Having grown up in the Middle East, and lived through a war or two, I’m not optimistic about the outcomes of a democratic revolution in the region. I said as much in “Media’s Sickening Sentimentality On Egypt” (HERE). That’s why I mocked (in 2005) the continual comparisons Bush and his gang used to make between “the carnage in Iraq and the constitutional cramps of early America; between the feuding Mohammedans and the followers of John Locke and Baron de Montesquieu.”

Niall Ferguson, writing in Newsweek, also thinks that the slobbering will soon give way to an uneasy silence:

“Time and again, Americans have hailed revolutions, only to fall strangely silent as those same revolutions proceeded to devour not only their own children but many other people’s too. In each case the body count was in the millions.

So as you watch revolution sweeping through the Arab world (and potentially beyond), remember these three things about non-American revolutions:

* They take years to unfold. It may have seemed like glad confident morning in 1789, 1917, and 1949. Four years later it was darkness at noon.

* They begin by challenging an existing political order, but the more violence is needed to achieve that end, the more the initiative passes to men of violence—Robespierre, Stalin, and the supremely callous Mao himself.

* Because neighboring countries feel challenged by the revolution, internal violence is soon followed by external violence, either because the revolution is genuinely threatened by foreigners (as in the French and Russian cases) or because it suits the revolutionaries to blame an external threat for domestic problems (as when China intervened in the Korean War).

To which an American might reply: yes, but was all this not true of our revolution too? …”

Read “Un-American Revolutions.”

UPDATE I (Mar. 6): Regular readers should know better than to attribute my quoting of Ferguson to an ideological affinity for his neoconservatism. Hell, Myron, as a man with a particularly critical and curious mind, don’t you get sick of tinny ideologues who mouth-off opinion without reference to the facts of history? I like deductions that cleave to facts. Ferguson is a good source of information. The article is cited for its juxtaposition of the American and The Other Revolutions. These contrasts demand Derb-worthy pessimism, not silly, happy faces. A lot of people refuse to ever cast aspersions on Thomas Jefferson’s blind spot: France. As much as I revere him, Jefferson was somewhat enamored of the “Revolution in France,” Edmund Burke’s precise, and derisive, characterization.

UPDATE II (Mar. 7): UN-AMERICAN AMERICA. Right you are Nebojsa. Vox writes: “Americans themselves do not even enjoy the democratic freedoms which their leaders are claiming to support elsewhere.” Which is exactly the point I belabored in “Frankly, My Dear Egyptians, I Don’t Give a Damn,” over a month ago:

“The ‘planners’ society’ I inhabit is ‘dominated by a bureaucratic elite.’ This unnatural elite, ‘manages its people’s principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances. … Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent.'”

“What remains of the rights to property and self-ownership in the soft tyranny that is the USA is regulated and taxed to the hilt. When they travel, Americans are routinely patted down, and irradiated with photons like meat in a packaging plant. In contravention of their naturally licit rights, many thousands of my compatriots languish in prisons for ingesting unapproved substances, or for violating information socialism laws (so-called insider trading infractions). Others are hounded by democratically elected despots for daring to form militia (as many Egyptians have recently done) in order to repel the trespassers who traipse across their homesteads on our country’s Southern border, killing their cattle and imperiling their kin.”

BESIDES:

“More often than not, Americans who yearn for the freedoms their forbears bequeathed to them are labeled demented and dangerous. I’ve yet to hear liberty deprived peoples the world over stand-up for the tea-party patriots. When they do — I’ll gladly galvanize on their behalf.”

BASICALLY, when Egyptians and Libyans stand up for my tea-party rights, I’ll love them and their freedoms back.