The uprisings in the Middle East: why the wise will be very wary.

As far as political violence is concerned all the major revolutions, bar the 1989 Eastern European uprisings, have a grim record. The leaders of the French, Russian, Chinese, and Iranian revolutions all increased the use of execution to rule their new societies. The guillotine is estimated to have cut off 40,000 heads; in the Tsar’s Russia the number of executions were about 18 a year; in 1918-1919, Lenin’s Revolutionary Russia was executing 1,000 a month just for political crimes. The estimates for the number of political killings in Communist China range from 17 to 70 million. The country still has the highest execution rate in the world. In comparison to Russia and China’s Darwinian communist revolutions, the use of violence in the Iranian Islamic Revolution seems mild, but there were still thousands of executions, first of Royalists and then members of the leftist Islamic Mojahadin group who waged a civil war with the new republic in the 1980’s. And after China, Iran has the highest rate of execution in the world.


Like all the regimes these revolutionaries overthrew, those now under threat in the Middle East are autocratic and oppressive. And the death sentence is used - but not on anywhere near the same scale as those revolutionary regimes. There were five executions in Egypt in 2009; four in Libya; and while Algeria imposed about 100 death sentences, none were carried out. Saudi Arabia and Yemen have worse figures, 69 and 30 respectively executions in 2009. But still we are nowhere near Lenin, Stalin, and Mao’s thousands.

So here is one reason to be very wary about the uprisings in the Middle East. Nobody wants to suggest that Libya or Algeria are free from violence – but history teaches that if serious revolutionaries took over it would get a lot worse.

There’s another reason to be wary: there is no strong political system ready to help the people chanting in the Middle East. The only major revolution in recent history not marked by violence were the uprisings in Eastern Europe in 1989. But these were not revolutions wanting to replace one ruling ideology with a completely new one, as in the Tsar’s Russia, or the Shah’s Iran. These were the masses of several countries demanding to join another system – the West. That’s why in the same breath we say, the uprisings that ended the cold war. The cold war ended because the masses wanted to join the other side where there was an orderly system of government with strong institutions for these rebel countries to link up to. So as soon as it was clear Moscow was not going to intervene, that’s what happened. Apart from in Yugoslavia there has hardly been an violence, and a complete absence of the spate of executions associated with revolutions.

Sadly there is no EU ready to absorb the countries in turmoil at the moment in the Middle East. So if the chants of the crowds are successful, then it will be a situation similar to France in 1789, or Russia in 1917, or China in 1949, or Iran in 1979. There will be a strong desire to sweep away the ancien regime, but what will be built in its place? Human beings do not sit down and talk quietly about the division of power: they fight. So if the ancien regime collapses, it is likely the hardest man will win. That means more executions.