Magazine February 21, 2011, Issue

Arab Agony

By David Pryce-Jones

About David Pryce-Jones

February 3, 2011 4:00 AM

(Corentin Fohlen/Sipa/Newscom)

What the Egyptian unrest says about, and portends for, the region

Upheaval is shaking the Arab world. Countries there are alike in being under one-man rule, and this authoritarianism is being tested to destruction. The outcome might be political reform and peace, but it could as well be another round of tyranny and war.

The current demonstrations are under one-man rule what a vote of no confidence is in a parliamentary democracy. The people confront their rulers with a choice: either to flee the country in ignominy, or to resist, call out the security forces and the army, and if need arises, order them to regain control by opening fire on the …

In This Issue

Articles

Politics & Policy

Arab Agony

By David Pryce-Jones

Upheaval is shaking the Arab world. Countries there are alike in being under one-man rule, and this authoritarianism is being tested to destruction. The outcome might be political reform and ...

Politics & Policy

The Fear of Worse

By Anthony Daniels

One of the problems with history is that it is lived forwards but written backwards. Those who are called upon to make it do not have the advantage of knowing ...

Politics & Policy

Palin vs. Romney

By Ramesh Ponnuru

Two potential candidates for the Republican presidential nomination have been described as “frontrunners”: former governors Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin. According to pollster Scott Rasmussen, they’re the candidates with the ...

Politics & Policy

Lost in Space

By Rand Simberg

Almost half a century after the first man went into orbit, and at a time when the federal government is so deeply in debt that no expenditure can be allowed ...

Politics & Policy

Nullification Temptation

By Allen C. Guelzo

The House may have passed a bill that would repeal Obamacare, but a Democratic majority in the Senate and a Democratic president who has hung his legacy on the survival ...

Features

Politics & Policy

The Education Ex-Governor

By John J. Miller

Last spring, it looked like the Oklahoma state legislature was going to reject a school-choice bill to provide vouchers for learning-disabled students. Earl Sears, a Republican, announced his opposition on ...

Politics & Policy

The Sense of the Senate

By William Voegeli

One thing leads to another. Complain bitterly that the Senate filibuster undermines democracy and you wind up concluding that the Senate’s existence is undemocratic. In 2009 the Washington Post’s Ezra ...

Politics & Policy

Pigford’s Harvest

By Daniel Foster

One unhappy night in 1992, 40-year-old Timothy Pigford, a fourth-generation black farmer having a terrible time of it trying to grow soybeans in North Carolina, sat in the living room ...

Politics & Policy

A Lion in High Summer

By Jay Nordlinger

Editor’s Note: This piece originally appeared in the February 21, 2011, issue of National Review. We are making it available to mark the retirement of Thomas Sowell from writing a ...

Books, Arts & Manners

Politics & Policy

The Gilded Guild

By Robert VerBruggen

Walter Olson is one of the nation’s leading critics of the litigation explosion. Through his blog, Overlawyered, as well as his books and his work as a think-tank fellow, he ...

Politics & Policy

Australian Model

By NR Staff

Think of him as the Tea Partier from Down Under. John Howard, the second-longest-serving prime minister in Australian history and leader of the Liberal (in American terms, read Conservative) party ...

Politics & Policy

A Kind Word for the Man

By John Wilson

Authority is a curiously neglected subject. Round up a gaggle of grad students, and they can discourse about power and hegemony into the wee hours. And as you are nodding ...

Politics & Policy

The Old Is New Again

By Sarah Ruden

The Golden Ass of Apuleius, which I am in the process of translating, is like a telescope. Through this work of the mid-second century a.d., you can see a whole ...

Politics & Policy

Film: The Great Quest

By Ross Douthat

Imagine, for a moment, that when Steve McQueen rode his motorcycle up barbed wire in The Great Escape, it was the first time that American movie audiences had been exposed ...

Morpheme Addiction

By John Derbyshire

Until very recently the only thing I knew how to say in Turkish was the proverb Nerede çokluk, orada bokluk, which means (I shall bowdlerize slightly) “Where there are people, ...

Sections

Politics & Policy

Letters

By NR Staff

Marital Goods Jason Lee Steorts misses the boat when he argues that monogamous same-sex unions and heterosexual infertile unions possess the same kind of value, and that therefore we should have ...

Politics & Policy

The Week

By NR Staff

‐ It looks like Egypt has discovered term limits. ‐ The House vote to repeal Obamacare is being treated by the media as a political stunt, since the bill is unlikely ...

Tweets from @youthcaptain

By Rob Long

Tweets from @youthcaptain, the next leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea: Was supposed to have some Dad-and-me time today. He’s “too busy” watching stuff in Egypt and Jordan etc. ...

Politics & Policy

Poetry

By Daniel Mark Epstein

OMEGA All day long my watch has been stopping On me, every few hours, a good Omega Automatic chronometer, certified, Gold face and bezel, circa 1970, Self-winding. My father left it to me When he died, ...

Athwart

Exit, Stage Left

By James Lileks

The chairman of the NEA recently said we might have too much theater in this country. Rocco Landesman was quoted by the New York Times thus: “You can either increase ...

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