Thursday, February 24, 2011

Anne Applebaum in Monday's Washington Post points up an important fact about revolutions--one type of modern activist repudiation of a nasty and/or corrupt regime does not exactly follow another like the proverbial and repudiated "domino effect". . Indeed what we are seeing in places like Egypt and Libya may be very different from anything we've seen in Eastern Europe in 1989 or in other parts of the world. The conflict may indeed have as much in common with the mostly-failed Revolutions in continental Europe in 1848. In which case, these events may will bring slower but long-lasting change to an area that, for a variety of reasons, has stubbornly lagged too long behind the rest of the world in pluralistic political development. ************************* "In Egypt, decisions made by the military may well have mattered as much as the actions of the crowd. In Bahrain, the conflict between Sunnis and Shiites is clearly central. The role of "Islam" is not the same in countries as different as Tunisia and Yemen. In Libya, the regime has already shown itself willing to use mass violence, which others have avoided. Tempting though it will be to lump all of these events together and treat them as a single "Arab revolution," the differences between countries may turn out to be more important than their similarities." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/21/AR2011022103310.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns

6 comments:

  1. All very, very important parts to remember.

    'Organized revolution' should be said in the same breath as 'jumbo shrimp', and 'military intelligence'.....

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  2. Ha! That''s a good point, Will.


    There are a lot of issues on the ground in Egypt which are very diffident from Libya, obviously, and area to area within the latter: we are seeing "organizing" from groups that were disorganized and suppressed for so long who knows how strong they will hold together with allied forces.

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  3. it's all very complicated and dangerous in many places...but in the end isn't the more simple description an age old struggle between conservative (haves) and progressive (have nots) ?

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  4. Very well said. There is no such thing as an organized revolution. Even ours started out as a dispute over taxation. The initial point was to get some representation not to succeed from the British Empire

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  5. Doug this is a huge area from which to write on. All I know is that seemingly these tyrants are all falling down. It's like a Domino effect that is going on over there.

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  6. This one got me Doug by Will. There was a time that Omar was taunting and blowing his horn and no hoax Reagan had enough and I think you will recall when he disappeared. What took place was a bomb landed 500 yards from his home as a warning. For the longest after that he seemingly went silent. It was always known that the man not only was a tyrant but his idol was Chavez as well within inner circles back then everyone knew the man was literally insane.

    But he had good kidneys...



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