Youth and Social Media Fuel Democracy

Young leaders in both China and Russia show they are not buying into the Communist indoctrination their elders accepted with little or no question. Fear of arrest, prison terms, the gulag, and being sent to a penal colony now have to compete with exposure to the alternative future social media describes for young digital pros.

     Sparks of democratic fervor have erupted before social media existed. The Hungarian Revolution in 1956, Czechoslovakia's 1968 reforms, and the pro-democracy movement that brought students to China's Tiananmen Square in 1989 were unsuccessful. But activists persisted and broke up the U.S.S.R. in 1991. Now they have the social media that helped fuel the 2009 Green Movement named for the campaign color of the losing presidential candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi,  in Iran; the Arab Spring; the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong; and anti-corruption rallies in Russia.

     When the three under-30-year-olds who led Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement were sentenced to prison terms in August, 2017, they said they considered their arrests a threat, rather than an end to confrontation. China shows it recognizes the threat of social media by trying to monitor who is saying what on the internet and by demanding ID verification for posts. Beijing's leaders refused to allow Liu Xiaobo, a Nobel Peace Prize winning leader in Tiananmen Square, to leave China for treatment of liver cancer. In the West, unlike in China, they knew he would be able to share his poems about democracy in person and on social media.

     It should be mentioned that not only social media, but also travel and education connect the world's democracy advocates. In  Hong Kong, for example, the Penn Club is a network of the University of Pennsylvania's alumni, families, and friends. Students from Penn and the families that sent them there recognize the university's home in Philadelphia also is the location where the US Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written to inspire the American Revolution. Recently, faculty visitors from the University of Pennsylvania conducted a Global Forum in Hong Kong that brought business and government leaders together with alumni to consider the key issues facing global business. Who knows what else these leaders could have discussed when they got together. Hong Kong protests that began in early June, 2019, aimed to eliminate the threat of transferring domestic criminals to the China mainland for trial. As demonstrations continued into August, both demands for democratic reforms and police intervention increased with no end in sight.

     In Russia, corruption by the select group that has benefited from the country's newly found oil and gas wealth motivates anti-government marches and rallies. Led by the blogger, Alexei Navalny, young protesters risked arrest to take to the streets throughout Russia in March and June, 2017. When Navalny was sentenced on a false charge in 2013, 10,000 protesters marched in Moscow to secure his early release. Russia's leaders can only imagine how many more protesters social media will bring out to welcome Alexei's younger brother, Oleg, when he finally is released from a false charge that sentenced him to a penal colony for three and a half years.

     For protection, in April, 2016, Vladimir Putin created a Russian National Guard loyal to him alone. By creating his private cadre of as many as 300,000 troops, however, Putin also created a prime target for infiltration by anyone out to do him harm. It is no wonder that, as head of the Guard, Viktor Zolotov, Putin's long-time personal bodyguard, is in a position to monitor those authorized to get close to Putin, and Putin is in a position to monitor Zolotov's activities. In September, 2018, whether from irritation or real fear, Zolotov challenged Alexei Navalny to a duel.

     But what will China's and Russia's students find when they go West for advanced educations in the United States and England? They'll meet President Obama's daughter at Harvard and Nobel-prize-winning Malala at Oxford. Students from Hong Kong, who attended the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, found they could sit on a bench next to a statue of Ben Franklin, and they probably ventured downtown to tour Independence Hall and to visit the Liberty Bell. Democracy stands ready to outlive the current leaders in China and Russia.

(Also, check out earlier posts: China's Manifest Destiny East, West, and South; Hong Kong Update, Remember Liu Xiaobo, Russia's Alternative to Putin, and 29 Countries Influence 7 Billion People.)

       

Who Are Your Country's Super Heroes?

Judging from their popularity in comics, graphic novels, and movies, young people love super heroes. Can they match the following countries with some of their super heroes?

_____A. Mahatma Gandhi launched a program of civil          1. Pakistan
               disobedience that led to independence.

_____B. Bishop Desmond Tutu called for Western                 2. Poland
               nations to apply sanctions that led to an end
               of apartheid, i.e. segregation of blacks into
               separate homelands and other indignities.

_____C. Malala Yousafzai won a Nobel Peace Prize              3. Turkey
               for urging all countries to educate their
               girls and women.

_____D. Fidel Castro assembled a Communist                       4. France
               guerrilla band that caused the country's
               corrupt dictator, Fulgencio Batista, to flee.

