Saturday 12 February 2011

Egyptian democracy

It's fast becoming a cliché to compare the events in Egypt to the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. The comparisons are there to be made, though. It has definitely been a people's revolution. I've been fascinated and heartened by the way the people steadfastly refused to leave the streets, facing down the authorities. As so often happens in a police state, the police were used as the thugs doing the government's dirty work while the professionals of the armed services stood back and refused to take sides.

Now, the appalling little dictator is gone, as usual leaving the West looking like the bad guy for having propped up his regime for all those years. Let's hope that the people of Egypt get what they want and what they deserve, the kind of freedoms the rest of us tend to take for granted, the kind our own governments don't always support.

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