Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

Egyptians are learning the hard way what revolutionaries elsewhere discovered long ago: Revolution often is just the vehicle for a new kind of tyranny. It is in times of revolutionary turmoil that gangsters and zealots can flourish by passing themselves off as patriots.

In Egypt, a popular revolution optimistically celebrated as the Arab Spring led to the removal of Hosni Mubarak, a despot who ruled by decree for 30 years from behind a democratic facade. There’s an old joke about Mubarak impressing then-U.S. president Bill Clinton by repeatedly winning elections with 90 per cent of the vote. Facing re-election himself, Clinton invites Mubarak’s advisers to run his campaign. When the vote is counted, it is 90 per cent for Mubarak.

Mubarak’s post-revolutionary successor, Mohamed Morsi, also is elected. Like Mubarak before him, he used his democratic mandate to grant himself powers that are all but absolute. This time, however, it appears that Egyptians aren’t having it and the country once again is in turmoil.

Regrettably, it is by no means unusual for revolutions in the name of freedom to end in anything but.

Like all popular revolutions, the Cuban revolution was billed as an antidote to oppression. Instead, Cubans got the Castro brothers for 50 years. The country now is a cloud cuckoo land, where the Castros exalt a socialist paradise while presiding over grinding poverty, chronic shortages of basics such as soap and toothbrushes and the imprisonment of anyone who dares to challenge them. Cubans will be rooting, silently, for Egyptians who want their revolution back.

Foes of tyranny hoped that the Arab Spring might embolden Cubans to turn out the Castros as Egyptians did with Mubarak. Some say it didn’t happen, and won’t, because Cubans don’t have cellphones. They thus are unable to organize mass demonstrations as Arabs did in Egypt and elsewhere, where cellphones are ubiquitous, even among the poor.

Threatened dictators have tried shutting down cellular and Internet communications, most recently in Syria, but not for long. Once these systems are in place, shutting them down is as much of an inconvenience to tyrants as it is to their rivals.

In Cuba, where cellphones and the Internet have always been forbidden, demonstrations would have to be organized by word of mouth. An elaborate network of informants, strict control of the media and summary imprisonment of dissidents makes organized opposition all but impossible.

Bread and freedom was the rallying cry of Russian revolutionaries, but what Russians got instead was famine and brutality on a scale never contemplated by even the worst of the czars. In the chaos of revolutionary Russia, it was the most ruthless of factions, not the most benevolent or the most popular, that prevailed. China’s revolution likewise ended in brutal dictatorship that continues to this day.

The French Revolution helped establish the pattern. In the battle royale that followed the overthrow of an unpopular monarchy, it was the worst of the cutthroats left standing. Then came the guillotine and the terror.

The English civil war only replaced an absolutist monarchy with the tyrant Oliver Cromwell. His disgruntled subjects could hardy wait for him to die so they could restore the monarchy. Cromwell then was dug up and, to popular acclaim, posthumously hanged.

Among the notable excep- tions to post-revolutionary despotism is the U.S.A. European aristocrats were among those astonished by the subsequent emergence there of a genuine democracy. They had assumed after George Washington’s Continental Army finally was victorious over the British that he, as the most powerful man on the continent, would be installed as an American king, or something like it. Instead, he resigned as commanderin-chief, went home and ran for election. For surrendering unrivalled power and voluntarily subjecting himself to the will of the people, England’s King George called Washington “the greatest character of the age.”

It is this kind of character that is so visibly wanting among leaders in Egypt, Cuba, China and elsewhere.