I was watching the Oscar-drenched movie Gandhi a few weeks ago. It was a nice refresher on civil disobedience and oppressed societies. But there are two concepts that jumped out at me. First, the Indian people tried peaceful protests. They gathered together in defiance of the British Indian Army, and the Brits killed them. And they arrested Gandhi. He stopped eating, the people all got upset, and the Brits let him go. Then, Gandhi had a great idea: shut down the colony by having an impromptu day of prayer. When people stopped working, the British Empire lost lots and lots of money. These types of protests, as Martin Luther King, Jr. found out, are the only ones that work. When civil-rights leaders held a march, the Alabama police beat them up, set attack dogs on them, and sprayed them with hoses. Awful, but who really cared? Not enough people until the Black community started boycotting buses and other businesses, and the oppressors lost money.
Now look at the Middle East and the Arab protests. The protests worked in Tunisia, and in Egypt. Huge groundswells of fury. In Tunisia the aristocrats didn't have the military might or blood-thirst to start killing the people. In Egypt Mubark had the military, but apparently the uproar--and perhaps his nationalism and conscience--was too much. Of course, though Mubark skipped out with more than $70 billion of mostly American free money, his legacy is still in power and we will see if the people have actually gained a foothold.
Other countries with peaceful protests will not fare as well, as we are seeing in Bahrain, and Libya. Bahrain and Libya are prime examples of relict colonial holdings of Western Europe, and the wealth and power of the ruling elite have not come from the toiling of the populace as it did in India. This wealth just appeared. In the case of Bahrain, wealth grew because of the US military and the fact that they are close to the Straits of Hormuz, that 29-mile-wide stretch of the Persian Gulf through which 29% of the world's oil passes. The Bahrain monarchy are not tied to the people, and this supposed division between Shia and Sunni is not nearly as important as the fact that the US has given and sold them more attack helicopters than you can shake a protest sign at. Did our Pentagon think that they were going to use all those arms against a common enemy, or their own people?
In the case of Libya, Colonel Gadaffi became a ruthless dictator by selling billions of dollars of oil to Europe, buying US weapons, and oppressing his people, much like the Italians did before him. It is estimated that the terrible, awful, blood-thirsty, terrorist--but we don't really care because you've got oil leader is worth more than $100 billion.
In both of these cases, the entire country could march, and they will most likely die. They could walk off their jobs, and it would hardly affect these despots. What the people do doesn't support their leader's wealth. These uprisings do, however, hurt the US and Western Europe because of the increased price of oil. The only problem is that we need that oil to survive, and will therefore side with the terrorist despots.
This is a similar problem for the state employees in Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana. If you walk off the job, the kids will suffer, society will suffer, and our country's future will suffer. Will the economy? Will the GOP? Perhaps, but they might also replace you with corporate for-profit education and you can join the hordes of corporate whores. The next election might well change things, but when billionaires can throw money at a democracy willy-nilly, democracy loses.
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