_____E. Dorothy Day was commended by Pope Frances       5. Myanmar/Burma
              as a champion of workers and the poor.

_____F. Lech Walesa organized the Solidarity                       6. Cuba
              trade union that began the movement
              that ousted the Soviet Union from Eastern
              Europe.

_____G. Aung San Suu Kyi, known as "The Lady,"               7. India
               who received a Nobel Peace Prize for
               keeping democracy alive in the face of a
               military regime takeover.

_____H. Mao Zedang, leader of the "Long March" away       8. United States of America
               from rivals, who returned to lead the country in
               1949 and to try rapid economic development
               through a program called the "Great Leap
               Forward."

_____I. Mustafa Kemal, who took the name Kemal                9. South Africa
             Ataturk and was elected president in 1923,
             established the country as a secular republic
             after hundreds of years as part of a Muslim
             empire.

_____J. Charles de Gaulle led the country's                           10. China
              government-in-exile until World War II
              ended and he could return to be elected
              President.

Answers can be found at the end of the earlier post, "What Moscow Could Learn from History."

Why Do They Love Us?

We believe that human rights are universal. As embedded in the United Nations' Declaration of Human Rights, "all human beings are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood." The Declaration declares everyone has the right to life, liberty, security, privacy, freedom from torture and arbitrary arrest or detention, equal protection before the law, and many freedoms, including the freedom to travel, receive an education, marry, own property, express an opinion, and associate with others.

     Since all human beings have a conscience, they have the right to choose to be an atheist or agnostic or whatever religion their conscience selects. Like Muslims, more than a billion Christians in the West and elsewhere choose to believe there is only one God. Only conversion, not coercion, may cause those who hold no belief, or a different one, to change their minds. No fatwa dispensation can consecrate the criminal slaughter of those who are not Muslim. The West believes that God needs to be allowed to let great sinners, like Paul, Augustine, and Ignatius of Loyola, choose to become great saints.

     Whether someone lives in the West, East, North, or South, life, not suicide, is a basic human right. Despite being blind, Chen Guangcheng defended the right of women, not the Chinese government, to determine the number of children a family should have. His opposition to forced abortions led to his house arrest and beatings of his wife. Like the millions of others who are fleeing from violence and murder in Syria, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or Libya, Chen escaped. Due to the good offices of the United States, he lives here now. He tells his story in The Barefoot Lawyer: A Blind Man's Fight for Justice and Freedom in China. 

     Persecution is not the only reason refugees flee to the West. Poverty and lack of opportunity cause many to take great risks at sea and through deserts to find jobs here. In an interview by Robert Christian, published on the Millennial blog (millennialjournal.com), Chen reports that in the real China 70% of the population live in awful rural conditions not the modern skyscraper cities of Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. In the United States, slaves, women, homosexuals, every ethnic and religious group, and people with disabilities have been able to appeal to the Declaration of Independence and Constitution in order to get their rights recognized and enforced. American blacks. women, and other groups have overcome job discrimination. They vote, attend public schools, and obtain small business loans. The social media that ISIS blithely uses to make bombs and recruit other terrorists was created by students educated in the West, not the Taliban who shot Malala in the head because she wanted to go to school. In the West, freedom of speech and opinions do not lead to murder. They lead to the formation of unions, media coverage, and legal remedies.

     Western researchers have come to the aid of the world's health. They have searched for and found cures for small pox, polio, pneumonia, and numerous other diseases that have plagued the world throughout history. Rather than shun, and even kill, homosexuals, Western researchers kept experimenting until they found a cocktail of drugs that could keep an HIV/AIDS diagnosis from being a death sentence. Because a French doctor founded Medecins sans Frontieres in 1971 and because charities and the Red Cross were willing to go to Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea, the Ebola epidemic has been stopped. And these Western organization continue to go everywhere, such as to Nepal, when natural disasters strike. Even when individuals like Kayla Mueller hear about people suffering in foreign countries, they leave their comfortable lives and go to help (See the earlier post, "The Continuing Battle of Good and Evil.).                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Democracy is not perfect. People love the West, because we are free to laugh at ourselves and admit our faults. Britain's Winston Churchill summed it up. "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

Convert Stories into Foreign Language Games

Screenwriter, Lee Sheldon, wrote a story that was incorporated into an alternative reality game where students learned Mandarin Chinese by interacting with Mandarin-speaking actors. That was just the beginning. Since then he has created plot lines for over a dozen more games. Students are excited to participate and college class attendance soared. Teachers can learn how to turn classes into games by reading Sheldon's book, The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework As a Game.

