A sad loss

My generation does not have the passion for freedom and democracy that our predecessors did. We've grown up after the fall of the Berlin Wall, after Perestroika, after the Romanian revolution, after Tienanmen Square. We've grown up with the unlimited freedoms of the Internet, the spread of globalisation, the increasingly linked world economy.

Generation Y is more likely to care about the living conditions in third world countries, than about political and social freedoms. We are aware of hunger and devastation, but not of secret police and corrupt judicial systems.

For decades, everyone in the West was acutely aware of the horrific abuses of power in Russia, East Germany, China, and the Eastern Bloc countries. Media reports were front page, people who escaped from Russia were given sympathetic treatment and there was a clear distinction between free countries and oppressed ones.

Now though, it's like the large number of oppressive regimes still in power don't get the attention they used to get. They've been lost in the general news cycle.

I think it's sad. I think we've lost the passion for one of the most powerful ideas in the last two thousand years. Democracy has won the ideological battle! We won! But we don't seem to be taking advantage of that fact. Now is the time to press home the victory.

That's why I'm happy about what's happening in Iran. Because we take our freedoms for granted. There are 70 million people in Iran - a country with a rich intellectual history - who would love the freedoms and opportunities available in so many Western countries.

I think it is to the world's benefit that democracy is promoted across the globe. I think it was Tony Blair who said no two democratic countries have ever gone to war with each other. You want to stop war? Promote democracy. Is it a coincidence that the most dramatic increase in human knowledge and scientific progress has come in the one century where democracy has been in the ascendancy? I don't think so.

It is sad that we don't seem to care as much about our ideological heritage as the generations before us. To be fair, I think a lot of that is down to our educations. Schools do not give students a good understanding of why our system is so much better than other systems. This needs to change. In order to continue the ideological war (and it is a war - and one worth fighting) we need to give the next generation the passion for our political system.