re: #26 Obdicut

It’s a rinse and repeat for other Arab Spring uprisings across North Africa and into the Middle East. You have a wide range of groups opposed to the then-existing autocrats, dictators, and despots, from truly liberal and western leaning to the religious and Islamist. With Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood won the advantage at the moment, and are pushing ahead with an agenda that threatens to reduce civil liberties from what many hoped for there (including religious freedoms and womens’ rights). In Libya, we’re seeing tribal groups/militias continuing to hold sway in the absence of a strong central government and those militias are more than willing to use force to get their way.

And in many of these countries, it wasn’t about freedom; it was about freedom to eliminate that existing despot and the freedom to impose their own vision for their country’s future to the exclusion of other views.

It’s why some people think that there was something to be gained from maintaining the status quo (allowing autocrats/despots/dictators to retain their power) because it tamped down the potential for chaos and disorder. But the region will get through this too. The region hasn’t known a period where there wasn’t chaos or disorder or conflict or violence.