Thursday, October 13, 2011

Arab Spring inevitably turns into Arab Winter...

In February of this year, when almost everyone was treating the anti-Mubarak protests in Egypt as a cause of celebration, I was shocked to read the following verdict by the historian Andrew Roberts in the Spectator:

We should abhor policy created by mobs, and assume that all revolutionary change will ultimately be for the worse, especially in a part of the world with so few model democracies. The future seems to be in the hands of the Cairo mob, which has been irresponsibly egged on by an American president desperate to be seen on the side of the nice middle-class liberals who are always the ultimate losers in revolutions. Far better the American president who said of the Latin American strongman: ‘He may be a sonofabitch, but at least he’s our sonofabitch.’

Wasn't he being unduly cynical? All revolutionary change will ultimately be for the worse? In 18th Century France, perhaps, but not in the Arab world where it was hard to imagine any regimes being worse than the present ones. Surely, the Arab Spring represented a step towards freedom and democracy, however small? Full story...

Don't miss:
  1. Egypt’s empty revolution... 
  2. Post-Mubarak Egypt is no better than pre-Mubarak Egypt...
  3. “Friends of Libya” meet in Paris for imperialist carve-up...
  4. Democracy in Libya? Don't hold your breath...
  5. Bahrain: the forgotten Arab Spring...
  6. Saudi Arabia's new law would make political dissent a crime...
  7. Corporate vultures move in after "entirely engineered Arab Spring..."

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