I didn’t want to write this post until the Middle East had settled down, but I can’t wait forever.

In Libya, people are shot at funerals. I can’t imagine that, but I can’t imagine a lot of things: grenades in the street, calls to prayer, the internet switched off. Somehow, in the last few weeks, the Middle East has found its voice. It’s the roar of self immolation. Wikipedia says 10,000 are injured, from Iran to the Western Sahara, but the exact number will never be known.

I think in metaphors.

Colonel Gaddafi is going down swinging. He’s a sick man on a death bed throne, snorting crushed bones and burnt bridges.  He’s coughing up graves. The Italians think it’s a thousand dead, but who knows? This isn’t Egypt. This might be old Africa, some contagion flown in on the backs of mercenaries, or the soldiers from Chad. It’s a pest, a hungry tick, this terrible violence for fuck-knows-what.

Maybe that’s a little strong. An African contagion – really? It all sounds a little racist. But, come on, wouldn’t it make a kind of sense? Here we are, rich folk in another world, steeped in the tremendous wealth of Enlightenment politics, zipping through election after election. And the system works. We’ve got justice, democracy, a sensible police force kept in check by people who know their rights (implied or otherwise).

While elsewhere, in the land of a million little mud huts, bullets punctuate the desert heat. Rule of law plays second fiddle to rule by law, and the consequences are obvious. Big men take the throne and hold on for decades. Billions of dollars are siphoned from local economies, sent to Paris, Madrid, or some terrible little boutique in New York called Irony. The big men send their children to Oxford, where they are carefully schooled in the art of double-think.

So when some peasant in Bahrain gets his teeth kicked in for the last time, grabs a sickle and vows to take the king down a notch, don’t we have the right to be nervous? That’s certainly the impression I’ve gotten. CNN interviewed the head of the Egyptian opposition, and every second question was about their treaty with Israel. Would it remain? Where did the army stand on this? Wasn’t the Muslim Brotherhood on the streets as well, chanting and slavering over a hot IED?

He said the Muslim Brotherhood had been trying for 80 years to take Egypt, and that wasn’t about to change. That’s a good answer, but it didn’t stop CNN asking the same thing again and again. We have a Pavlovian response to angry Muslims on the march.

We fear.

When I asked a history student what he thought of it all, he was worried about terrorists coming to power. It seems they can’t handle democracy like we can; if they had a voice, they’d only call us to prayer. Maybe the big men had really done everyone a favour, draped in their self appointed war medals. They kept a lid on their people, even if (tut) the methods grated our liberal sensibilities.

 

Counter Terrorists Win

 

James Howard Kunstler, peaknik prophet, examplifies this fear…

For a month, Egypt has been a magic mirror for America to behold its own wonderfulness, like a diorama of “Freedom and Democracy” out of a Kentucky creationist museum. In this, our hour of national narcissism, we imagine a replay of Bunker Hill, Valley Forge, and Yorktown – with a falafel on top…

Why shouldn’t it be another Bunker Hill? Isn’t the whole world headed to democracy? Barack Obama, presumably a big fan of freedom and all that, supported the brutal Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak – right up until the writing was literally on the walls of Cairo. It’s a strange, bipolar attitude to the basic idea of democracy.

Perhaps the Ancient Greek theory of the Kyklos was right. According to this, society naturally rotates through a series of political systems. The Kyklos revolves (via revolution – a related term) from democracy to aristocracy, then to monarchy, and finally back to democracy. It whirs on, kicking up bloody sparks, for eternity.

There’s a lot of interesting things going on here – questions about linear versus circular conceptions of time – that I won’t go into at the moment.

Rather, I want people to make a decision. If you believe democracy is the final word in history, the long, sweet ellipsis at the end of the world, then you cannot be afraid of the Middle East. People everywhere are basically people. They want somewhere to sleep and someone to sleep with. If they have kids, they want them to be happy. If they have parents, they want them to be proud. They’ll make the right decisions.

If, on the other hand, you believe in the Kyklos, you can have a more cynical response to the Middle East. You believe democracy is neither always benevolent nor endlessly permanent. These are countries stitched together by Europeans from the other side of the world,  with religious and political violence tearing at their seams. Simply, things are complicated. What you cannot do is contain this cynicism. Wherever you live, no matter how peaceful, the Kyklos rumbles on. Revolution is always coming – even here, even now.

What nobody can do is have it both ways. We cannot simply proclaim democracy, although the single greatest form of government ever conceived, should never be extended to the unwashed foreign masses. This is double-think, lazy-think, no-think. Or are we really too afraid? Do we really need these tinpot dictators, armed to the ivory teeth, beating the chaos back? Then we should own up: democracy is a failure. We should stop congratulating ourselves, and get down to the dirty business of realpolitik.