A revolution from without

I was kind of a young guy, a boy really, in 1989, as we began to get news of the revolutions in the western part of our Warsaw-pact world, but I remember it well. My grandfather had an old radio, one of those huge things that needed its own piece of furniture as a stand, and where you had to turn a big and a small gold dial and then this gold vertical bar would move on the scale of the frequencies. He knew how to turn it on to Radio Free Europe or Voice of America, and, suddenly – poof! – that was the end of the censorship. You could hear what the free world was thinking! You could hear the real news. The real news, as there was no other source of information.

I wish I could say I remember the fall of the Berlin wall, but I don’t; what I do remember is hearing the news that in Timișoara, the people were on the streets, demanding an end to the dictatorship. You could feel it getting closer every day. But everyone was concerned about the number of protesters and what the Western powers would do. Fear is the hardest thing to overcome in such times. The protests were big enough for the West to notice, grandpa would say, but were they big enough to inspire confidence of success? Had they really occupied a whole square? The police quarters? Would the Americans and the British and the French accept the changes, or would there be a new Yalta agreement? Our information, even coming from the alternate media, was patchy, and even today many of my Western friends have a much more linear narrative of our revolution than we do, who lived through it.

In the end, we all know the fairy-tale ending as well as the not-so-fairy-tale aftermath of the 1989 revolutions of Eastern Europe. And it’s always been speculated that the media played a huge role in mobilizing the citizens to come out on the streets – especially to give them the confidence that it could be done. But what now of the contemporary movements? Many Westerners have told me that it was surreal to watch our revolution on TV. Many told me we should be proud of having had the first televised revolution. I didn’t quite get that then, but now, as I’m one of the Westerners at the end of a computer screen searching the internet for news on Egypt, I’m starting to see it: the revolution from without – the human drama of the fight for freedom, on the big stage, the world stage. Sit back and, whatever you do, don’t switch your mobile device off.

We first got excited about Iran’s so-called Twitter Revolution earlier in 2010, but, despite all the hype, it’s not at all clear what the new information technology does for protesters. What’s certain, as Malcolm Gladwell just gets it in his brilliant New Yorker article, is that Facebook and Twitter aren’t how the revolutions get started. You need guts to be a hero, and the last thing Facebook gives you is guts. But new media may accelerate the process of spreading the news – what Radio Free Europe used to be for us, the whole of the internet probably does for these guys in Cairo or Teheran. Revolutions are successful only when everybody joins in, not just the brave few who risk their lives to get the spark going. And that means all those ordinary, normal people, who have much to lose, and who sit at home in front of their gold-knobbed radios/smartphones, chewing their nails in anticipation of the moment when it will be relatively safe to come out and join the protests. For these people, a support network from outside, nurturing the hope that the rebels will not be squashed, and encouragement by what they perceive to be their human brothers and sisters – these are essential for the movements to finally gain momentum. And when they don’t – well, then, the heroes die.

And what is the voice of America now? What does the Free World think about the Arab revolutions? The West, so eager to chastise and condemn, so ready to proclaim and to scold, and so meddlesome in other people’s business, only manages to squirt a few cautious commonplaces about what the aftermath might be and how it will affect the price of oil or holidays (in the case of Tunisia). Take, for instance, out of the Guardian’s Q&A on Egypt’s protests:

And for the west?

As reflected in the mild comments from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on Friday, western politicians need to achieve the right balance between backing the people’s legitimate demands and protecting their own interests. It is not good for western powers to lend their support to autocratic regimes. But it is in no one’s interest to have a political vacuum in countries where extremism and violence can flourish and where much of the world’s oil reserves are managed.

I’m not naive enough to take Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize seriously (or the Nobel committee for Peace in general; after all, Gorbachev got the prize as well, several months after refusing Lithuania its independence and followed his prize acceptance with sending troops to storm Vilnius). But sending such cynically vague messages of support (if that’s what they’re trying to be) must not do much for those protesters. Even worse are the commentators who worry that these Arab countries will turn to Islamism, or that revolutions result in power vacuums or turnovers that are too fast, leading to chaos and instability, concluding that it’s best if the people just ‘wait till the dictator dies’…

If we in the West are so pleased with ourselves and our cultural achievements, especially in the domain of portable technology and social networking on the internet (for what, other than a justification of our procrastinatory and alienating, increasingly trifling level of communication in the form of barely grammatical bursts of brain activity, is the whole fuss about the Twitter Revolution?), let’s at least show some [safe internet] solidarity with those men with sticks on the streets of Cairo, and give them the benefit of the doubt that they’ll enjoy their newly-won freedoms with at least as much responsibility (or lack thereof) as the Eastern Europeans…