Uganda: The Oppressed Need Real Revolution, Not Replication

opinion

With pro-democracy demonstrations billowing around his regime, Yemen's President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has held his post for more than 30 years, warned on March 22 that the country is balanced on the precipice of "a bloody war" within its own borders. Saleh, whose offer to step down at the start of 2012 was rejected by the opposition, invoked "the will of the people" to vindicate his government, adding, "It is impossible for a minority to control the fate of the nation."

But domination of the multitudes by a small and elite minority has been the governing norm in Yemen for generations, embodying the model of statism itself. As Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four: "Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure," a coercively-imposed system of interconnected hierarchies adapted to let indolent elites live off of the work of the industrious.

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