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Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Unrest in the Arab World

The Arab world has been set alight by long suffering people held captive in dictator regimes by the ‘peaceful protest’ writings of the elderly American layman, Gene Sharp. Following, in effect, the teaching of Mahatma Ghandi, whose leadership ejected the British from India by peaceful protest following World War II, his suggestions have struck a chord of possible action, which has been spectacularly successful in Tunisia, then Egypt, and have now caused turmoil in Libya.

Unfortunately, it can be that courageous and successful protest movements eventually fall victim to the need for a constructive answer to the question of ‘what now’. No-one wants to see a rerun of the French Revolution or anything like it. The American revolution, with far different motivation (the British parliament was the villain, more than the Monarchy), was able to learn lessons from the French experience, in forming a republic, but still struggled to find a satisfactory answer to the same inescapable question. Unlike France they had the separate state legislatures to unite in a federal system, from which we subsequently, and substantially, derived our own federal system.

What about Egypt? They need an answer in the form of a new constitution and government suited to their country’s need. What sort of democracy will result?
Would American or Australian democracy be good enough as a model? Hardly! Who would want to see the confusion and ineffectual conflict of Western democracies resulting in Egypt or any other of the disturbed Arab states? They need better. The world too, has a stake in their success in devising governments OF the people. FOR the people and BY the people!

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