Any day these last few weeks you could turn on the television and hear some media pundit promoting the idea of an Arab Spring. Arabs in their hundreds of thousands supposedly were going into some central public place to free themselves from tyranny. Democracy at last! Elections! Freedom! The media pundits compared what was happening to the storming of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is all too possible to see now that the Arab Spring is a Eurocentric fantasy resting on the inability to grasp how other societies actually operate.
Moammar Qaddafi and Bashar Assad are making sure to smash up their own cities, killing at random by way of exercising power. It is the same in Yemen and Bahrain, and might well replicate elsewhere, for instance Jordan and Algeria. The Iranian regime shoots and executes its people on a horrifying scale, and sees fit to support Assad’s repression in Syria while condemning the repression in Bahrain. Such cruelty and hypocrisy may look like evidence of bad character, but more to the point derive from the fact that the Arab and Muslim order does not have, and never has had, any agreed means of handing power over peacefully. Those in power or who want it have to be ready to resort to violence. At this moment rival forces — Islamists, secular Westernised folk, the military — are frustrated because absolute power so far has escaped their grasp, and now they have the chance to grab hold of it. Ersatz nations are dissolving as their constituent sects and tribes jostle with each other for supremacy.
What is passed off as a Spring, in other words, is really a repeat of the brutality that is the age-old instrument of everyone who has ever sought power in the Arab and Muslim order. The process is self-perpetuating, as vital as it is lethal. The would-be power-holder has only his family, tribe or sect to rely on, and he has to be rid of everyone in his way, exactly as Qaddafi and Assad and the rest of them are doing. So the former Tunisian and Egyptian ministers are already in prison. So the Egyptian security forces are already arresting dissidents and beating them to death in prison. As the French proverb puts it, the more things change the more they stay the same.
Finally a train of thought for the pundits and politicians: What induces the likes of Barack Obama and Tony Blair to keep on trying to breathe life into the defunct peace process? It defies history, custom and political reality to believe that a Palestinian state will abolish violence in the Middle East. In Gaza and the West Bank they too have only set up tribal or sectarian tyranny. Meanwhile Israeli Arabs are going about their business peacefully instead of holding mass demonstrations in some central public place. They’re the only Arabs living in a real democracy and maybe that enables them to recognize a phony Spring when they see it.