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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…. Read More

via Object-Oriented Philosophy

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