The stifled, suppressed people of the Arab and Muslim worlds are looking at Tunisia with envy and daring to dream of freedom. Of course, what they get even if they escape their current unenviable lives may not improve their situation much. I don't pretend any regional, cultural, or Islamist religious expertise but it seems to me they are trapped by regional, cultural, and Islamist religious traditions that may lead them to simply exchange one master for another. I would not be surprised to see them boot out their strong men dictators and replace them with a theocracy that may be equally brutal and repressive. The Shah of Iran was replaced with the fanatical, black-turbanned ayatollahs and religious police enforcing morality with whips and prisons and stonings. The warring warlords of Afghanistan were replaced by the Taliban and religious police enforcing morality with lashings and death. So many of these areas have Islamists, themselves brutally supressed by thuggish dictators who fear the potential revolution should the Islamists gain enough power. And if they gain that power, no one should doubt they will remove the dictator's foot from the collective neck of the people and swiftly replace it with their own.
I have wondered on occasion why so many in that region of the world live under a dictatorship or a theocracy and suffer lives of such misery. Do they have some deep cultural belief in a strong but benevolent father figure to rule over and take care of them that sets them up for the dictators? Is it their immersion in the deeply paternalistic Abrahamic religion of Islam that makes both the dictator and the theocracy so appealing?
Social media such as Facebook and Twitter seem to be playing big roles in the unrest in Muslim lands. Maybe the forces unleashed by the internet and the connected age will have a democratizing effect and smooth out the differences that divide us. Gains and losses are both likely. Here's hoping seomething resembling wisdom prevails.
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