“There’s no way he will be able to withstand the moral force of their arguments and their outrage.”
Istanbul, April 2 – Sustained demonstrations against the president of the Republic of Turkey have given optimistic proponents of liberal systems cause to believe the dictator might fall, as they fail to consider, as they have countless times before, that this is the Middle East, where despots crush popular, liberty-pursuing movements with Stalinesque ruthlessness.
Large protests broke out the week before last after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ordered the arrest of his most prominent political rival, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu. Hopeful observers of regional affairs have seized on the popular reaction as the beginning of the end of Erdoğan’s eleven-year rule, despite ample evidence from nearly every other country to the east, south, and west over the last fifteen years that such popular movements inevitably meet an end under the merciless fist of a tyrant.
“This is so exciting,” gushed New York Times columnist Nick Kristoff. “It’s so refreshing to see the people stand up to a dictator in such numbers. There’s no way he will be able to withstand the moral force of their arguments and their outrage. Erdoğan is done.”
“Just look at the spirit of the protesters,” added his colleague Thomas Friedman. “History will long remember this moment, when the higher values of democracy and accountability finally began to overcome the darkness of of an autocratic regime. The dustbin of history awaits the Turkish authoritarian.”
Kirstoff, Friedman, and their acolytes made similar pronouncements amid the Arab Spring of the early Obama years, when regime after regime faced popular outrage that ended up toppling important Middle East rulers, and, with few exceptions, the aftermath of those revolutions lives on in the form of new or reborn dictatorships just as oppressive, intolerant, and violent as anything that came before, if in fact the revolutions succeeded at all.
In Iran, successive waves of popular unrest have failed to dislodge the mullahs from power. The same holds true in the Palestinian territories. A short-lived “democratic” regime in Egypt displaced longtime strongman Hosni Mubarak, only to fall to a military coup whose leadership still controls the country. Libya has fallen into chaos. Syria continues to suffer from a civil war that did eventually bring down President Bashar Assad, but now consumes the fractured country in sectarian violence. Yemen still faces a multi-sided civil war and one the world’s most pressing humanitarian crises.
The optimistic pundits have also, in keeping with the established pattern, drawn parallels between the hoped-for deposing of a dictator and their hoped-for end of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s political career, in which he has not, reportedly, jailed his political rivals.
Please support our work through Patreon.
Buy In The Biblical Sense: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B92QYWSL
Fabulous Facebook Comments!
Glorious Google+ Comments!
Wordpress Comments