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By Root 1804 0

Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World’s Last Dictators by 2025, his guide to overthrowing forty-five of the world’s authoritarian leaders, a book that makes Dick Cheney look like a dove, Palmer lauded the emancipatory power of the Internet, calling it “a force multiplier for democracy and an expense multiplier for dictators.” For him, the Internet is an excellent way to foster civil unrest that can eventually result in a revolution: “Internet skills are readily taught, and should be, by the outside democracies. Few undertakings are more cost effective than ‘training the trainers’ for Internet organizing.” The Web is thus a powerful tool for regime change; pro-democracy activists in authoritarian states should be taught how to blog and tweet in more or less the same fashion that they are taught to practice civil disobedience and street protest—the two favorite themes of U.S.-funded trainings whose agendas are heavily influenced by the work of the American activist-academic Gene Sharp, the so-called Machiavelli of nonviolence.

With regard to Iran, for example, one of Palmer’s proposed solutions is to turn diplomatic missions of “democratic states” into “freedom houses, providing to Iranians cybercafés with access to the Internet and other communications equipment, as well as safe rooms for meetings.” But Palmer’s love for freedom houses goes well beyond Iran. He is a board member and a former vice chair of Freedom House, another mostly conservative outfit that specializes in tracking democratization across the world and, when an opportune moment comes along, helping to spread it. (Because of their supposed role in fomenting Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, Freedom House and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations are two of the Kremlin’s favorite Western bogeymen.) Perhaps in part thanks to pressure from Palmer, Freedom House has recently expanded its studies of democratization into the digital domain, publishing a report on the Internet freedom situation in fifteen countries and, with some financial backing by the U.S. government, has even set up a dedicated Internet Freedom Initiative. Whatever its emancipatory potential, the Internet will remain Washington’s favorite growth industry for years to come.

Cyber Cold War

But it would be disingenuous to suggest that it’s only neoconser vatives who like delving into their former glory to grapple with the digital world. That the intellectual legacy of the Cold War can be repurposed to better understand the growing host of Internet-related emerging problems is an assumption widely shared across the American political spectrum. “To win the cyber-war, look to the Cold War,” writes Mike McConnell, America’s former intelligence chief. “[The fight for Internet freedom] is a lot like the problem we had during the Cold War,” concurs Ted Kaufman, a Democratic senator from Delaware. Freud would have had a good laugh on seeing how the Internet, a highly resilient network designed by the U.S. military to secure communications in case of an attack by the Soviet Union, is at pains to get over its Cold War parentage. Such intellectual recycling is hardly surprising. The fight against communism has supplied the foreign policy establishment with so many buzzwords and metaphors—the Iron Curtain, the Evil Empire, Star Wars, the Missile Gap—that many of them could be raised from the dead to day—simply by adding the annoying qualifiers like “cyber-,” “digital,” and “2.0.”

By the virtue of sharing part of its name with the word “firewall,” the Berlin Wall is by far the most abused term from the vocabulary of the Cold War. Senators are particularly fond of the metaphorical thinking that it inspires. Arlen Specter, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, has urged the American government to “fight fire with fire in finding ways to breach these firewalls, which dictatorships use to control their people and keep themselves in power.” Why? Because “tearing down these walls can match the effect of what happened when the Berlin Wall was torn down.” Speaking in October 2009 Sam Brownback, a Republican