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Listen to two great and independent minds, Christopher Hitchens and Russ Roberts, talk about why Orwells Anti-Totalitarianism still matters.
Watch Larry Diamond, co-director of the International Forum for Democratic Studies and founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy, explain why he believes it can at the New York Democracy Forum:
Larry Diamond – “Can the Whole World Become Democratic?”
Watch economist Alex Tabarrok explain at the TED Talks why he believes that “the best is yet to come” for our planet, if we only get a few things right:
“The “dismal science” truly shines in this optimistic talk, as economist Alex Tabarrok argues free trade and globalization are shaping our once-divided world into a community of idea-sharing more healthy, happy and prosperous than anyone’s predictions.”
That is the subtitle of a new book by Dambisa Moyo: Dead Aid, which I highly recommend. Moyo knows the facts – and she knows Africa.
Watch her discuss about how we can make poverty history with development expert William Easterly at the Templeton Foundation
Paul Collier is Professor of Economics at Oxford University and Department Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies.
Watch him speak about his book “The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It”, in which he “outlines four traps that the poorest countries in the world can find themselves in: the trap of civil war, the trap of being landlocked, the trap of having abundant natural resouces, and the trap of having a bad government” and explains how they can escape these traps:
Watch Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and co-editor of the Journal of Democracy, debate his book The Spirit of Democracy – The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World, which I very strongly recommend to anyone interested in the science of democracy and democracy movements, with some researchers from Freedom House at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs:
Watch Shikha Dalmia explain why the new rags-to-riches-movie Slumdog Millionaire is a brilliant metaphor for recent Indian history at Reason TV:
“In important ways, Slumdog tells the story of India itself—a poverty-stricken underdog with its own rags-to-riches tales.
Since the early 1990s, India has cut its poverty rate in half. About 300 million Indians—equivalent to the population of the entire United States—escaped the hunger and deprivation of extreme poverty thanks to pro-market reforms that increased economic activity.“
Watch Swedish writer Johan Norberg, author of the classic study In Defense of Global Capitalism, travel around the globe and explain to you, why globalization is the only hope for the poor and why we don’t have enough of it:
“The world is an unequal and unjust place, in which some are born into wealth and some into hunger and misery. To explore why, in this controversial Channel Four documentary the young Swedish writer Johan Norberg takes the viewers on a journey to Taiwan, Vietnam, Kenya and Brussels to see the impact of globalisation, and the consequences of its absence. It makes the case that the problem in the world is not too much capitalism, globalisation and multinationals, but too little.”
Watch or listen to C. Fred Bergsten, Nicholas R. Lardy, Trevor Houser, Derek J. Mitchell and Charles Freeman debate their book, China’s Rise: Challenges and Opportunities, at the Peterson Institute:
Watch Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics and author of Development as Freedom, in which he shows how liberal democracy helps avoid famines and disasters, talk about his life and ideas to Harry Kreisler:
Watch Muhammad Yunus, Nobel peace laureate, author of Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism, and founder of Grameen Bank , explain his ideas at the Google NYC campus:
Authors@Google: Muhammad Yunus
“Economics professor Yunus claims he originally became involved in the poverty issue not as a policy-maker, scholar, or researcher, but because poverty was all around me. With these words he stopped teaching elegant theories and began lending small amounts of money, $40 or less, without collateral, to the poorest women in the world. Thirty-three years later, the Grameen Bank has helped seven million people live better lives building businesses to serve the poor. The bank is solidly profitable, with a 98.6% repayment rate. It inspired the micro-credit movement, which has helped 100 million of the poorest people in the world escape poverty and earned Yunus a Nobel Peace prize.”
Watch Philip Short talk about his book Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, which is much more than just a great biography, at the University of California:
“Towards the beginning of this massive biography, Short cautions readers against dismissing the terror of Pol Pot’s regime as the incomprehensible work of evil men. Instead, Short argues, the explanations for the Khmer Rouge regime, which resulted in the death of over one-fifth of Cambodia’s population, or 1.5 million people, are ‘rooted in history’.”
