liberty

This a
good article change.. does not happen over night .You have to work at it. Also change needs to grow and like a flower garden. It needs to be watered and harvested. It does not happen just because. Many of our political leaders to day must understand that theyhave to work at changing things it does not just happen It all deals with mind sets. At least that is what I think . You have go after the mind set of the public and shape it. Then sell them your product. Your self or concept of whatever you want. But today to many of thosein politics just sitting and there and crying the blues on how things are so bad but donot come up with a vision of what they want to do. There message is clear and correct but they areto lazy to go and do it. That is why this article so that change happens over time andpeople have to go out and do it. Not just sit there and cry about.


Liberty Calls.Joe O'Connor, National Post · Saturday, Feb. 26, 2011

No matter how complex a revolution is, at the heart of each is a universal noti on: A belief shared by great masses of people that life, for the average citizen, can be better than what it is.

That change is possible, and that what was previously thought of as unimaginable is within reach, if enough people are prepared to go out and grab it.

Beyond a shared belief in human possibility, revolutions are a hodgepodge, an extended family with lots of second cousins and third cousins twice removed, that come in different shapes and sizes, and take on different forms.

The biggies, the legends of the game of societal upheaval and the rarest, are social revolutions characterized by tossing something rotten (a French king, a Russian czar, a U.S. puppet in Havana) overboard and sowing something new.

More common are political revolutions, where a tin-pot tyrant like Hosni Mubarak gets knocked from his perch. Some revolutions end happily. Sadly, most do not.

And that's the rub with regime change: The new reality seldom lives up to the revolutionary hype.

"It is hard to point to too many success stories," said Jeff Goodwin, a sociologist at New York University.

"Countries generally have revolutions because they are in a bad situation, and revolutions don't always get you out of that hole.

"Revolutions happening in poor authoritarian countries, well, those countries usually end up remaining poor and authoritarian."

Even in "enlightened" countries, revolution is not always what it is cracked up to be. France ditched a king, lopped off a bunch of noble heads, bloodied itself in European wars and wound up with an emperor named Napoleon Bonaparte.

Mao Zedong starved China, and shunned (and shot) its intellectuals. Joseph Stalin built gulags and presided over kangaroo courts.

And Cuba just keeps on keeping on under the Castro brothers' watchful gaze, while Africa did away with colonialism and wound up with despot cronyism.

But it is not all doom and gloom for the aspiring revolutionary. There are sunnier examples of what is possible, on down the regime-changing road.

Take the United States. The shining city on the hill: a brilliantly hued example of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, born out of bloodshed, and who is all grown up now, a wealthy superpower, the likes of which the world has never seen.

Of course, scratch away at the façade and one finds the beacon of liberty often has a dimmer over it.

Betting on bad guys, like Mr. Mubarak in Egypt, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Porfirio Diaz in Mexico, the Shah of Iran, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, and more, was the American way of doing business in the 20th century, just as the American Revolution itself was largely a rich man's fight for political and economic liberty.

After the final shot was fired and the U.S. Constitution signed, the right to vote, in the republic's infancy, was limited and linked to property ownership. Slaves stayed property. Women simply did not count.

It would be years before they did. "The American revolution was a true revolution," said Jack Goldstone, a professor of public policy at George Mason University.

"But the privileged elites made the revolution and they stayed in control afterwards. However, the principles and institutions of government became much more egalitarian."

So what, exactly, are we witnessing in the Middle East now? Have we seen this movie before, or is it a new release?

It started, remember, with a single match struck in Tunisia.

Mohamed Bouazizi, unemployed and humiliated by government officials for trying to earn a living selling vegetables on the street, set himself ablaze on Dec. 17.

Twenty-eight days later the regime of president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was in flames, toppled after 23 years. Mr. Mubarak, in Egypt, was next to go after 32 years.

"We have been seeing people doing almost unimaginable things here," said John Foran, a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

"These revolutions are being made non-violently, in terms of the protesters, and the governments vary in how violent the response is, but the means are non-violent."

