Hallward weighs in

Peter Hallward in The Guardian, via Cengiz Erdem’s blog:

“Whatever happens next, the people of north Africa and the Middle East have already won victories that will never be erased. The clashes in Tunis on 11-12 January, the capitulation of riot police in Cairo and Alexandria on 28 January, the retaking of Manama’s Pearl Square on 19 February, the liberation of Benghazi on 20 February – in the annals of revolutionary history, events of the 2011 Arab spring may one day invite comparison more readily with the summer of 1789 or the autumn of 1917 than with the winter of 1989.”

I have only one reservation here. The hard Left (and my good friend Peter is of course there) has never had sufficient appreciation for 1989. But those who feel a bit cool towards ’89 simply need to make more friends from Eastern Europe; they’ll quickly let you know what life was like for them before ’89, and what that year meant to them. You can’t possibly look these people in the eye and tell them that ’89 was just about fat cat neo-liberals being able to exploit people even more. There was a heck of a lot more upside to it than that. In my opinion, the Left is often blinded by its anti-Americanism-at-all-costs, and thus it ends up downplaying the tyrannies of such places as the East Block and Cuba.

That said, I agree with the general point that ’89 was not well-equipped to challenge what Hallward calls the global status quo. It was simply a flattering year for the West, and looked to some like a repudiation not only of Soviet communism, but of anything but global capitalism.

The Arab uprisings, however, are not at all flattering for the West. We looked the other way on Tunisia, funded and encouraged Egypt, guarded Bahrain, relied on Yemen, and recently snuggled with Qaddafi in Libya not too long after bombing him.

And this is cause for thought, to say the least. We simply aren’t the good guys in 2011 (by “we” I’m now referring to my own native country, the United States). Our ugly or at least complicitous side has been shamefully exposed by the recent events in the Arab world, and the (sometimes tiresome and always one-sided) Leftist narrative of us as a hegemonic center of neo-liberal exploitation is ringing true at present. There’s no escaping it.

Today, the vanguard of democracy is not in Washington. It’s on the Arab street, and we need to give them credit for that. They’ve created a generation of heroes: these Arab kids. They’re a lot more brave than you or I have ever needed to be.