Another Revolution Betrayed
Walter Laqueur | May 16, 2011
It is Difficult to predict revolutions. George Rude, the leading left-wing historian of the French Revolution once wrote that an intelligent observer of the French scene, native or foreign, would hardly have predicted in 1787 the coming of the revolution despite a variety of straws in the wind. There was probably no closer student of France at the time than Arthur Young, the leading British expert on agriculture, who visited France three times for extended periods on the eve of the revolution. While he saw a number of things that were wrong with the country, he certainly did not realize that a great revolution was coming.
Not as unusual as one might think. In Russia, there was no more ardent a protagonist of the revolution than Vladimir Ilich Lenin, who had devoted his whole life to the cause. And yet Lenin, in a lecture in Bern in January 1917, was quite pessimistic about the prospects of the masses rising up, telling his audience that the great event might not even happen in his lifetime. But it did happen just one month later. And by the end of the year, his party, the Bolsheviks, had taken power.
Mere HER i The National Interest. Det ligger en kopi i et forum på The People’s Daily her.
Opdatering – endnu en artikel om revolutioner:
Arabs and the long revolution
A talk by Brian Whitaker at the Centre for Applied Human Rights, University of York, 18 May 2011
The Popular Uprising that began in Tunisia last December came as a surprise in one sense, but in another sense it was no surprise at all. Rather like an earthquake, we could be pretty sure it was going to happen, though nobody could say exactly when.
It was obvious, or ought to have been, that at some point something would have to give – and the same can be said of all the Arab countries. If the regimes don’t transform themselves radically over the next few years, eventually they are going to fall.
Mere HER i Al Bab.
Opdatering: Den 95-årige Bernard Lewis har lige udgivet endnu en bog, skriver Enhanced Online News:
Opdatering 25. juni 2011 – endnu en artikel om revoutioner:
Arab Youth Rising & Europe’s Entitlement Kids: Contrasting Portraits Of A Generation
The young people on the two shores of the Mediterranean each have demands, but the sense of possibility embodied in North African and Arab quest for freedom is utterly absent in European youth protests.
By Gerd Held – June 23rd, 2011
Amidst all the uncertainty surrounding the rebellions in North Africa and the Middle East, one thing is sure: these are uprisings of young people. A new, questioning generation is manifesting, breaking away from the narrow confines imposed by their families and religion. And despite the precariousness of their situation, they have succeeded in making themselves heard.
When the late American political scientist Samuel Huntington spoke of an Islamic youth boom, he was assuming that the huge numbers of young people in the Arabic nations would necessarily turn towards fundamentalism. The assumption wasn’t at all far-fetched: cases abound of restless youth seeking answers in totalitarianism.
Mere HER i Worldcrunch.
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