prominent human-rights activist. His story made international headlines in 2012 when, under house arrest, he made a dramatic escape and sought refuge in the US embassy in Beijing. The Chinese government eventually allowed him to go to the United States.

Guangcheng now lives with his wife and two children in the United States. His mother and brother have faced continued harassment from the Chinese authorities.

His work has been based on the assumption that personal liberty, political liberty, and economic liberty are inseparable.

Putin and the Western Press

As a former KGB lieutenant and a leader with instincts for both political manipulation and ruthless control, Vladimir Putin showed a stunning gap in his otherwise savvy machinations, when he a displayed a shocking lack of familiarity with the dynamics of the Western press.

During the 2005 summit meeting with President Bush at Bratislava in Slovakia, Putin made a comment about Bush having “fired” a reporter. The gaffe revealed that Putin did not understand that the Western press was independent of the federal government, and capable of directing egregious insults at elected or appointed officials with no fear of retaliation.

As President of Russia, Putin clearly had no idea of a truly free press, and could not imagine a president who was not empowered to punish or discipline the news media. President Bush recalls the moment:

It dawned on me what he was referring to. “Vladimir, are you talking about Dan Rather?” I asked. He said he was. I said, “I strongly suggest you not say that in public. The American people will think you don’t understand our system.”

At the time, CBS News had fired, or demanded a resignation from, Dan Rather, a news anchor who had broadcast a story based on what later turned out to be forged documents. CBS News accused Rather of failing to use due diligence in researching his sources.

Putin had nearly total control on the Russian press, and could not imagine the attacks which presidents regularly endure from the media in the United States.

Putin's Assertiveness

In December 1999, Russian President Boris Yeltsin resigned, and his post was taken by Vladimir Putin, who served as ‘acting president’ until formally elected in March 2000. At that time, Russia’s constitution limited a president to two consecutive four-year terms, much like the United States.

In March 2004, Putin was reelected. Serving from 2000 to 2008, his first stay in the presidency paralleled the years of his American counterpart, George W. Bush, who was in office from January 2001 until January 2009.

Over the eight years of Putin’s first presidency, observers in other nations around the world became increasingly concerned about both personal political liberty and about economic freedom inside Russia. Although Putin began his time in office by displaying a personally warm and friendly relationship with President Bush, the relationship cooled over the course of a decade.

Having worked in the KGB from 1975 to 1991, Putin had a reputation for ruthlessness. As Russia stabilized economically, in large part because of its reserves of oil and natural gas, and as the Russian economy began to exhibit signs of healthy growth, Putin seemed emboldened.

Despite his broad international knowledge and savvy political skills, Putin revealed a significant ignorance about the dynamics of western democracies. In a 2005 meeting with President Bush, he made comment evincing his belief that freely-elected leaders were able to control the news media and “fire” members of the press.

Extrapolating from his own experience, Putin assumed that, if a high-profile journalist were suddenly removed from employment, then it was probably the work of the country’s president. Putin did not understand that the press was free and independent to the degree that it could direct significant criticism at the president without fear of reprisal.

Throughout its history, Russia has never had a press that was free enough and powerful enough to remove a president from office, as the was the case with Nixon, or publicly discuss a president’s perjury to the extent that the president’s license to practice law was suspended, as was the case with Bill Clinton.

Meeting in Bratislava in Slovakia in 2005, Putin displayed his belief that President Bush controlled the press and could “fire” a reporter. Putin was speaking of Dan Rather, the disgraced CBS News anchorman, who had been fired, or forced to resign, because of his inaccurate reporting. Dan Rather had broadcast a story based on documents which later turned out to be forgeries. His employer believed that he had not exercised appropriate diligence in verifying his sources.

Putin failed to understand that CBS News had fired Dan Rather. Putin thought that President Bush had the power to do that. Clearly, Putin didn’t understand how things work inside the United States: a shocking degree of ignorance for a former KGB lieutenant. President Bush recalls Putin’s words at the 2005 summit meeting:

Over the course of eight years, Russia’s newfound wealth affected Putin. He became aggressive abroad and more defensive about his record at home. In our first one-on-one meeting of my second term, in Bratislava, I raised my concerns about Russia’s lack of progress on democracy. I was especially worried about his arrests of Russian businessmen and his crackdown on the free press. “Don’t lecture me about the free press,” he said, “not after you fired that reporter.”

After discovering what Putin thought about the American news media, Bush explained to him that he could lose credibility by displaying such ignorance. Putin had not believed that a United States president was powerless over the press.

Although western democracies were concerned about Putin, he found some willing instruments among them. France’s Jacques Chirac, whose political direction seemed to lurch from right to left, supported Putin.

