Another Thug Ruler Bites the Dust

Now that Muammar Gaddafi is gone, it’s time to start conjecturing about who the new thug ruler in that country will be.  If history teaches us anything, it’s that the masses will continue to live in misery.  Think Napoleon … Lenin … Mao … Castro … Ho Chi Minh … the Iranian mullahs and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad … and, more recently, what has essentially turned out to be a military coup in Egypt. 

Having observed so many of these so-called people’s revolutions during my lifetime, I am reminded of the words of Benjamin the donkey in George Orwell’s classic Animal Farm:  “Windmill or no windmill … life would go on as it had always gone on — that is, badly.”  Sadly, the masses are always repressed into pretty much the same way of life they had before “freedom” revolutions took place in their countries. 

After 6,000 years of recorded history, the hands of power continue to change, yet the plight of the uninformed, naive masses stays pretty much the same.  What usually happens in a successful revolution is that a new power class emerges.  The doors of elitism swing open and a small number of thugs rush in to take their places inside, as Alvin Toffler describes in The Third Wave:

Time and again during the past three hundred years, in one country after another, rebels and reformers have attempted to storm the walls of power, to build a new society based on social justice and political equality.  Temporarily, such movements have seized the emotions of millions with promises of freedom.  Revolutionists have even managed, now and then, to topple a regime.  Yet each time the ultimate outcome was the same.  Each time the rebels recreated, under their own flag, a similar structure of sub-elites, elites, and super‑elites.

Next in line (?):  Bashar al-Assad and Syria.  The American battle-cry is that all people want freedom, but do they really?  Remember, Osama bin Laden said that in the Muslim world, there are many things that are more important than freedom.  That’s a painful thought when you consider how many American lives have been sacrificed in the Middle East. 

Perhaps America needs to call time out and listen more closely to what Ron Paul has been trying to explain to us over the past three decades.  As the United States persistently tries to force democracy on uncivilized people on the other side of the globe, it moves just as persistently in the opposite direction at home. 

It sure would be refreshing if we concentrated on solving our own problems and left it up to other countries to solve theirs.