Now that Colonel Gaddafi is dead, there’s a lot stuff flying about Twitter along the lines of Are you watching Mr Mugabe/Assad/Ahmadinejad? I’m sure they are. Few people are likely to mourn Gaddafi’s death but one should not, I fear, suppose that his eclipse weakens other distatorial regimes or vastly emboldens their respective opposition movements. It would be grand if this were so but foolish to presume it must be.
Indeed, one can plausibly argue that a quite different message has been sent by this Libyan uprising and that this message warns other ghastly regimes to crack down harder and faster to ensure that dissent is suppressed before it has time to build. In other words: Gaddafi’s fate is certainly exemplary but it may actually work against reform. Perhaps this is because it is hard to have just a little reform; once that door is opened there’s little chance of closing it.
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