The Jasmine Revolution of the Middle East looked both beautiful and promising after the fall of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
When a man of Mubarak’s stature and stubbornness heeds the justified cries of his people by leaving office, the foundations of all dictators weaken. Luckily for all involved in the Egyptian protest, Mubarak understood progress would be inhibited by his association and eventually left — nevertheless still preserving some influence through the power assumption of former colleagues.
Most dictators are not so sensible.
In Libya, Moammar Gadhafi promised civil war before resignation and kept every bit of his word. While Libyan “rebels” take charge of key cities and military officers defect to their cause, Gadhafi is ordering military assaults on what were his own people with air raids and armies of hired guns.
On Feb. 23, the Italian government, who has strong commercial ties with Libya, projected a death toll as high as 1,000 in Libya, and the war has ceaselessly raged on since.
The burning question is: What madness is required to convince a leader to kill his own subjects?
Around 360 were killed in Egypt, opposition leaders within Iran claim a death toll of about 100 and at least two have been killed in both Bahrain and Oman — whose protest is but three days young.
It’s fear that drives such rage against one’s own subjects, a rage stemming from what I would call a dictator complex.
The dictator complex makes each autocrat irrationally and egotistically convinced he is the only man for the job. Seeing as most of the leaders in question have ruled for decades while filling government offices with puppets, thus tailoring the nation to their idiosyncratic wills, it makes perfect sense they believe they are indispensable.
These men think if they leave, next to nothing of their rule will remain. The nation’s government will be a blank slate, and the dictators’ legacies will be reduced to ash.
With this in mind, one can begin to grasp why a man might massacre his people for some greater good, like stability.
Stability is always the key word. Mubarak was a slave to his obsession for stability and chastised any organization with the scent of religious involvement as extremist in order to maintain his particular flavor of stability. In China, the exact term used by the government to refer to its dealings with opposition forces is “stability maintenance.”
Stability is a sign of power. Being in control of a stable nation shows a leader has a tight grip, and opposition rallies are seen as an embarrassment.
Why else would Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad outlaw any and all journalistic coverage of the ongoing protests there?
The obvious answer is so he can feign stability while simultaneously quelling demands for an end to the Iranian Islamic Republic with lethal force. Journalists in Iran have been detained or put under house arrest along with men who ran against Ahmadinejad in the last election season.
The measure of violence a leader is capable of inflicting upon his people is dependent on his — often outlandish — perception of his own value to the country.
With more momentum than ever and still more each day, the people are willing to do anything. The real question to be asked upon each flair of opposition is how indispensable the leader believes himself to be.
A line from the film “V for Vendetta” comes to mind: “People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.”
Finally, autocrats the world over have been force-fed this axiom by none other than their own constituents, and each leader’s fumbling, ruthless actions betray a hidden terror.
Clayton Crockett is a 19-year-old international studies freshman from Lafayette. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_ccrockett.
 
 
 
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contact Clayton Crockett at [email protected]