Saturday, February 12, 2011

Mr. Spencer--Let Me Be Wrong





Well, the Tsar has abdicated the throne, and seems headed into exile. Even his crown jewels, in Swiss bank accounts, have been seized and will be returned to the national treasury. The mutinous troops who would not fire on the crowd at the Winter Palace will soon be handing power to some sort of Constituent Assembly, which will elect the Egyptian Kerensky. And the world is all atwitter at the prospect of a despot giving way before the power of a crowd. It's people power! Power to the people! You'd think that Corozan Aquino or Vaclav Havel were waiting in the wings in Cairo to pick up the pieces of the fallen dictatorship, instead of the tightly disciplined cadres of the Muslim Brotherhood. I've previously compared this group to the Bolsheviks, but now I feel compelled to admit where I was wrong: the Bolsheviks in 1917 commanded the allegiance of only a tiny percentage of the population, and their vote total in Russia's first (and last) democratic election was dwarfed by that of the Socialist Revolutionaries. By contrast, the Muslim Brotherhood is the only organized political alternative in Egypt--broadly popular, with an infrastructure of governance already in place.

For Mr Spencer's whole article


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