The Case for Democracy, Revisited
The Olin Institute for Strategic Studies is pleased to announce that Natan Sharansky will give a talk titled “The Case for Democracy, Revisited” at 3 pm on Monday, 26 November.
Natan Sharansky is an internationally renowned human rights activist, political leader, and author. He is Chair of the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies at the Shalem Center.
Mr. Sharansky’s award-winning books, Fear No Evil (1988) and The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror (2004) are critically acclaimed best sellers around the world.
The talk will be held in the Tsai Auditorium, Room S010, of the CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street.
For more information, please contact: Ann Townes at 496.5495 or atownes@wcfia.harvard.edu
___________________
Dissident
Natan Sharansky’s passion for democracy isn’t always welcome in the West.
BY MATTHEW KAMINSKI
Saturday, November 3, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
JERUSALEM–An eternity ago, in 2004, the former Soviet refusenik and Israeli government minister Natan Sharansky called George W. Bush “a dissident President”–“jokingly,” he tells me, thinking back to that first White House meeting. “I didn’t think it’d be so true, that he’d be so lonely, because,” as he later warned Mr. Bush, “dissidents are lonely.”
The fortunes of Mr. Sharansky and his ideas about freedom rose and sunk with President Bush’s opinion polls. His “The Case for Democracy” came along, three years ago, when the administration seriously looked to push it in the Muslim world. The president loved the book, and Mr. Sharansky became the in-house philosopher for the Bush Doctrine. “If you want a glimpse of how I think about foreign policy, read Natan Sharansky’s book,” blurbs Mr. Bush on the back cover of the paperback edition.
Read the rest of this article here.