Remarks by President George W. Bush at a "Conference on Cyber Dissidents"

Thank you and welcome. Good morning and welcome.

First of all, I want to thank Laura for joining us. As you can tell, she cares deeply about the idea that all should be free, and I share that as well. I share it for a couple of reasons. One, I believe in the universality of freedom. I believe deep in everybody’s soul is a desire to live in a free society. I believe Muslim mothers want their children to grow up in a free and peaceful world so they can realize their full potential, just like American mothers want their children to grow up in a free and peaceful world. So I believe in the universality of freedom.

I also believe that it’s in the U.S.’s interests to advance freedom for the sake of peace, and so the Bush Institute is going to be involved with the freedom movement. We’re going to use our platform here at Southern Methodist University, one of the great universities in the United States, to advance human freedom for the sake of peace.

I am concerned about isolationism. The United States, in our past, has had the tendency to say, “Oh, the work of freedom is too hard,” or, “Who cares how somebody else lives, just so long as we’re comfortable here in the United States?” One of the lessons of September 11 is that conditions overseas matter to our national security here at home. I also believe that if we allow isolationism to become a dominant philosophy, that we forget our own past, that we don’t honor the fact that our nation has become a compassionate nation because of our embracing the ideals of freedom. And so one of the reasons we’re focusing on the Freedom Agenda so strongly here at SMU is to remind the country that free society is in our national interests, and the best way to do that is to encourage people actually on the frontlines of the freedom movement and to give them a platform.

And so that’s what we’re doing here today, and one of the things I was nervous about, about a think tank is that all we do is have people come here and sit around and think. I think it’s important to not only have people come around and think and experts write and opine but also to figure out how to act. So the Bush Center is a place where we’re going to inspire, hopefully, people to make a difference in their communities, whether it be here at home or abroad.

Today we’ve got some unbelievably courageous people, people who are willing to challenge the status quo in their respective countries, in their homeland. Here in America, we’re so blessed that at times we forget how courage is important, and so the Bush Center is going to embrace courage, and today you’re going to hear some really interesting people, people that refuse to take the lack of a free society for granted, people who are willing to use their talents to advance an agenda that is based on the universality of freedom. And it’s in our interests, our country’s interests to support them and to support courageous people.

We’ve got Fellows here at the Bush Center, two of whom are associated with this part of the Bush Center, the Freedom Agenda, one of whom is Oscar Morales. He’s from Colombia. Oscar started FARC No Mas. They signed a million people up on Facebook, and then on one day, those million showed up in the streets around the world and said, “We support the people of Colombia who reject the Marxist, drug-oriented group of people who are trying to take away our freedoms.” It’s an example of how the Internet can be effectively used to advance the Freedom Agenda.

And the other person with us is Mohsen Sazegara. What’s interesting about Mohsen is he was the founder of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and now is associated with the Bush Center here at SMU in Dallas, Texas. It’s an improbable journey, but it’s a journey that can be instructive to people on the campus of SMU, to the people who live in Dallas and to the people of our country, and equally important, a journey that can be instructive to the people inside of Iran.

I want to thank [Jim] Glassman for his hard work. He really has got this institute up and running. As you can see, we’re impatient people. We didn’t want to wait for the building to be constructed before we got our programs up and moving, and the institute is alive, and it’s active, and we’re going to make a difference in people’s lives in a positive way.

We’d like to collaborate with people who share our values, and in this case, the Freedom House is one such institute. They make a huge difference, the Freedom House, and we can learn from the Freedom House, and so I want to thank Jennifer Windsor for joining us. It’s really great for you to be here.

I also want to thank Dr. Jeffrey Gedmin. He’s the President of Radio Free Europe. Needless to say, most of you tuned in to the word free. Now, Radio Free Europe was relevant to Europe decades ago. He’s trying to make Radio Free World relevant to parts of the world that need to see the beauty and light of freedom. So Laura and I are thrilled you’re here. We welcome you, and we really want to thank those who are on the frontline of the Freedom Agenda.

One other thing we’re doing here, just so you know, is that we’re going to build a Freedom Repository. Kristen Silverberg, who was an ambassador during my administration, is with us today. She and [Stephen] Hadley, by the way — one of the problems of leaving the White House is you miss your friends, in spite of the fact that there is an Internet. We could blog each other, I guess, and perhaps we could learn to do so here, but I was surrounded by incredibly competent people during my presidency, two of whom are active in this particular initiative — Stephen Hadley was my National Security Advisor, and Kristen Silverberg, who worked first in the White House and then became an ambassador, came up with an interesting idea, and that is to have a Freedom Repository here on the SMU campus, a place where dissidents, underground preachers, political prisoners can store their letters and their diaries and their writings and their thoughts to be memorialized forever. The idea is to use the Freedom Repository as an educational tool to fight off isolationism but also as a tool to inspire others. 

And so we’ve got a lot of things going here, and we’re really thrilled you’re here. This is the beginning. This Cyber Dissident Conference is the beginning of a focused effort on how to use tools to advance democracy and freedom, and so we’re honored you’re here. You’re on the campus of a great university. Thank you for coming, and God bless.