{"id":18999,"date":"2024-12-27T16:46:58","date_gmt":"2024-12-27T17:46:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=18999"},"modified":"2024-12-27T18:25:12","modified_gmt":"2024-12-27T18:25:12","slug":"in-a-political-year-some-deaths-spoke-to-the-struggles-for-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=18999","title":{"rendered":"In a Political Year, Some Deaths Spoke to the Struggles for Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Among the notable figures who died in a sometimes polarizing 2024, many championed justice, equal rights and political freedom.<\/p>\n

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In a year saturated with politics in an ever more polarized world, where the obituary many feared they\u2019d be reading would be that of democracy itself, one death seemed to encapsulate the historical moment we\u2019re in: that of Aleksei Navalny<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A man of courage who championed democracy in his native Russia, a country that does all it can to suppress it, Mr. Navalny died in an Arctic prison as he had lived: as a ceaseless foe of authoritarianism and the persistent nemesis of one of its most intractable practitioners, Vladimir Putin.<\/p>\n

Mr. Navalny\u2019s death, at 47 \u2014 coming after years of arrests, beatings and a near-fatal poisoning \u2014 set off a global wave of grief and anger and did precisely what he would have wanted it to: galvanize his fellow resisters to redouble their resolve.<\/p>\n

Mr. Navalny, of course, was not a lone figure in the struggle between democracy and the iron hands that repudiate it. And he was not the only righteous dissident to die in 2024. He had a counterpart, albeit of an earlier generation, in Nijole Sadunaite<\/a>, a Lithuanian Roman Catholic nun who took on Soviet totalitarianism in the depths of the Cold War. For years, she too had known the inside of a cold Siberian cell.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Half a world away, Shih Ming-teh<\/a> died on his 83rd birthday, more than 60 years after he began agitating for democracy in a then-dictatorial Taiwan. He paid dearly for his political passion: torture and 20 years in prison, 13 of them in solitary confinement, under a repressive regime that history ultimately swept away. \u201cI\u2019m someone who never had a youth,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

And in an emerging era in which the threats to free and open societies can be more insidious, Shafiqah Hudson<\/a> found her mission in the dark corridors of the internet: ferreting out trolls peddling lies and misinformation on social media sites. Her efforts may have been \u201can endless game of Whac-a-Mole,\u201d as Penelope Green wrote in Ms. Hudson\u2019s obituary, but they nevertheless \u201cadded up to an early and effective bulwark against misinformation that can threaten democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Among the notable figures who died in a sometimes polarizing 2024, many championed justice, equal rights and political freedom.In a year saturated with politics in an ever more polarized world, where the obituary many feared they\u2019d be reading would be that of democracy itself, one death seemed to encapsulate the historical moment we\u2019re in: that of Aleksei Navalny.A man of courage who championed democracy in his native Russia, a country that does all it can to suppress it, Mr. Navalny died in an Arctic prison as he had lived: as a ceaseless foe of authoritarianism and the persistent nemesis of one of its most intractable practitioners, Vladimir Putin.Mr. Navalny\u2019s death, at 47 \u2014 coming after years of arrests, beatings and a near-fatal poisoning \u2014 set off a global wave of grief and anger and did precisely what he would have wanted it to: galvanize his fellow resisters to redouble their resolve.Mr. Navalny, of course, was not a lone figure in the struggle between democracy and the iron hands that repudiate it. And he was not the only righteous dissident to die in 2024. He had a counterpart, albeit of an earlier generation, in Nijole Sadunaite, a Lithuanian Roman Catholic nun who took on Soviet totalitarianism in the depths of the Cold War. For years, she too had known the inside of a cold Siberian cell.Half a world away, Shih Ming-teh died on his 83rd birthday, more than 60 years after he began agitating for democracy in a then-dictatorial Taiwan. He paid dearly for his political passion: torture and 20 years in prison, 13 of them in solitary confinement, under a repressive regime that history ultimately swept away. \u201cI\u2019m someone who never had a youth,\u201d he said.And in an emerging era in which the threats to free and open societies can be more insidious, Shafiqah Hudson found her mission in the dark corridors of the internet: ferreting out trolls peddling lies and misinformation on social media sites. Her efforts may have been \u201can endless game of Whac-a-Mole,\u201d as Penelope Green wrote in Ms. Hudson\u2019s obituary, but they nevertheless \u201cadded up to an early and effective bulwark against misinformation that can threaten democracy.\u201dWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19001,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18999"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18999\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19002,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18999\/revisions\/19002"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}