Watch Michael Ignatieff talk to Jung Chang and Jon Halliday about their biography, Mao – The Unknown Story, in which they prove that Mao’s communist regime killed over 70 000 000 people in peace times, more than any other regime in history:
Harvard University, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy: Mao – The Unknown Story
There is only one major point where I slightly disagree with the authors. They claim that Mao never really believed in marxist ideology. I doubt it. But I can’t tell. But even if that’s the case, most of his supporters definitely did believe in communism and the dynamic of the regime can only be explained by this simple fact. This is important to point out, because many communists reacted to the book by saying: ‘Well, maybe he killed 70 million people. But he never was a real communist anyway.’ Let’s not allow them to get away with this!
We can’t predict the future. But we can try. And if we try hard enough, we may be better prepared for it.
The National Intelligence Council’s report on “Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World” tries very hard to predict the major global trends for the next 15 – 20 years. Watch Thomas Fingar, Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, discuss the report at the Atlantic Council.
It predicts the Economic Rise of the East and an unprecedented growth of the global middle class:
“Over the next several decades the number of people considered to be in the ‘global middle class’ is projected to swell from 440 million to 1.2 billion or from 7.6 percent of the world’s population to 16.1 percent.”
This is great news for many reasons. The further decline of hunger and poverty around the world is very likely to be accompanied by further liberalization and democratization in many countries. But, again, we can’t predict the future. So let’s try very hard to make it a better one!
Watch a panel on economic development and poverty reduction in India at Columbia University, featuring Arvin Panagariya, author of India: The Emerging Giant, Jagdish Bhagwati, author of In Defense of Globalization, and Tunku Varadarajan, Professor at the New York University Stern School of Business:
Watch David Bandurski, a scholar at Hong Kong University’s China Media Project, discuss his article “China’s Guerrilla War for the Web” for the Far Eastern Economic Review :
Do you care about the “Millenium Development Goals” and the global fight against poverty? Do you care about Darfur and the global fight against genocide? Then you should also care about this terrible fact:
Eric Reeves in The New Republic : Millennium Development Grotesquery
“Incredibly, the regime committing genocide in Darfur is now meant to be in charge of a critical U.N. poverty- and disease-eradication program.
The largest and most influential group of developing nations has added an ill-considered and wholly gratuitous burden to the challenges of the Millenium Development Goals: they have selected the Sudan government, which continues to perpetrate genocide in Darfur in front of the eyes of the world, to be their chair in the coming year. The “Group of 77,” as it’s known, made this extraordinary decision at the very moment the General Assembly and the U.N. Secretariat were highlighting a number of discouraging shortfalls in MDG progress. The Group of 77 now has 130 members (77 was the number at its inception in 1964), including virtually every African nation. Since it was the African countries’ turn to pick the chair of the organization, and since the selection of Sudan was supported by China, the outcome–however outrageous–is hardly surprising. Strong support from the member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference helped ensured Khartoum’s diplomatic victory. The selection of the National Islamic Front regime as chair is no mere symbolic exercise, though the symbolism of the choice is intensely dispiriting. For it comes at a time when the head of the regime faces a likely arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court—for crimes against humanity and for genocide in Darfur.”
Don’t miss the informative essay by Richard Dust on Darfur in the same issue of The New Republic :
The Truth Will Not Set You Free
“Everything we know about Darfur, and everything we’re not doing about it”
And watch Hillel Neuer from UN Watch confront the regime and its supporters at the UN:
“Sudan and its friends — Syria, Saudi Arabia, China — deny the atrocities in Darfur, and attack the members of the mission on Darfur as headed by Jody Williams. UN Watch confronts Sudan and its allies.”
Watch this shocking documentary on the still dire situation of the so called “Untouchables” – or “Dalits” as they wish to be called – and their desperate struggle against the caste system, India’s traditional form of apartheid:
International Dalit Solidarity Network – I’m dalit, How are you ?