Twentieth-century revolution was about picking up arms, hiding out in the hills, gradually building support among the people before blasting the dictatorship out from behind the palace walls.

Today's repressive regimes turn to sand in a matter of weeks, with limited resistance. (Granted, Muammar Gaddafi is a different kettle of crazy).

No matter: A golden age of revolution appears to be at hand, where non-violent protest is the weapon of choice. Before flowering in the Middle East, people power washed away authoritarian ghouls in Georgia (Rose Revolution, 2003), Ukraine (Orange Revolution, 2004) and Kyrgyzstan (Tulip Revolution, 2005).

"Gaddafi can kill people until he realizes he has got to go, whereas almost everywhere else we are seeing less push-back, in terms of government violence, because these governments actually know they are illegitimate," Prof. Foran said.

"Once people are no longer afraid -and that's what Tunisia taught Egypt, and Tunisia and Egypt are teaching others -then it can happen anywhere, couldn't it?"

Cascading dominoes are a characteristic of a revolutionary age. Europe went crazy for liberal democracy in 1848, in a tide of mostly fruitless revolutions.

And when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, it took communism with it, a mass combustion of authoritarian governments often miscast as a spontaneous event.

"That's just a myth," said Prof. Goldstone.

"It's a nice story. But if you start at 1989, it actually started with the Solidarity movement in Poland, which had been active for almost decade. There were dissident groups in Czechoslovakia, and for that matter, there were underground networks in the Soviet Union, trying to seek support for a post-communist future.

"In Egypt, youth and labour movements have been organizing for the last couple of years."

Revolutions happen, they just don't happen overnight.

What there often is, in the midst of events -however well-planned and drawn-out they may be -is a triggering moment.

A point where the revolutionaries realize it is game on and there is no turning back.

In France, the moment was the storming of the Bastille in 1789, when an artillery battery turned its guns against the fortress walls instead of the Parisians trying to breach it. The United States had its shot heard round the world at Lexington/Concord, and in Russia, the Bolsheviks seized their moment by seizing control of Petrograd, while the city slept in October 1917.

In Egypt, it was a demonstration, planned to coincide with Police Day, a national holiday.

"What you see there is a meaningless flare, basically a signal to the broader public that we think the time has come -and we, meaning an organized, underground, leading-edge group -but we think the time has come to challenge the regime and we may get beaten down this time, but maybe not," Prof. Goldstone said.

"How the government responds becomes crucial.. It might be that troops are undisciplined and fire into crowds. It might be that the army or the police show signs of solidarity or restraint, and this provides encouragement and the crowds then come back stronger.

"And the turning point could be tanks turning their turrets away from the crowds, or the creation of martyr, like in Tunisia, but what it indicates is that there may be a chance, and masses of people will take risks if they think there is a payoff."

And that's the revolutionary reckoning: the payoff -true freedom, and a better life -often disappear in a puff of rifle smoke or of a Cuban cigar -when a new bully takes the place of the bad guy that came before.

Revolutions come in different shapes and sizes. They assume different forms. Some are born in the countryside, others in the cities. Some are peaceful. Some are violent. And some are something in between, but no two are exactly the same, and defining a revolution's precise nature can be as elusive as capturing the deposed dictator before he slips away in the dead of night.

"They are a complex genus with different species," Prof. Goldstone said.

The Middle East is in the Petri dish now. Academics, governments, despots and budding revolutionaries are hovering, with an eye on the microscope, waiting to see what happens next.

"It is a lot easier to know when revolutions start than when they end, and I have already noticed people talk about the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt as if they are over, because the dictators fled and a new government is in place," said Prof. Goodwin.

"But a revolution isn't really over until a new regime is fully institutional. And it is very much in question as to what kind of regime is going to come out of all this, and what kind of reforms we might actually have in the Middle East."

Yes, the revolution is now, and yet, it has only just begun. The hardest part, for the people living through it, is finding a happy ending.

joconnor@nationalpost.com