Turning in the widening gyre

The other day, in an idle moment, we happened upon the Doha Debates on BBC World. I heartily recommend them for anyone with an idle moment and even a fleeting interest in press freedom and the issues of the Middle East - a region not generally celebrated for its commitment to democratic openness.

The debate we chanced upon concerned, broadly speaking, whether WikiLeaks was a force for good or evil.

Those in favour of the leaks argued among other things that, particularly in the Middle East, WikiLeaks had exposed the lies of governments and brought truth into the glaring light of day, and that had to be a good thing.

The opposite corner argued diplomacy was based on trust and if governments could not talk to one another in confidence they could not conduct the behind-the-scenes business that governments must to function, to prevent wars, and so on.

A fascinating tussle of ideas, explored by articulate opponents with impressive credentials. Would that someone might foster such a tradition in our own television studios.

One thing almost all appeared to agree on was WikiLeaks, for better or worse and in conjunction with all the other manifestations of the digital revolution - Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the infinite variety of online forums and web-logs that comprise cyberspace - was affecting greatly not just the flow of information in society, but society itself.

And this extends to forms of government. Those which have maintained legitimacy through the suppression of information and freedom of speech - the autocratic regimes of the Middle East, for example - are, as we have seen with events over the last month or so, first in Tunisia, now in Egypt; especially vulnerable.

Nobody quite knows how it will all end in Egypt, but that the uprisings have not been crushed in brutal and bloody militaristic confrontations says as much about the fact the entire country - indeed the world - is watching the actions of its army as it does about its military commanders' loyalties.

Ironies abound in the fact it is technology rather than military might doing the good work of spreading Western-style "democracy" - the rub for powers such as the United States, which has spent billions supporting the Mubarak regime, being that the genie of democracy unleashed tends to have a mind all of its own.

Egypt's ancient and modern civilisation has long exercised the collective imagination of the West: in drama, poetry and literature, for example.

More than 30 years ago, it was a gentler, less complicated country. I experienced it drifting down the Nile on an old felucca, reading Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet - still a fashionable tome in the 1970s.

Others reference it in more oblique fashion. Take Irish poet W. B. Yeats' The Second Coming, with its sphinx-like creature - "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

It remains as haunting and apt a meditation on social unravelling as exists in the Western canon. It was written in the wake of World War 1 and the Russian Revolution.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Unduly pessimistic? Let's hope so. And that compassion and justice prevail on the streets of Cairo and Alexandria, Suez and Luxor, for fascinating Egypt has much to contribute to the modern world and, importantly, the stability of its region.

Simon Cunliffe is deputy editor (news) of the Otago Daily Times.

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