Opinion The moral clarity of the Arab crowd
To topple the tyrants,societies had to stop enabling them.
Perhaps this Arab Revolution of 2011 had a scent for the geography of grief and cruelty. It erupted in Tunisia,made its way to Egypt,Yemen and Bahrain,then doubled back to Libya. In Tunisia and Egypt,political freedom seems to have prevailed,with relative ease,amid popular joy. Back in Libya,the counter-revolution made its stand,and a despot bereft of mercy declared war against his own people. There is no middle ground here,no splitting of the difference.
Over the decades,Arabs took the dictators bait,chanted their names and believed their promises. They averted their gazes from the great crimes. Out of malice or bigotry,that old Arab street had nothing to say about the terror inflicted on Shiites and Kurds in Iraq,for Saddam Hussein was beloved by the crowds,a pan-Arab hero,an enforcer of Sunni interests. Nor did many Arabs take notice in 1978 when Imam Musa al-Sadr,the leader of the Shiites of Lebanon,disappeared while on a visit to Libya. Colonel Gaddafi had money to throw around,and the scribes sang his praise.
The tumult in Arab politics began in the 1950s and 1960s,when rulers rose and fell with regularity. They were struck down by assassins or defied by political forces that had their own sources of strength and belief. New men,from more humble social classes,rose to power through the military and radical political parties. By the 1980s,give or take a few years,in Egypt,Syria,Iraq,Libya,Algeria and Yemen,a new political creature had taken hold: repressive national security states with awesome means of control and terror. The new men were pitiless,they reordered the political world,they killed with abandon; a world of cruelty had settled upon the Arabs. In the public space,there was now the cult of the rulers,the unbounded power of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi and Hafez al-Assad in Syria and Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia. The traditional restraints on power had been swept away and no new social contract between ruler and ruled had emerged.
Fear was now the glue of politics,and in the more prosperous states the rulers purse did its share in the consolidation of state terror. A huge Arab prison had been constructed,and a once-proud people had been reduced to submission. Yet,as they aged,the coup-makers and political plotters of the yesteryears sprouted rapacious dynasties; they became country owners, as a distinguished liberal Egyptian scholar and diplomat once put it to me. Shame a great,disciplining force in the Arab life of old quit Arab lands. Todays rebellions are animated,above all,by a desire to be cleansed of the stain and guilt of having given in to the despots for so long. Elias Canetti gave this phenomenon its timeless treatment in his 1960 book Crowds and Power. A crowd comes together,he reminded us,to expiate its guilt,to be done,in the presence of others,with old sins and failures.
There is no marker,no dividing line,that establishes with precision when and why the Arab people grew weary of dictators. To the extent that such tremendous ruptures can be pinned down,this rebellion was an inevitable response to the stagnation of the Arab economies. The so-called youth bulge made for a combustible background; a new generation with knowledge of the world beyond came into its own. Then,too,the legends of Arab nationalism that had sustained two generations had expired. Younger men and women had wearied of the old obsession with Palestine. The revolution was waiting to happen,and one deed of despair in Tunisia,a street vendor who out of frustration set himself on fire,pushed the old order over the brink.
There is no overstating the importance of the fact that these Arab revolutions are the works of the Arabs themselves. No foreign gunboats were coming to the rescue,the cause of their emancipation would stand or fall on its own. Intuitively,these protesters understood the rulers had been sly,they had convinced Western democracies that it was either the tyrants writ or the prospect of mayhem and chaos.
Massimo dAzeglio,a Piedmontese aristocrat who wrote,what for me are the most arresting words about libertys promise and its perils: The gift of liberty is like that of a horse,handsome,strong and high-spirited. In some it arouses a wish to ride; in many others,on the contrary,it increases the urge to walk. For decades,Arabs walked and cowered in fear. Now they seem eager to take freedoms ride. Wisely,they are paying no heed to those who wish to speak to them of libertys risks. Fouad Ajami
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