By Abdelkader Zerougui
After decades of disappointing leadership, false prophets and lies, finally history is taking its right course in the Middle East. The voices that have been hijacked by autocratic thugs for decades have spoken, not against America or the democratic West, but against the Orwellian states and the ones who anointed themselves to be the saviors of the Arab world.
Ideological expressions such as imperialism and colonialism have long been gone from the lexicon of the street rebellions. The Middle Eastern states’ propaganda machines failed to rally the masses against virtual enemies called the “crusaders,” America and Israel.
For the first time in their tumultuous history, the Arab masses have suddenly recovered their "sight." It is somehow what Plato discussed in Book VII of the Republic "allegory of the cave," when humans broke their chains, and emerged to the outside world, and saw the “divine light” that was hidden from them by their captors for a long time.
The Middle East is in a state of metamorphosis, and there is no indication that so-called Islamism is filling the vacuum, except in Moammar Gadhafi’s latest gibberish speech, when he accused al-Qaida of giving hallucinogens to the Libyan youth, and sending them onto the streets of Benghazi to destabilize the nation.
These spontaneous revolts in the Middle East are the outcome of decades of systematic oppression by sadistic dictators. Bankrolled by the rich oil monarchies, these regimes served as guards against the spread of freedom, and maintained a rotten status quo that served as incubators for all forms of psychological disorders and mass hysteria.
Ordinary citizens were subjected to the most inhuman treatments. Stories of collective punishment, rape, food and sleep deprivation and psychological warfare have been recorded in the Middle East by human rights groups over the past decades. Extremism and al-Qaida’s members were hatched in the dungeons of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and the total institutions of Pakistan, and not in Sufi mosques. Middle East Jihadists are ordinary people turned into psychopaths by the latest dehumanizing inventions that these medieval regimes had in their arsenal.
During the last decades, these dictators have found in the new breed of Jihadists a scarecrow that resonated and played well on the West’s fears. These tyrants succeeded in swindling cash and military equipment worth billions from the West, as they marketed themselves as the gate keepers who prevented this wild beast called “Islamic extremism” from spreading to the U.S. and Europe.
Middle Eastern states became fiefdoms, where these dictators and their acolytes used public resources for their own personal gain without regard to ethics or the law. These medieval rulers dismantled the state’s duties of protecting private property and providing security to its people, and established themselves as pharaohs who were above the laws of men and God alike.
They were running these countries like their own private domain, and treating their own citizens as potential enemies that must be kept on a leash at all times. The pharaohs turned men into beasts, and turned men against each other, and filled jails and asylums with intellectuals and whoever dared to break free from this bondage.
Democracy is the sole antidote to Middle East totalitarianism and its offshoot radical Islam. Supporting the momentum is crucial to defeating evil in all its forms and stopping oil tribal pseudo-states from creating cocoons for a new breed of radicalism. The so-called "moderate" monarchies and “friendly” dictators will crumble once they fail in creating virtual enemies, raising red flags and seeking Western support to fight them.
These rotten regimes have an in-exhaustive list of “enemies.” Campaigns were launched against communists, Islamists, Jihadists, secularists, Shiites, Zionists, pro-Americans, evangelists and materialists just to name a few. The Middle East and the gulf region is in a constant quest to fabricate new foes and adversaries, so the “kingdoms of darkness” remain in power, and postpone their inevitable demise and the spread of democracy.
The remaining Middle East dictators, and absolute monarchies have been trying to subvert history by maintaining their grip on resources and “their” countries’ economies. Like membership in communist or fascist parties, cronyism, nepotism and loyalty are the criteria to access the countries’ wealth in the Middle East. These so-called “liberal” economies are far from true market systems.
The ruling oligarchs draw the lines, and award contracts and licenses not to the highest bidder as defined by the law of supply and demand, but based on extra-economic factors, such as connections, loyalty and nepotism. As a result, individuals with divergent views are often ostracized and deprived from access to the market. People and enterprises can become blacklisted and individuals can be banned from traveling just by a gesture from the circles of power.
Such meddling with the market is the source of frustrations and distortions that creates radicalism, which instantly is used by these regimes to further repress the population. Middle Eastern dictators and absolute monarchs tell their citizens, “Do not object or oppose our will. Be obedient, and if we are not happy with you, we can punish you as we please.” This is the concept of the relationship between subjects and their rulers in the Middle East.
Thus, the free world needs to pressure the remaining of the Middle Eastern tyrants to establish the rule of law, end illegal monopolies over resources, and provide equal opportunities to all people without discrimination. Radicalism with all its forms in the Middle East is the outcome of the absence of the rule of law, exclusion, lack of transparency and the continuous existence of an oligarchy that sees itself holding a “divine” right to dispose of its “private domain” ― represented by the people and the countries’ resources ― in any way it sees fit.
The U.S. and the rest of the democratic world should always reflect on Sept. 11, 2001, March 11, 2004, and July 7, 2005, for they represent attacks on New York, Madrid and London, respectively. The perpetrators of these heinous crimes have one thing in common. They were the product of undemocratic and twisted regimes.
Abdelkader Zerougui, Ph.D., is an adjunct professor of sociology at American University in Washington, D.C. He can be reached at Zerouguiabdelkader@yahoo.com.