No one knows how the two dramas will resolve, but neither regime appears to be in danger of collapse.
But it is never too early to think about the universal human need for autonomy that drives both the struggle and the enigmatic process of people’s transition from political silence to the opposite direction.
The Declaration of Independence was largely the result of the Continental Congress inciting “domestic riots” by unleashing King George III as a “ruthless Indian savage” and offering freedom to enslaved blacks in exchange for their support. It has been the subject of retroactive criticism because of the passages it accused of doing.
But as a political analysis, the document is rock solid. The Declaration states: But when a long line of abuse and extortion… proves a plan to bring them under absolute tyranny, it is their right and their duty to abandon such a government. ”
It was “repeated wounding and robbery,” including the dispatch of “hordes of officers to harass the people,” that pushed the previously loyal, or at least passive, colonists to breaking point.
Whether or not specific complaints about the Declaration’s taxes still resonate today, complaints about the overbearing authority it expressed should. That sentiment connects the patriot of the 1770s with the rebel of today.
They ranged from 1960s civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer (“I’m tired of being fed up”) to young Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi (set himself on fire in 2010). (which triggered the Arab Spring). Arrested for unauthorized resale.
Of course, people can tolerate and even accept taxes, permit laws, and public health restrictions. If such rules enjoy legitimacy in reality and perception, they should. Its legitimacy hinges on whether the public has any say in creating them.
What drove Bouazizi to self-destruction was not that the police punished him by taking away the scales they used to measure goods, but that local officials met him when he came to complain. was to refuse In recent days, it wasn’t just the “zero coronavirus” policy that drove Chinese to protest, but lies about its attendant costs, such as a possible lockdown in response to the deadly fires in Xinjiang. I had the feeling that I was with you.
As millions of people believe that Iran’s moral police arrested young Masa Amini and beat her to death on suspicion of violating hijab rules, authorities have been forced into reasonable disagreements and innocent mistakes. If you respond with deadly violence, the consequences can be explosive.
If unbridled harassment defines tyranny, the absence of restraint does not define freedom. However, the latter requires that restrictions on people’s rights be limited and legal. As the Manifesto said, governments can only find lasting stability on the basis of the informed and unenforced “consent of the governed”.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Chinese Communist Party President Xi Jinping see things differently.
Each believes they are empowered by ideological precepts to dictate in detail how their people should live their lives. Respectively, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union — the greatest victory over tyranny in recent memory — was the result of a US-incited conspiracy that Moscow lacked the means or the will to thwart. adopts the view that
Ayatollah Khamenei and President Xi Jinping, of course, can practically coordinate the official harassment their people receive. Xi appears to be easing his zero-coronavirus policy to quell protests. In contrast, Khamenei’s government has denied Western media reports of abolishing the morality police, although the police’s presence has reportedly been curtailed, leaving many women vulnerable to bare hair. I’m leaving
Yet the ultimate recipe for stability on both sides, equated with regime survival, is repression. For them, anxiety is not the foreseeable reaction of people under constant official pressure. It is a foreign-inspired test of their political resolve. And as the patient Iranian and Chinese people know well, they are going to let it pass at all costs.
