Politics & Power Quote by Natan Sharansky

Sharansky is needling a comfortable kind of pessimism: the habit of treating authoritarianism as a cultural destiny rather than a political choice. By invoking “some of the most serious thinkers,” he’s not flattering them; he’s puncturing the authority that comes from sounding grave, scholarly, and resigned. The line works because it turns “seriousness” into a liability. If yesterday’s experts could be so confidently wrong about Germany, Italy, and Japan - places that became shorthand for democratic reconstruction after catastrophe - then today’s confident claims about Russia or “Latin America” should read less like realism and more like intellectual fashion.

The subtext is sharply anti-essentialist. “Not compatible with the cultures of…” is the language of civilizational sorting, a polite cousin of racism: it launders power politics into anthropology. Sharansky’s list is doing quiet rhetorical work, too. It stitches together former fascist powers, Cold War battlegrounds, and post-imperial states to show how often “culture” gets deployed as a veto against democratic aspiration. The phrase “important to remember” signals moral urgency, but also a rebuke: forgetting this history isn’t neutral; it licenses accommodation with dictators.

Context matters. Sharansky, a Soviet dissident turned Israeli politician and human-rights advocate, is speaking from the biography of someone told, implicitly and explicitly, that freedom was “not for people like you.” His intent isn’t to promise inevitable democratization; it’s to strip away the alibi that repression is traditional, and that liberty is an imported taste that certain societies can’t digest.