Popular uprisings are like the forces of nature

Popular uprisings are like the forces of nature – you can’t stop them

Yahya R. Haidar
Scoop

The little-predicted revolutions in Arab countries which shook the political world to its core have coincided with natural disasters that took their toll on the physical world with equal strength. But, there is an unlikely common denominator between the geographies where the two separate events occurred. The latest UN report on International Corruption ranked at one end of the equilibrium the countries of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen as being the most corrupt, while at the other end New Zealand and Japan where considered to have the cleanest record of national corruption; yet, the two extremely opposed governments were not immune to the unforeseen large-scale challenges that hit them. If natural disasters are difficult to pin down regardless of sophisticated scientific reasoning, the masses are proven to be a force equally unpredictable despite the millions of pages compiled by political think-tanks and strategy experts.

No doubt, the earthquakes and tsunamis that hit Japan are natural occurrences that defied the collective human ability to predict and to respond; but by the same token, there is nothing more natural than the revolutions spanning through the Arab world, which happened despite the hegemonic and almost supernatural climate of fear imposed by Arab dictators on their people with the aid of their western backers. These revolutions have been natural at all levels; in their lack of any form of ideological affiliation, and more importantly their emphasis on the principle of all human rights – the right to be genuinely free.

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