Words of wisdom for a captive audience?

European Voice

Barack Obama’s Captive Nations Week speech will likely favour blandness over stirring rhetoric.
As regular readers of this column may know, since 1959 the United States has marked the third week in July as Captive Nations Week. It arrived on the political calendar thanks to a joint resolution of Congress and it has remained there ever since. It decries the enslavement by communist imperialism of “Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Estonia, White Ruthenia, Rumania, East Germany, Bulgaria, mainland China, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, North Korea, Albania, Idel-Ural, Tibet, Cossackia, Turkestan, North Viet-Nam, and others”.

It was a rum list even then: it ignored Yugoslavia (captive to communism but not the Soviet empire), and nations such as the Circassians whose history gives them every cause to complain. It includes some obscure candidates (Cossackia) but ignores Russia itself, which has a good claim to be the first inmate of the communist prison and its greatest victim. Eleven of the nations mentioned, or the countries that they now form, are safely in NATO or the EU or both.

Yet the job is only half-done. Most of the countries that were unfree before 1989 are unfree now. So the main message should still be clear. That the US, “the citadel of human freedom” (in the words of the original law), cares about their plight is a powerful, encouraging message for, say, Tibetans – a truly captive nation in the old sense of the phrase – and for those in the slave labour camps of communist China, or in the still more barbarous conditions of North Korea.

So it would be good if President Barack Obama’s forthcoming proclamation, marking the event for 2012, highlighted the case of specific nations and the forms of captivity – communism, crony-capitalism, ethno-nationalist colonisation – in which they languish.

On the evidence of previous years, it will not. Far from using the stirring rhetoric of the Eisenhower era, the modern White House opts for bland, anodyne phrases that will not offend anyone. Take this for example from the dreary 2010 proclamation: “In partnership with like-minded governments, we must reinforce multilateral institutions and international partnerships that safeguard human rights and democratic values. We must empower embattled civil societies and help their people connect with one another and the global community through new technologies.” Ronald Reagan would have taken a nap half-way through that.

Do not expect any mention this year of the former Soviet empire, once the core concern of the old captive-nations cause. That is a pity, as it could rightly celebrate some good news, such as the fact that the US is vigorously engaged in the defence of the Baltic states, with military exercises in recent weeks and a general level of co-operation in the past two years that would have been unimaginable for most of the past decade. But this administration is oddly nervous about trumpeting such successes, not least because they imply (and confirm) the failure of the ‘re-set’ with Russia.

Indeed, the proclamation would also be a perfect place for a ringing condemnation of the corruption and brutality of the regime in the Kremlin. Thanks to Congress, the US is about to put into law a ban on visas for those involved in the $230 million (€187m) tax fraud uncovered by the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, and for the persecution that then led to his death in prison in 2009. This is strongly endorsed by leaders of the Russian opposition, who are incensed by the way the West has connived with the people who are looting their country. Using Captive Nations Week to say that the US will close its borders – and its financial system – to the worst members of the Russian regime would be a bold and effective move. No danger of that, then.

Edward Lucas edits the international section of The Economist. займ на карту срочный займ на карту https://zp-pdl.com/get-quick-online-payday-loan-now.php https://zp-pdl.com/get-a-next-business-day-payday-loan.php займ на карту