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March 11, 2005
Hey Bernardine, Ever Heard Of This Guy?
An oft-repeated slander of the blogosphere by the MSM goes something like, "They keep saying they're going to replace the mainstream media...". Of course this is nonsense; it's been pointed out many times by bloggers that we will always need what the MSM provides: money, for salaries. Salaries for foreign correspondents and stringers, for writers to take the time to dig deep into a story.
Claudia Rosett at the Wall Street Journal is "in the zone", as an athlete would say. Her reporting on the U.N. Oil-for-Food Scandal has been exemplary. And now comes this:
Saigon's Sharansky: Will Vietnam be the next Iraq?
So it happens that a message reached me last weekend from within one of the world's most repressive states: Vietnam. Word came that the Sharansky of Saigon, democratic dissident Nguyen Dan Que, had been released from his latest stretch in Vietnam's prisons. Though Dr. Que, as he prefers to be called, is now dogged by state security agents around the clock and allowed no phone or computer of his own, he could arrange to be on the receiving end of a phone call.
So at an appointed hour, I picked up the phone in New York and spoke with Dr. Que, a 63-year-old doctor who has by now spent almost half his life fighting for liberty in Vietnam. Given that Vietnam's secret police almost certainly eavesdrop on any contact he has with the wider world, I was prepared for a discreet and carefully phrased conversation, meant to minimize his risk. Dr. Que was not. He got straight to the point: "What I want is liberty for my people."
It is important for the world to understand that in saying such things, Dr., Que knows all too well the risk he is taking. Back in 1975, as Saigon fell, he had a chance to leave--and turned it down. [...] Instead, for more than 30 years he has seized every chance to speak out and demand liberty for his country. For that, under Vietnam's communist regime, he has paid dearly--spending more than 20 years in labor camps and prisons. [...]
Who of us, sitting here at our expensive computers sipping chardonnay, can really imagine what it's like to summon up the visceral courage to say those words, "What I want is liberty for my people", when you know that your oppressors are listening, and that for speaking those words, you might wind up back in the prison from which you had just been released?
Where are the "progressives", relics like Bernardine Dohrn who will take up their story and demand justice for them? Uh, sorry, I’ve got classes to teach—good luck to you, buddy.
Or like we say in bike racing as we pass riders who've just crashed, "See ya, wouldn't want to be ya!"
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