Crying Tunisian policemen comforted by protesters
Why is there no (functioning) democracy in the Middle East and North Africa? This is one of the fundamental questions of our time. When you ask people from the region, foreigners are the favored answer. Did the Europeans not carve out artificial states without respect for local conditions, laying the foundations of authoritarianism by dividing and conquering? Does America not give billions of dollars to local strongmen, like Mubarak, helping them to buy off their populations and arm their security services?
The people of Tunisia, like the people of Iran four decades earlier, have affirmed that on the contrary, Western interference is rarely decisive in maintaining autocracy. Those who blame Americans, or their dead European cousins, for political backwardness in their home countries are mostly excusing themselves for their own acquiescence to dictatorship. The crux of any authoritarian regime, in reality, rests on two variables: the willingness of the people to repeatedly test the security forces, and the willingness of the security forces to, in return, kill civilians for a sustained period of time.
The Tunisian people did their part, and the security forces refused to continue oppressing their brothers and sisters. That’s what makes the picture of the crying policeman so moving.
Mohamad Bouazizi has also reminded everyone of the power of the original and far more courageous form of political suicide: self immolation. It stands in stark moral contrast to the brainwashed goons who publicly protest with detonators and the blood of passerby. If Tunisia turns into a free democracy, then the sacrifice of Bouazizi and his fellow protesters will be the greatest triumph of the 21st century. However, there are reasons to be cautious. Leaders in the region have previously lost enthusiasm for democracy in the face of rising Islamism. It would be a tragedy if the promise of Tunisia’s revolution is lost to continuing instability, as happened in Algeria, hijacked by Islamists, as in Iran, or, in an effort to avoid the above scenarios, the revolution simply opens the door for a new tyrant.
Indeed, the original use of the word “revolution” in politics, to refer to events in Britain in 1668, described a reversion to a previous order, not the dawn of a new one. Here is to hoping that Tunisia’s revolution will be different.
- Jon
The people of Tunisia, like the people of Iran four decades earlier, have affirmed that on the contrary, Western interference is rarely decisive in maintaining autocracy. Those who blame Americans, or their dead European cousins, for political backwardness in their home countries are mostly excusing themselves for their own acquiescence to dictatorship. The crux of any authoritarian regime, in reality, rests on two variables: the willingness of the people to repeatedly test the security forces, and the willingness of the security forces to, in return, kill civilians for a sustained period of time.
The Tunisian people did their part, and the security forces refused to continue oppressing their brothers and sisters. That’s what makes the picture of the crying policeman so moving.
Mohamad Bouazizi has also reminded everyone of the power of the original and far more courageous form of political suicide: self immolation. It stands in stark moral contrast to the brainwashed goons who publicly protest with detonators and the blood of passerby. If Tunisia turns into a free democracy, then the sacrifice of Bouazizi and his fellow protesters will be the greatest triumph of the 21st century. However, there are reasons to be cautious. Leaders in the region have previously lost enthusiasm for democracy in the face of rising Islamism. It would be a tragedy if the promise of Tunisia’s revolution is lost to continuing instability, as happened in Algeria, hijacked by Islamists, as in Iran, or, in an effort to avoid the above scenarios, the revolution simply opens the door for a new tyrant.
Indeed, the original use of the word “revolution” in politics, to refer to events in Britain in 1668, described a reversion to a previous order, not the dawn of a new one. Here is to hoping that Tunisia’s revolution will be different.
- Jon
