How to lose a country gracefully (part II)

By Khmer Democrat, Phnom Penh
Brutal Khmer Dictators, Your Days are Numbered Series

This New York Times article by its executive editor Bill Keller, in several parts, is dedicated to the leaders of this autocratic regime with the hope that they are smart enough to see a better path into their future:

Part II

How to Lose a Country Gracefully

Bill Keller

The New York Times, March 1, 2011

Freedom is a slippery slope.

Both Gorbachev and de Klerk began as reformers — that is, politicians devoted to making a dreadful system less dreadful, not to actually abolishing it.

Perhaps because of the pressure exerted by years of international boycotts and decades of domestic insurgency, de Klerk was quicker than Gorbachev to recognize that his ruling party’s life project — a South Africa carved into a commonwealth of separate and independent nations, poor black ones and prosperous white ones — was cruelly absurd and ungovernable. By the time I arrived in 1992, he was already dragging his own party and some diehard white separatists into a raucous convention of factions, races and tribes to write a new constitution; white rule was clearly ending, and the only question was how ugly the end would be. Gorbachev, however, thought he was saving the Communist Party, right up to the day that party stalwarts tried to overthrow him.

Those regimes along the Mediterranean rim that are trying to hold back an angry tide by shuffling the cabinet or promising so-called reforms — Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia — may buy themselves some time, but revolutions have a way of overrunning reformers.

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