John Lee, author of Will China Fail? – The Limits and Contradictions of Market Socialism, argues in The Australian that the tainted milk scandal is part of a much bigger problem for Chinese civil society:
Deadly hand of officials in China
“While China has been decentralising and officials have multiplied, it is not building institutions that encourage public accountability. It’s hard to build rule of law when the party controls the courts, tribunals and law enforcement. It’s hard to have transparency when the party controls the media. It’s hard to make local officials accountable when Beijing relies on them to maintain the CCP’s hold on power in far-flung places.
Moreover, if you think China is well on its way to becoming a private-enterprise, free market economy, think again. The state remains a significant player in the Chinese economy. State businesses receive more than 70per cent of the country’s capital. The state owns more than 60per cent of the country’s fixed assets.”
Why did Beijing try to tell the Nobel Committee whom not to give this year’s Nobel Peace Price to?
Here’s the official explanation:
“‘Everyone knows what kind of person Hu Jia is, he is a criminal that was convicted and sentenced to prison by the state judiciary of inciting the subversion of state power,’ foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said. ‘If they award the peace prize to such a person, it would be rude interference in China’s internal affairs as well as our independent judiciary.’”
So, who is this “criminal”, who is so dangerously subverting state power?
Read about him and his wife Zeng Jinyan on the Hujia & Jinyan’s Spirit Blog or in The Independent: Hu Jia: China’s enemy within
And don’t miss their movie Prisoners in Freedom City:
Aung Din spent more than four years in a Burmese prison cell. For the Far Eastern Economic Review he writes about how The U.N. Has Failed Burma.
Good news first: The regime in Burma has released the country’s longest-serving political prisoner. U Win Tin has spent 19 years behind bars. With him at least six more prominent democracy fighters were also set free. It looks like even this regime, one of the very worst, is responding to international and inside pressure.
But, as Benjamin Zawacki, Amnesty International ’s Myanmar researcher, has pointed out: “While the release of U Win Tin and his fellow prisoners is certainly the best news to come out of Myanmar for a long time, unfortunately they don’t even represent one percent of the political prisoners there. These seven people should never have been imprisoned in the first place, and there are many, many more who should also be released.”
The Irrawaddy ’s Kyaw Zwa Moe is afraid that this is just another Evil Game.
Win Tin has vowed: “I will keep fighting until the emergence of democracy in this country.” The international community should join him in his fight.
Freedom House has a special report on the DPRK gulag system, “the kwan-li-so political penal labor encampments where as many as 200,000 persons, including both suspected wrong-doers and wrong-thinkers, and up to three generations of their family members, are imprisoned without trial and subjected to forced labor under extremely severe conditions.”
Concentrations of Inhumanity – by David Hawk, FH
The report deals with: “Enforced Disappearance, Deportation and Arbitrary Imprisonment, Enslavement and Forced Labor, Murder, Torture, Rape and Enforced Prostitution”.
And it concludes: “The phenomena of repression associated with the political prison camp system of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea are clear and massive crimes against humanity as now defined in law.”
Well, it is still too early to tell. Despite its great economic successes, Singapore is still being ranked Partly Free by Freedom House. But there are some signs of hope. Hugo Restall writes in the Far Eastern Economic Review on how “Pressure Builds on Singapore’s System”.
On September 9th, 1948 the North Korean communist regime was founded. Sixty years later, it is still one of the very worst dictatorships around the globe.
Sometimes one man’s fate tells it all. Dong Hyuk Shin was born in the gulag in 1982. He was beaten and tortured until he finally managed to escape in 2005. You can watch him speak about his terrible past, the current situation and his hopes for the future at Google:
Born and Raised in a Concentration Camp
“Shin was born on Nov. 19, 1982 and called the camp home until 2005. While at the camp, he endured daily beatings, torture, starvation-level rations, saw forced abortions and even witnessed the public execution of his mother and brother in 1996. Shin described his life of total isolation from the world: ‘In South Korea, although there is disappointment and sadness, there is also so much joy, happiness and comfort. In Kaechon, I did not even know such emotions existed. The only emotion I ever knew was fear: fear of beatings, fear of starvation, fear of torture and fear of death.’ Liberty in North Korea ’s Executive Director Adrian Hong will brief the audience on the broader issue of human rights in North Korea, as well as the current refugee situation and what can be done to help.”