Germany’s Gerhard Schröder, a representative of that country’s SPD party, had enabled Putin to negotiate a pipeline deal through the Baltic Sea, sending Russian natural gas directly to Germany. Schröder brokered a loan guarantee from the German government for one billion Euros to shore up the construction of Putin’s pipeline.

In return for helping Putin, and to the dismay of western democracies, Schröder was appointed to a well-paying and powerful post within the natural gas industry after his term as chancellor ended. President Bush describes the situation:

Putin was wily. As a quid pro quo for supporting Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder in their efforts to counterbalance American influence, Putin convinced them to defend his consolidation of power in Russia. At a G-8 dinner in St. Petersburg, most of the leaders challenged Putin on his democratic record. Jacques Chirac did not. He announced that Putin was doing a fine job running Russia, and it was none of our business how he did it. That was nothing compared to what Gerhard Schroeder did. Shortly after the German chancellor stepped down from office, he became chairman of a company owned by Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned energy giant.

When the Russian constitution ended Putin’s first stint as president in 2008, he was elected prime minister. While he was prime minister (2008 to 2012), Dmitry Medvedev served as president. Medvedev and Putin had a close working relationship, and some observers considered Medvedev’s presidency to be an extension of Putin’s.

The provision of the Russian constitution which prevented Putin’s third consecutive term did not prevent a third non-consecutive term. During Putin’s tenure as prime minister, the constitution was altered to extend presidential terms from four years to six. In 2012, Putin was elected for his third term as president.

During Putin’s first eight years as president, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acted as a check or foil to Putin’s international ambitions. During his third term, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has a times assumed a similar role vis-a-vis Putin, although at times moderating, as when she hesitated to encourage vigorous support of the Ukraine in the face of Putin’s invasion.

The King, the Clerics, and the Women

The internal dynamics of Saudi Arabia pit a moderate dynasty against extremist Islamic leaders, with the ordinary residents caught as pawns in the middle. This is clear, for example, in the question about women’s role in society.

The royal family, the house of Saud, has some moderate thinkers among its members. King Abdullah, who reigned from 2005 to 2015, was savvy in his conduct of international diplomacy.

This brought him into conflict with the mullahs, imams, and mujtahids - the Islamic leadership. Saudi Arabia has a majority of Sunni Muslims and a minority of Shi’a Muslims.

Officially, the dynasty adheres to Wahabism, a strict version of Islam. Unofficially, it has demonstrated a pragmatism in its relationships with various non-Muslim nations. One suspects that the royal family knows when to compromise a bit; fanatical clerics, on the other hand, contemplate no compromise.

Shia and Sunni usage of the words for Islamic authorities - mullah, imam, mujtahids, and other expressions - vary slightly. To complicate matters, the Saudi monarchy embraces Wahabi, a type of Sunni which is different than the ordinary Sunni Islam which the majority of the commoners in Saudi Arabia embrace.

Despite his stature as monarch, King Abdullah (now succeeded by his half-brother, King Salman) was subject to substantial pressure from the Islamic leaders. The National Review reported in October 2011 about a rather moderate-sounding statement from the king:

It would be too much to say that King Abdullah is an acolyte of John Stuart Mill. And yet he seems inclined to grant women in Saudi Arabia the right to vote and even to submit their candidacy for municipal office “in accordance with sharia.” Abdullah justified this shift thus: “We refuse to marginalize the role of women in Saudi society in every field of work,” leaving the unsettling implication that marginalization will continue in other areas. One of these will be behind the wheel of a car, where women are prohibited from sitting, hindering their ability to reach polling centers. So long as this wider “marginalization” (known outside the Wahhabi realm as subjugation) persists, equality under the law will remain a fantasy. And so long as the electorate at large is unable to elect — and dismiss — its leaders, universal suffrage will continue to be a mirage.

Despite the modest sentiments expressed in his statement, King Abdullah encountered the opposition of Muslim leaders. Although the monarch had hoped to somehow harmonize “sharia” law with his efforts to moderate the oppression of women in his realm, his intentions were resisted and ultimately rendered ineffective.

Not much has changed for women in Saudi Arabia.

The Islamic leadership wants to keep the monarchy in power, because it maintains a strong economy and maintains law and order. The resistance to the king is therefore veiled.

The Muslim hierarchy would not openly or publicly opposed the king. But behind the scenes, he is certainly not free to issue social legislation, or legislation related in any way to sharia, as he chooses.

The result is that women in Saudi Arabia find that they are still not allowed to have driver’s licenses or drive cars. Women need the permission of a male family member to travel, go to school, open a bank account, marry, or have surgery. The police enforce a dress code for women, according to which only the eyes and hands are to be seen publicly.