SOB's and Protests in Countries

Not surprisingly, when the imprisoned opponent of Putin, Alexei Navalny died/killed in prison, there was an outpouring of criticism from the West. Self-righteous proclamations of “Western values” have followed. Take this one by Andrew Sullivan as an example:

“(Navalny) represented the core principles of the West; and they are worth prudently defending abroad as well as at home. In Navalny, you see a commitment to empirical truth over ideological lies; to transparency over corruption; to courage over brute force; to humor over power; and to freedom over tyranny.”

 

Really? The West cherishes these things abroad? Didn’t they support the massacre in East Pakistan/Bangladesh in 1971? Haven’t they always supported dictators in the Middle East, including one Saddam Hussain (until he invaded Kuwait)? Such love affairs of the West with brutal dictators have been true for long, best captured by Franklin D Roosevelt’s infamous line:

“(Dictator X) may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch.”

When Biden called Putin a “crazy SOB (son of a bitch)” recently, his problem wasn’t that Putin is an “SOB”, rather, it was that Putin wasn’t “our” SOB.

 

Raghu S Jaitley wrote an interesting post on why some societies tolerate protests against the government, while others don’t. In general, of course, democracies allow protests. Why? Because politicians in democracies accept that there are many who don’t support them, even loathe them. They also know that they won’t get lynched or imprisoned when they leave/lose power, so protests don’t pose a life-and-death threat unlike, say, in dictatorships.

 

In addition, protests in democracies, he says, “usually involves transgressing a particular law that one is protesting against”. In other words, they don’t seek to overthrow the government, nor do they question or threaten the entire existing framework. Second, they don’t happen all the time. Just imagine the alternative:

“Every single grievance can lead to the breaking of the law, which will then threaten to destabilise society.”

 

Jaitley then refers to Gandhi who seemed to have understood a long-term danger in opposing the British via violent means:

“If that were to succeed, the fear was you would replace one violent state with another.”

The history of so many African nations, he says, shows the validity of that fear.

“The means you employ to protest and succeed will often be the means you will use to govern. It is a trap that has caught out almost every national movement and its heroes.”

The more I thought of those lines, the deeper its truth felt. The Russian and French revolutions were violent, and led to equally violent successors to the governments they overthrew. America was formed via an armed struggle against their own (but British) government, and so it sowed the idea right from its foundation to present day, that one should keep arms because, hey, the government may go rogue. Therefore, its gun culture. And why it is a constitutional right for individuals to bear arms. It’s not just the gun lobby, it is a deep rooted belief in the American DNA.

 

Finally, he says, whether protestors can adopt non-violent means depends on the nature of the government that they protest against.

“(Non-violent means) assumes that the state that’s confronting it is rational, possibly moral and can weigh the merit of continuing to ignore the protest with the risk to its primary goal, that of self-perpetuation.”

Gandhi had such an opponent in the British, so do the farmer protestors in India and the EU. Which is why they can be non-violent.

 

A very thought-provoking perspective.