the revolutions in the Middle East, the bombs falling in Libya, protesters shot and rounded up in Syria, the Bahrain dictators taking succour from the Saudi Arabian dictators and I am reminded of the dictators in Europe. The decimation of marching, unarmed people; the fight for votes, for even the right to be taught to read.
And I wonder just how much any of it supposes that we are not more animal than rational. It is easy to see the dictators as animal, wanting to rule, putting down with brutality anyone who opposes their rule because their might is financially rewarding as their preeminent position is egoistically congratulatory. But are not those who march equally merely showing their animal behaviour? Is burning effigies, shouting in anger, fighting in the streets the sign of high intellect?
When Gandhi sat down and let the British strike out at the Indian protesters the world could see that when he replaced the British he truly would be different. He did not fight them on their own grounds but on his world vision in which they, the British, would not exist as empire builders.
Dictators always fight in the streets and those who fight them there will become them. You win by fighting on new ground, with new methods of behaviour that demonstrate to yourself that you could never be a dictator, because it is not oppression you are fighting but the struggle to make an animal, rational.