Monday, February 21, 2011

Crane Brinton tells us that dictators are human: they cite “plots,” “conspiracies” and “unprincipled schemers” to excuse their tyranny. So it is that Louis XVI blamed the devious Duc D’Orleans for the Bastille’s fall; George III railed against an obstinate “clique” of deluded tavern keepers; and Nicholas II attributed his forced retirement to unscrupulous freemasons. Yet, while we moderns chuckle at these foolish explanations, they remain attractive among those who viewed recent events in Cairo with suspicion.

In truth, not much has changed since the cart carrying “Citizen Capet” rolled toward the guillotine – except for our language. Now, instead of blaming devious dukes, deluded tavern keepers and crafty (so to speak) freemasons, we have a new trinity of conspirators: WikiLeaks, “social media” and Al-Jazeera. They are the new “outside agitators,” the “unwanted foreign elements” in our happy, happy midst.

So it is that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the WikiLeaks revelations an attack on U.S. foreign policy interests, Egypt Today suggested banning Facebook, and General Omar Suleiman blamed “unfriendly TV stations” for “inciting youth against us.”

It might be useful to reflect on our complicity in repeating such statements. American network anchors seem unaware that words betray emotions – and political preferences. Hence, while State Department and White House officials “strategize,” the Muslim Brotherhood “plots,” while CBS and CNN “report,” Al-Jazeera “blares” – while Mubarak and Co. went about the business of “managing Egypt’s challenges” and Google, Facebook and Twitter “found ways to exploit” Egypt’s “reservoir of popular discontent.”

Some pointed out that while social media and Al-Jazeera did not cause the recent unrest, it was hard to imagine what had happened without them. That was true, but also trivial. Think of it: Without that Guttenberg press, there’d have been no Thomas Paine.

This is not to say that WikiLeaks, social media and Al-Jazeera were not important. They were. They may even be revolutions in themselves: WikiLeaks provides a more accessible means of publishing secrets, social media a faster way of accelerating protest and Al-Jazeera a new way of viewing it – allowing, as television does, a camera to tell the story. Then too, the “cyberactivists” in Egypt mastered, as Maryam Ishani wrote, “new-media tools to report events, alert participants about security situations, and provide legal assistance to those rounded up by state security forces.” This was an important observation, if confirmation that today’s media are the equivalent of America’s “committees of correspondence,” France’s “committees of public safety,” and Russia’s “peasants and workers soviets.”

Thankfully, the chatter about how Egypt’s revolution would not have been possible without new media has been dampened by those who know best. “Tunisians took to the streets due to decades of frustration, not in reaction to a WikiLeaks cable, a denial-of-service attack, or a Facebook update,” Ethan Zuckerman wrote in Foreign Policy. “This is not a Facebook revolution, and not an Internet revolution,” one Egyptian protester insisted. “This is not about the Internet, this is about the needs and demands of the Egyptian people.”

This seems more than just an opinion: “Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen have a combined total of 14,642 Twitter users,” one political blogger noted. So why all the fuss? “The Western media’s focus on so-called Twitter Revolutions,” he goes on to observe, “may tell less” about revolutions “and more about the preoccupations of the American journalists who cover them.”

These views simply (though not merely) confirm what historians and political observers have long known: that while our means of communicating has certainly been transformed, what’s being communicated has not. The causes that sent people into the streets of Boston, Paris and Petrograd in 1776, 1789 and 1917 are the same as those that sent them into the streets of Cairo in 2011: a greedy king, a squalid court, a botched government – a ruthless regime.

Fifteen years before the Bastille was stormed, France’s future was foretold by a lonely figure on a Paris stage: “Because you are a great lord, you think you are a great genius,” Beaumarchais has Figaro say; “[N]obility, fortune, rank, appointments, all this makes a man so proud! But what have you done to deserve so many good things? You took the trouble to get born.” Perhaps Louis XVI should have closed the theaters. The fires of all revolutions, including the one in Cairo, are not kindled by pamphlets, broadsides, or even internet sites but, to quote James Billington, are set alight by “ideas in the minds of men.”

Mark Perry is a military and foreign policy analyst. His most recent book is “Talking To Terrorists.” This commentary first appeared at bitterlemons-international.org, an online newsletter.