Oh how our 'leaders' would love us to revolt....

From Peter Hitchens, arguably the greatest living British journalist....


Egypt, People Power ...and the truth we dare not speak

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
5th February 2011

I have been an unheroic witness to several episodes of alleged People Power. I hid under the bed as tracer whizzed past my Bucharest hotel window, during the mysterious overthrow of the Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu.

I lay down in the dirty snow to save my skin, as the KGB Alpha Group stormed the Vilnius TV tower in the Kremlin’s last failed attempt to keep control of the Baltic states. I felt my bowels shrivel with dread when, in Moscow in 1991, I heard the unmistakable sound of gunshots finding their human targets.

Cairo

More enjoyably, and more safely, I stood amid ecstatic crowds in Prague as they jeered their communist rulers into oblivion, marched alongside Hungarian democrats in Budapest and rejoiced to see the sunny Russian morning when every litter-bin in the capital was full of burning Communist Party membership cards.

It was intoxicating and exhilarating even when it was also terrifying. I am the sort of reporter who only goes to war zones because he hasn’t been properly briefed (I once touched down in Somalia in a blue suit and polished shoes).

But these days, whenever I see a huge crowd on TV, surging through some central square in some wretched despotism, my heart sinks. I don’t want to be there, among the nice, gullible people whose absurd hopes are bound to be disappointed.

I know what will come next – a let-down.

We have already pretty much forgotten Tunisia, whose crowds our electronic media lauded and encouraged only weeks ago. Anyone know what is going on there now? Or care much? Thought not.

The liberation of Romania was followed by an era of renewed corruption and political squalor that has not come to an end and is not likely to. No doubt it was preferable to the former regime, but it cannot possibly measure up to the semi-religious hopes raised back in 1989 by overwrought commentators, including me.

I have seen it argued – credibly – that the joyous return of freedom to Prague was orchestrated by the KGB. And look at what followed.

Post-communist Russia is not the beautiful, rich and civilised land it could be and ought to be, but a crime family posing as a nation. For many people there, the choice between the old regime and the new one is not an easy one.

Poor old Prague is now just the capital of a subjugated province in the new German Empire that we politely call the European Union. The same goes for the Baltic republics and Romania. And, more importantly to me, for us here in Britain.

It is much nicer for them to be ruled from Berlin and Brussels than to be ruled from Moscow, though nothing like as nice as they might once have hoped.

But it is not nicer for us to be ruled from Berlin and Brussels rather than ruling ourselves, as we more or less did before 1989, when the Cold War kept Germany down, the Americans in and the Russians out.

Would I, knowing what I know now, have been so keen on the liberation of Eastern Europe 20 years ago? No. I would in the end have sacrificed their freedom in return for ours.

And if I am ruthlessly honest – as I ought to be – I would sacrifice the freedom of the people of Egypt for my prosperity and stability, if that is the bargain on offer. And I think it is. There, I’ve said it