Safely on the Bottom?

Now that Osama bin Laden is safely on the bottom of the Arabian Sea, we can turn our attention back to the larger Mideast revolution—Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Libya et al—a new movement toward democracy fueled by social-network technology.

That’s quick shorthand for it, but not so fast, Buckaroos. Before Facebook and Twitter there was samizdat, the low-tech networking device invented forty-five years ago by Soviet dissidents, and look what it got them.

This Russian acronym—self  (sam) + publishing (izdat)—described the network created when a typist using seven sheets of onion-skin and carbon paper made copies of an uncensored document, distributed it to friends, each of whom made seven more copies and distributed those, etc. It was dangerous work. People were sent to prison camps for it.

But copies found their way into the hands of foreign correspondents and eventually onto western radio broadcasts to be heard, despite jamming, by the very Russians the censors meant to shield. This uncontrolled flow of information led to a growing movement of thoughtful and courageous adults whose political dissent had much more to do ultimately with the fall of communism and the Berlin wall than did the American president Ronald Reagan.

Something like that is what’s happening in the Middle East, though now the speed of transmission is instantaneous. But if we assume democracy will result, we may be mistaken. We have only to look at what developed in Russia, where there’s still little tolerance for uncontrolled news reporting and independent thinking.