Dissidents’ Library and Conference Center in Dallas

The George W. Bush Presidential Center at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX will host several libraries, including the “Voices of Dissidents” Library. The video below shows former President and First Lady George and Laura Bush talking about this library. Laura Bush also shared with Greta Van Susteren on Friday that a conference featuring Cyber-Dissidents will be hosted at the library in the Spring of 2010. She explained:

There will be specific areas of human freedom. And one thing different about the archives here in the institute is that we’re going to have a freedom repository, and that is a collection of works by dissidents and political prisoners, current ones, or ones like Vaclav Havel, who will be one of our first contributors to the freedom collection, who led the revolution in Czechoslovakia. And he was jailed as a dissident in Czechoslovakia and then finally became president of the Czech Republic after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

So that is going to be very interesting. And our first fellow that we announced that will be part o f the human freedom part and the freedom collection part of the institute is Oscar Morales Guevara from Colombia. He’ll start here in January.

He will produce a conference on cyber dissidents. He’s an engineer in Colombia, but he started a Facebook movement “No Mas FARC” against the FARC in Colombia. So he will be able to bring into the whole idea of dissidents and political prisoners this idea of being able to reach out beyond the boundaries of a tyranny through the Internet.

And so we’ll have a cyber conference here next March or next spring to talk about ways we can increase the voices of people, let people who are shut behind the tyranny be able to reach out to the rest of the world through the Internet.

For updates, and conference details as they become available, regularly check the GeorgeWBushCenter.com Also see EDUCATION, GLOBAL HEALTH, HUMAN FREEDOM, ECONOMIC GROWTH TO BE INITIAL FOCUS OF BUSH INSTITUTE; PROGRAMS TO BEGIN IN 2010 (.pdf)