How we lost our voice

Anti-government protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square

Like everyone, I have been gripped and stirred by the events unfolding in the Maghreb and Middle East. Unlike some admirable and astute commentators, I didn’t feel primarily moved to try to “make sense” of what was happening in Tahrir Square, or to speculate on what the millions of Egyptians not in the square were thinking. Such speculation seemed and still seems to me beside the point and actually rather odd. I didn’t hear a comparable call at the time of the demise of Salazar and Franco and the Greek colonels, or the fall of communism and the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, to try to “make sense” of those events, or to wonder what all those not celebrating and tearing down chunks of concrete were up to.

People, not everyone to be sure, but an overwhelming mass including the bravest and best and most articulate spirits, no longer wanted to live in police states or kleptocracies. They no longer wanted to be tortured or murdered by goons or spied on by spooks and kept under surveillance by their neighbours. They wanted free and transparent elections. They wanted the greater measure of control over their lives that they imagined to be a function of democratic government. No doubt they also wanted a better chance of prosperity. None of this, as we watched it unfolding in Tunisia and Egypt and Libya and other places, seemed to me to need to be teased out by some subtle process of reasoning. The primary sense of it was overwhelmingly clear.

But as I thought about this, I understood a reason even though the sense of these events might be unmistakable, it might also be uncomfortable. I was struck by the eloquent comments of the impressive Libyan writer Hisham Matar, whose father was abducted by Egyptian secret service agents in 1990 and holed up in a Libyan gaol (he has not been seen since). He said that the Libyans rising up against the cruel and dictatorial regime of Muammer Gaddafi were “rediscovering themselves again as a people”, finding their voice.

It is indeed the voices of those interviewed in Tahrir Square and other places that have been moving. In a few ringing sentences, they have blown away a whole swathe of cobwebby notions, spun by poisonous old spiders hunkered for too long in dark musty places, the Shelobs of the academic and media establishments, which held that Arabs were medieval and undemocratic, or entirely taken up with Islamic fundamentalism. These uprisings have had very little to do with religion.

The people we have heard have been of all ages, different occupations, men and women. I noticed especially the women, older and younger, because women were supposed to have been silenced and oppressed in these countries. I heard them speak exactly as the best and brightest of our own people would hope to speak, only better and more clearly, more urgently and more bravely. They have shown us how to use social media in a non-narcissistic way.

For the most part unarmed (of course, the situation is different in Libya), facing dictators with ample supplies of weaponry (supplied by ourselves) and, in some cases, hired mercenaries, they have spoken with the freedom of those who have nothing to lose but their lives. Or rather with the freedom that comes to those who realise that there are some things even more important than their own individual lives: that is, principles that will protect the lives of others, both born and unborn. Time and again I heard people say they were prepared to die for this. To die but not to kill, except in self-defence, which is what distinguishes them from suicide bombers. These uprisings have had an existential quality – they have been about being and freedom.

But in a strange reversal, just as these people in north Africa and the Middle East have found their voice, we seem to have lost ours. One of the comments heard repeatedly in Tahrir Square has been “I am proud to be Egyptian”. That can be rephrased as “I am proud to be a human being, taking my destiny in my own hands”. But how many of us in the west, or the north, can hold up our hands and say, “I am proud to be British, or American, or Italian, or French”? I do not feel proud to be British when I see our prime minister on an ill-timed mission to sell arms to autocrats. I feel less proud to be an alumnus of the London School of Economics when I learn how that institution became entangled with the Gaddafis.

These protests have not shown us in a good light. They have shown us up as citizens who have in large measure given up our birthright – that is the right that should be given at birth but needs to be wrested back in each generation – of freedom in return for the comforts and conveniences of consumerism, dispensed by powers over which we have little control.

harry.eyres@ft.com

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