In recent years, more and more left-wingers and even some socialists got interested in human rights abuses in China, most of them, because they sympathize with Tibet. And that’s of course a good thing. The problem is their interpretation of why these abuses occur. They point to Chinas economic reforms and the ongoing oppression. And they don’t even have to distort the facts. But then they draw a very wrong conlusion. They believe, that China is oppressive because of its economic reforms. This way, they can use communist China as an example for the old marxist theory, that “capitalism leads to fascism”. Very clever! But very far from the truth.
What they don’t know, because they don’t want to know:
- Before the reforms, China was even more dictatorial than it is today. In fact, it was far more so. No regime has ever killed more people than the CCP in the Mao Years: an unbelievable 70 million, according to the latest estimates. So the economic reforms did have some positive political effects, too.
- The CCP mixes aggressive nationalism with the very old-style communist ideology of authoritarian modernization. Why and how is this globalisation’s fault?
- China’s economy is not as free as most people believe. After Mao, China had to recover from complete devastation. And it has come a long way. But it’s reforms are still very incomplete. And that’s especially true for the countryside.
- China is proof that economic freedom and political tyranny can go together, at least in some ways and to some degree. But this of course doesn’t mean, that they usually do. China may just be an exception.
And I am not just speculating. A study done by Daniel T. Griswold shows “How Open Markets Till the Soil for Democracy”: Trading Tyranny for Freedom
Here you can also watch a video (and a powerpoint presentation) of a very informative talk given by Griswold at the Cato Institute, in which he also discusses the cases of China and Singapore:
Now that’s a nice surprise! According to a poll by WorldPublicOpinion.org in Egypt, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iran, Indonesia, the Palestinian Territories, and among the Muslim population of Nigeria a clear majority of those questioned is more or less in favor of globalisation and trade:
“Asked about ‘globalization, especially the increasing connections of our economy with others around the world’, majorities in six of the seven nations polled say that it is ‘mostly good’ for their country. Approval is highest among Egyptians and Nigerian Muslims (79% and 78% saying mostly good, respectively). Sixty-three percent of Azerbaijanis, 61 percent of both Iranians and Indonesians, and 58 percent of Palestinians see globalization as mostly good. While support in Turkey does not reach a majority, a plurality still calls globalization mostly good (39% to 28%). On average across all seven publics, 63 percent say that globalization is good for their own countries. Only 25 percent think it is mostly bad.“
The World Bank has finally published the revised poverty figures for 1981-2005, introducing a higher poverty line, $1.25 a day instead of $1. At first the results are a little confusing. And so is the title of the study:
The Developing World is Poorer Than We Thought, But No Less Successful in the Fight Against Poverty
Here is a nice summary, if you don’t want to read the whole thing.
If you take a closer look, the main findings haven’t changed much:
“- The % below $1.25 a day was halved, falling from 52% to 26% over 1981-2005.
- The trend decline in the aggregate poverty rate was one % point per year.
- Number of poor fell by 500 million, from 1.9 billion to 1.4 billion.
- At this rate, the developing world as a whole is on track for attaining the first Millennium Development Goal of halving the 1990 poverty rate by 2015.”
To draw conclusions about the root causes for these successes, it is very important to look at the regional differences. Globalised East Asia has made impressing progress, especially China:
“- Dramatic progress in East Asia. Looking back to the early 1980s, East Asia was the region with the highest incidence of poverty in the world, with almost 80% living below $1.25 a day in 1981. By 2005 this had fallen to 18%.
- There are 600 million fewer people living in poverty by this standard in China alone, though progress in China has been uneven over time.
- In the developing world outside China, the $1.25 poverty rate has fallen from 40% to 29% over 1981-2005, though not enough to bring down the total number of poor, which has stayed at around 1.2 billion.”
But Africa has been marginalized:
“- $1.25 a day poverty rate for Africa has shown no sustained downward trend over the whole period; starting and ending the period at 50%. The number of poor has almost doubled in Africa over 1981-2005, from 200 million to 380 million.”
The big question seems to be: How do we get Africa on the Asian track?