Several finalists for 2015's Children's Choice Book Awards have international and intergalactic themes that could become classroom games.

• Temple Run: Race Through Time to Unlock the Secrets of Ancient Worlds by Tracey West takes readers on a quest to uncover the clues that will lead them safely through ancient civilizations
• I Am Malala: How One Girl Stood Up for Education and Changed the World follows the Nobel Peace Prize winner as she worked to overcome obstacles to women in Pakistan
• The Return of Zita the Space Girl by Ben Hatke is an adventure that requires Zita to break out of a planet's jail

Girl Power?

Lured by the romance of joining the "jihadi girl power subculture," young tech-savvy Western women are developing contacts with ISIS terrorists, just like the Latin Queens who have been drawn to the gang of Latin Kings. The question is: Are women who join terrorist groups and gangs exhibiting girl power or their willingness to become tools of male power? Are terrorist groups grooming women to use their quick reflexes to detonate car bombs, their devotion to become suicide bombers, or their feminine wiles to return to their home countries to attack targets determined by men?

      Female Kurdish soldiers also have taken up arms against ISIS. Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned Marxist leader of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) that has long fought a war for independence from Turkey, recognized how his support for gender equality would help enlist women who understand ISIS's intention to restrict the rights of women.

 Girl power is seen in other forms by the following women:

• Malala Yousafzai The Pakistani girl who recovered from being shot in the head by the Taliban and went onto win a Nobel Peace Prize for supporting the education of women throughout the world  In 2015, Time magazine named her one of the "100 Most Influential People." Her story is told in the book, I Am Malala.
• Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe This nun from the order of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, recognized as one of Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People" in 2014,  ministers to the girls abducted and raped by soldiers of the Lord's Resistance Army in Southern Sudan and Uganda. At the Saint Monica Vocational School in Gulu, Uganda, these girls learn to grow their own food, make their own clothes, tenderly care for their children, and sew the purses and other items they sell to support themselves and their families. Profits from the book, Sewing Hope, the story of Sister Rosemary, support her work.

Also, consider the three women that National Geographic has identified as "Emerging Explorers."

• Mantza Morales Casanova When this Mexican woman saw children harming animals and plants, she decided to form Humanity United to Nature in Harmony for Beauty (HUNAB), an organization determined: 1) to put education about the environment into schools, 2) create Ceiba Petandra Park, a free area where 64,000 children can have an interactive learning experience about climate change, wetland conservation, wildlife protection, and pollution, and 3) to provide the education that children need to become environmental leaders who change the world.
• Shivani Bhalla Determined to save Kenya's lions, she founded: 1) Lions Kids Camp, where children often see lions in the wild for the first time, and 2) Ewaso Lions, a community outreach program designed to give tribal warriors, women, and children reasons to embrace conservation and to respect and coexist with lions.
• Shabana Basij-Rasikh At a risk to her own life and theirs, her parents sent her to a school in Afghanistan, where she excelled and went on to earn a degree from Middlebury College in the United States. To prepare other girls to attend universities abroad, she co-founded the School of Leadership, Afghanistan, a boarding school for girls. She has said, "The most effective antidote to the Taliban is to create the best educated leadership generation in Afghanistan's history. Our girls of today - the women of tomorrow - will make it happen."

What's in a Name?

"What is your doll's name?" "What is your pet's name?"

New plush animals, dolls, and pets that children received as holiday gifts offer naming opportunities to provide creative, globe-spanning answers to the questions adults often use to interact with youngsters.

A plush tiger named "Gandhi" reflects one of the big cat's last remaining habitats in India, and "Mandela" the lion pays homage to South Africa's great leader. "Churchill," England's World War II leader, is the perfect name for a new bulldog.

Girls may choose to name their dolls Marie Curie for the Nobel Prize winner in chemistry or Amelia Earhart for the first woman to make a solo transoceanic flight. They might choose the name "Golda" to honor Israel's late prime minister or "Malala" to honor the girl who won a Nobel Peace Prize at age 17 after she survived a bullet meant to silence her efforts to help girls receive an education in Pakistan.

History and the news are rich resources of names that help children connect with those who have made or now make a major impact on their world. At foreign films, pay attention to the credits which are filled with different names used in other countries. Instead of Bob, encourage a child to name an action figure, Lars.