Today's Thought: Sic Semper Tyrannis

[Emperor_Norton_II]

Once again, the Imperial Court has come up with something they wished for me to spread throughout the land. Today's thought comes to us from the Minister of Canadian Relations:

Every now and then you run into a refutation of the concept of "no news is good news." There's this tendency to look at the news and see - or even intend to see - only the bad in life. Stories about celebrities getting arrested, or the death of yet more American soldiers in Iraq, or whatever the latest FUD about technology being an evil force which must be stopped - they're all so much more comforting and easier to see, apparently. There's something to be said for reinforcing the comfortable, debate-free idea that Everything Sucks.

However, it's not quite that simple if you bother to look at things, and this weekend has done a good job of showing this.

Over the past few days, we've seen a lot of good - or at least entertaining - events in the world. In no particular order, we've seen stirrings of an Indo-Pakistani ceasefire in the Kashmir region, New Zealand's prime minister inadvertently highlighting the overzealous idiocy of Australian airport security, Richard Perle got maneuvered into admitting the illegality of the Third Gulf War(1), and Ariel Sharon seems to be making at least vague noises of concessions in Israel, though he's showing no sign of dropping the wall ridiculousness.

Those are all mainly tangent to this discussion, however; evidence that over the past couple of days good and wonderful things have indeed happened, regardless of the negativity of peoples' worldview these days. But I'm not here to simply spread a variety of random, somewhat aimless good news, and I'm certainly not here to fan the flames of cynicism and despair.

I'm here today to talk of revolutions.

Chances are most of us have been following the events in the nation of Georgia for the past several days. As far as countries go, Georgia's a pretty fascinating look at part of the aftermath of the Soviet Union. Stuck in an almost intrinsically unstable part of the planet (for example, it has the good fortune to border on Chechnya), Georgia has been ruled with a short break since 1972 by Eduard Shevardnadze, who has had a long and very distinguished political career, not only with Georgia but with the Soviet Union from which it emerged. Under his leadership, Georgia managed to cope with the chaos of the post-Soviet collapse remarkably well, establishing at least a vaguely functioning democracy, handling internal strife as best as it could, and experiencing the birth of a politically active general public. Things seemed to be going well.

The problem was, Shevardnadze seemed to want a bit more security than a democracy would allow him. Since the mid to late nineties, rumblings about increasing levels of corruption in his government began to make themselves heard, cumulating in the November 2 electoral farce which almost all sides agree was rigged. Nonetheless, Shevardnadze cheerfully proclaimed his victory, despite the howls of outrage from the opposition, general public, and electoral monitors. However, this time he seems to have underestimated the population.

After several weeks of protests building up from the November 2 election, demanding a revote, the opposition led a revolution, storming the Parliament building, sending Sheverdnadze into flight, and finally forcing his resignation as president sometime Sunday local time. Pressure from Russia, who sent their foreign minister to convince Sheverdnadze to back down, and the army, which chose to blithely ignore the president's declaration of martial law, both helped, but the actions of the public were of course what set this off. For the moment, opposition leader Mikhail Saakashvili seems to be the next president in line, speaking glowingly of the "velvet revolution" and the birth of a new Georgian state, with elections to come sometime in early January 2004.

So what do we have significant about this? Well, there's obviously a number of things, running from the bare fact of the revolution to implications for the region, NATO, and Russian relations, but I'm strapped for time here, so I'll mention the two main things that jumped to mind for me.

First is the fact that this was, for all practical purposes, a completely bloodless revolution. Not one shot was fired beyond celebratory fireworks; the worst of the injuries and damage were a couple of bloodied noses and uprooted trees. Saakashvili is currently trying to convince people to maintain order before things spiral out of control, and the general attitude seems to be of mixed relief and celebration.

In addition to that, we have the simpler fact that this seems to have been another dramatically successful revolution, shades of the fall of Milosevic a few years ago. Both were non-violent movements, led by popular, pro-democratic firebrands - and they only happened within a couple of years of each other. In other words, two of the more firmly planted regimes of the age got ingonimously hurled out of power in exchange for a more reformist, populist regime - without a shot fired - within three years of each other.

And you're trying to tell me that a mobilized, motivated population can't effect political change, even against a firmly entrenched regime?

Much of what we hear of in the news these days is simply bad news. Disasters, repression, or whatever else are the order of any given day, which has been contributing towards an air of mingled anger, cynicism and despair that you can see in the news, in political discourse, and in many major blogs out there, to say nothing of the major political forums. People have decided to project their own apathy or fear onto the people as a whole, and it's created an air of "why bother? There's no way we can affect change" that's become the dominant political mindset in North America.

The reason I am discussing the events in Georgia right now is because they exist - and they don't exist alone - as a blatant counterexample to this defeatist mindset. Although there is a sizeable activist mindset on this side of the Atlantic, it's more than a little self-limiting, taking the wrong attitudes and the wrong actions to undermine its own causes (yes, I plan on discussing this at length in a future post). The capacity exists, when people get together and decide that Something Must Be Done, to do amazing things. I'm certainly not advocating revolution against the state in the American system - at this point, anyway - but I am pointing out that a lack of apathy can be one of the greatest weapons against injustice. Whether it's something so simple as reforming municipal bylaws, or something as tremendous as bringing down the powerful and corrupt, there is a method and solution out there, waiting to be grasped.

No foe is implacable.

(1) - Yes, the third. The first Gulf War was the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, which was referred to as the Persian Gulf War until the outbreak of Desert Storm. "Our" Gulf War was in fact the second, which makes the current farce the third.

[TankLV]

1. Don't forget to mention the "velvet revolution" in the Philippines.

Millions literally stood down the entire armed forces of the country without ANY arms and no casualties.

I believe that was the first.

And the Marcos' were as corrupt as you could get.

[Emperor_Norton_II]

2. quick kick

Ego demands that I recieve a fair hearing!