I was asked to survey the world and answer the question “How fares freedom?” I have done so, here. We are in an age of the strongman. Anti-democratic forces are riding high. But everywhere, there are people who resist these forces, and they are amazing.
At the end of my piece, I make two points, of an elementary nature — but sometimes these are the most important points. First: Democrats have to be in alliance with one another, even as anti-democrats are. Anti-democrats are very good at allying with one another. Think of the dictatorships that keep the regime in Venezuela afloat: those of Cuba, Russia, China, and Iran. Democrats and liberals are stronger when they band together.
The second point: Liberal-democratic values have to be argued for, year after year, generation after generation. People may think this is unnecessary. Isn’t the desirability of liberal democracy self-evident? No. Old people tend to forget, and new people are born. There can be no resting on laurels, as events prove.
In my piece, I mention many names, of autocrats, yes, but also of democrats and dissidents — and simple victims. Here is a paragraph from my section on Egypt:
The country has some 60,000 political prisoners. People are tortured to death, routinely. Sometimes their names make the news: Shady Habash, a young filmmaker; Giulio Regeni, an Italian doctoral student; Mustafa Kassem, a U.S. citizen who had returned to Egypt to see his family.
Here on the Corner, I’d like to note a report from the Wall Street Journal, published on Monday. It concerns the case of Giulio Regeni, and what Italian investigators have found. The story is clear, gruesome as it is.
Just before 8 p.m., he was abducted at his local metro stop and taken to a nearby police station. He was blindfolded and driven across the Nile to the offices of the NSA, inside the grounds of Egypt’s Interior Ministry.
“NSA” stands for “National Security Agency” — in Egypt, something very different from the National Security Agency of the United States.
There, in Office N. 13 of a four-story villa — a room typically reserved for the interrogation of foreign nationals — he was tortured for days, according to the account of a witness, a 15-year veteran of the NSA.
“In the room there were metal chains used to tie people up. The upper half of his body was naked, and there were signs of torture. He was speaking in his language, he was delirious,” the former NSA officer told Italian investigators, according to a transcript of his testimony. “He was very, very thin. He was handcuffed to the floor.”
What about Regeni’s family?
The Italian Embassy was informed of Mr. Regeni’s disappearance hours after it happened. Five days later, on Jan. 30, his parents flew to Cairo in a desperate bid to find him. At the time, Mr. Regeni was still alive. The Egyptian government made no official comment on the disappearance. At the time, the NSA firmly denied that Egyptian security forces were in any way involved in Mr. Regeni’s disappearance, according to Italian officials.
A little more:
The NSA witness said Mr. Regeni died in the agency’s custody. The cause of death was a violent blow to the back of Mr. Regeni’s neck in the 24 hours before or after the evening of Feb. 1, according to an autopsy carried out in Italy. His body was found on Feb. 3, dumped behind a wall on the side of a dusty highway on the outskirts of Cairo.
Did the Egyptian government make any statement at all?
In the months that followed, Egyptian authorities offered varying explanations for Mr. Regeni’s death, telling Italian officials that he may have been killed in a car accident, or that he died after attending a sex party.
Yup — that’s how they do it, the world over. Names and faces are different, but tactics are remarkably similar.
Anyway, my survey, once more, is here. It is not entirely dark. There are streaks of light. May these streaks increase, blotting out the darkness that must be beaten back, constantly.