The End of Dictators

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One after another they are falling as the tide of non-violent revolution sweeps the Middle East and drowns the racist myth that Arabs don’t want freedom and democracy.  But so far it has been relatively easy as the low-hanging fruit of corruption has been picked off. The tough slog is now on.

First in Libya, where the Qaddafi clan, surrounded by the dictator’s North Korean and East German trained cadre of female bodyguards, and supported by their African mercenary shock troops, seem prepared to hold on until the last bullet. They will be swept aside soon, but not after a lot of bloodshed and the Qaddafis will probably die before being able to retire in exile on the billions they have stashed in offshore accounts.  

Algeria appears poised to be next in line, but the military thugs who run that dictatorship, after years spent eliminating the Islamists, have had considerable practice at suppressing dissent and they too will make a painful exit.

The toughest nut probably with be the Assads (the lions) of Syria. They are a minority clan with a ubiquitous secret police apparatus who have demonstrated their ruthlessness against the Muslim Brotherhood and the Sunni majority by killing thousands in leveling the city of Hama. Governing by what is known as the Hama rules, the accidental heir to the dynastic dictatorship, a London-trained ophthalmologist Bashar al Assad, looks like a mild-mannered technocrat but he will kill as many as it takes to keep the hordes at bay.  

The two exceptions to the new rule are the Iranian and Chinese regimes. They will hang on longer in part because they were challenged prematurely. The Chinese Politburo learned from Tiananmen and have bribed the younger generation with material opportunity and distracted them with nationalistic pride, but beneath the surface dissent festers.  The theocratic thugs, who have captured the Iranian revolution, have also tried to nip history in the bud by brutally striking back against the Green counter-revolution but their days are numbered too.

What I take comfort in is that the alienated and irrelevant left can’t blame it on the CIA who totally missed the boat and are on the sidelines while history is being made. And on the right the bankruptcy of our neo-liberal free market ideology could not be more apparent as the revolutionaries fighting for freedom today are overturning the crony capitalist oligarchies that America has not only supported, but has become.

What is hopeful however, is what is happening in Wisconsin.  A revolution is beginning to take place in America against the corporate plutocracy and their theocratic and free-market fundamentalist lackeys in Congress.  America citizens are taking to the streets in Madison against the Koch brothers funded fraud mounted by the Republican right who are on a totalitarian bent to create a one-party corporate serfdom of uneducated debt slaves. 

But it looks like the passive consumers who lost their jobs to outsourcing and can no longer go to the malls, are becoming active citizens fighting back against the establishment the ruined the economy, then fleeced them to reward themselves. Adding insult to injury, the Kochs political front men are now forcing them to give up their pensions and healthcare in the name of reducing the deficit created by tax breaks for the rich.  While the rest of America, except Wall Street, is being asked to tighten its belt, will more and more citizens step up and refuse to take it any more? I think they will and it looks like it is beginning to happen.