DON’T BOTHER TO WAKE ME WHEN THE REVOLUTION’S OVER

1/15/12

It’s been awhile since I’ve touched on these two topics, but loyal readers know that I wasn’t part of the starry-eyed legions of ingénues who got all dewy-eyed at the Arab Spring that saw dictators being toppled in favor of mobs of overeducated, underemployed kids out for a lark and having as their only common link an utter lack of familiarity with the world of work and the hardscrabble lives of the people they purported to represent. In this sense, the “young people” who managed to throw the Middle East into a turmoil the unfolding of which will have consequences we have begun neither to imagine nor to suffer closely resemble our public servants in Washington, but I digress.

My comments during and after these debauches which were so heartily cheered by our consanguineous Western media centered primarily on Egypt and Libya, and included the following posts:

On Libya:

HEY, SOMEBODY HAS TO RUN THE PUBLIC TRANSIT SYSTEM IN TRIPOLI
10/21/11
“THIS IS A FINE MESS YOU’VE GOTTEN US INTO…”
10/8/11
THICK AS A BRIC?
10/8/11
I HOPE MICHELE BACHMANN WASN’T COUNTING ON LIBYA TO GET OIL TO $2
8/22/11
DOG BITES MAN
4/23/11
IT’S NOT A CHICK FLICK; IT’S A ROMANTIC COMEDY.
3/28/11

On Egypt:

PERHAPS ALL WE NEED IS A LITTLE RE-EDUCATION
8/2/11
AFTER ALL THESE CENTURIES, THE EGYPTIANS STILL HAVE SOMETHING TO TEACH US, Parts I and II
2/3/11
“…HE’S AN EGYPTIAN…” ???
1/29/11
YOU BREAK IT YOU BOUGHT IT…
1/28/11

I was reminded of the utter insightfulness and prescience of the above posts by two adjoining articles in today’s (i.e., Sunday, 1/15/12’s, page 31) Chicago Tribune. The first of these, “ElBaradei drops bid for Egyptian presidency” reports that, as the headline tells us, Mohammed ElBaradei, former head of the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency, darling of the “international community,” subject of the aforementioned 1/29/11 post “…HE’S AN EGYPTIAN…” ???, and an Egyptian native who occasionally deigns to actually visit his homeland, has decided not to run for president of Egypt not because the job promises to be so thankless, if not fatal, no sir, but, rather because, as Mr. ElBaradei put it, it appears that, in Egypt,

“no revolution took place and no regime has fallen”

because the military has such tight control over the land of the Pharaohs. So much for the “young people’s revolution.”

On sober reflection, the outcome that Mr. ElBaradei hopefully so accurately and ruefully describes is a good one for Egypt, considering that the alternative to military rule in Egypt would have been a combination of mobocracy and a group of naïve university students’ and intellectuals’ gleefully yet heartlessly testing crackpot social, political, and economic theories on the population of the Arab world’s most populous nation. Such experimentation did not work so well in Russia in the early part of the last century; its prospects were not much better for Egypt in the early part of this one.


The news is not as good for Libya. The next article on page 31 of today’s Trib reports that, as the headline says, “Libya aims to quell battle between militias.” It seems that, the wake of the revolution so ardently cheered and helped along by both Bush/Obama administration and its underlings in NATO, militias from neighboring towns in Libya are blasting away at each other with heavy artillery. Perhaps the Libyans can luck out, like the Egyptians, and have the military seize control and restore order before the place degenerates into all out civil war.


Neither Libya nor Egypt is ready for what we call “democracy” in this country. To go a step further, despite what the starry-eyed on both the right and the left in the West would have you believe, most of the world isn’t ready for self-rule. (Given the latest evidence, one wonders if we in the United States are up to the tasks that go with such an experiment, but I digress.) To pretend otherwise is not noble; it is dangerous.