With the events in North Africa and Arabia unfolding, I am reminded of the Iranian Revolution in the late 1970s seemingly sparked by one event but all revolutions though the event itself seems furious and spontaneous, have deep roots.
Oppression is defined by extremes – extremes of poverty, lack of power, lack of legal redress – but all oppression is a feeling as well as a knowledge for as every thinker can tell you no one can imprison your mind. Or as Gandhi once said they can kill my body but they will never have my obedience. And that’s the point – oppression is all about getting your obedience against your best interests and against your will. That takes time. Lifetimes.
We can look at the commencement of revolutions down through history and every historian will take you further back than the fact of the people on the streets. And these antecedents to the revolution proper are easy to trace – except for one thing. You need the right people to interpret for the populace their grievances and their future. No one starts a revolution merely to get rid of what is oppressing them, they start a revolution to have the better life their oppressors forbid them.
You can put them down year after year, as they are doing in Saudi Arabia, but eventually they will find a voice, a leader, and then oppression haunts the mighty.