Doha Debate: Fall of Dictators Doesn't Equate to Fall of Dactatorships
Submitted by fyl on Fri, 2011/03/25 - 06:22.
A video titled Doha Debates: This House Believes that Arab Revolutions Will Just Produce Different Dictators is a debate that discusses what the fall of a dictatorship may or may not mean. While its focus is what is happening in the Arab world, the thing which makes this discussion unique has little to do with which nations are involved and all to do with timing.
First, the honesty of one of the panelists impressed me when he pointed out that "political analysts have been very good at predicting the past". He goes on to talk about how communications—the Internet and satellite TV being the two prime examples—are the big change. He describes it as how a government has lost the monopoly on control of information.
While this may seem obvious on the surface, this seems like more than a passing thought. Up until a generation ago, the lack of an educated population was a common way to control them. With increasing literacy, such as happened in Nicaragua since the revolution, government secrecy became more important as the best method of control. Today, the loss of control of communications by governments means that the the thoughts of the population in general gets heard both within the country and around the world.
Now, with new, independent information sources offering information to the general population, that population needs to realize that they may just ben hearing more rather than there being a significant change in what is happening. For example, if information about the Gulf of Tonkin incident had been available to everyone in virtual real time rather than many years later, would the Vietnam war have even happened?
If we go back to the comment about predicting the past, if today's communications methods had been in place in 1979, how would things have been different in post-revolutionary Nicaragua?
When the government in an tech "advanced" country
wished to bamboozle its citizens it has/does regardless of info and tech penetration. It merely controls the message and employs disinformation. Anyone found any WMDs in Iraq? Valery Pflame, her husband, faux interpretations of satellite imagery & "good" intel, dis-informantion, pitch the UN, trash can any voice off choir, ....The Holier than They approach enables some governments to hide in plain sight. Sophistication often moves forward on both sides of the message stream. But then, I agree with the importance of politico timing of events. When the dam is stressed for too long with a correlating inattention by the rulers...the passion river of time breaks down all in its path. The powder biscuits of all revolutions.
When dictatorships are necessary
There are some time periods when dictatorships are necessary: example Egypt between 50's and as late as 2000. After that era, the culture changed, well not necessarily changed after that time, but a change which was in the making for a long time (i call it the anti fundamentalism culture that started after Sadat assassination) . What we saw in Egypt is a direct consequence of what Mubarak was able to achieve in the country during his "rule". if this era of Mubarak "dictatorship " did not occur, we would have a totally different Egypt, one that would be much more fundamentalist and incapable of producing the type of Peaceful and Technology driven rebellion we saw.
in some sense, Mubarak dictatorship made this rebellion possible.
the other enabling factor is the level of and culture of education which is prevalent among the young in Egypt. Other factors include: cheap communication and wide availability of communication (internet and cell phones).
But that dictatorship's time was over, and now it is no longer necessary, it became obsolete, for a time anyways... until the next need arise, or is fabricated.
Just to follow
and agree with you. ironic that the dictator Mubarak encouraged education. I don't think they do much of that in Latin America.
Nice reasoning!
On the Colbert Report show last night talking about the escalating food prices as consequence of commodities speculators, they pointed out that people in the Arab world are taking to the streets protesting because of scalating food prices, among other points, thus resulting on the throwing out of Mubarak and others, to which Colbert said then that speculators should be commended from profiting on food trading instead of being maligned for their greed, because of the end results of their greed. Very funny.