Between 1.5 and 2 million opposition activists converged on Beirut's downtown Martyrs Square and surrounding neighborhoods to mark the lapse of one month on Hariri's assassination. [snip]The most depressing thing about Hezbollah's show of strength last week wasn't the big numbers. After all, fascists are notoriously good at putting on a show. The bummer was the high volume of uncritical press they got in the West compared to the collective yawn that greeted the anti-Syrian demonstrators the week before. Can't wait to see how the MSM cover this.
What made the trick was the massive turnout of the Sunni sect onto the streets of the capital to defy Syria's tutelage. Crowds from densely-populated Sunni neighborhoods stood shoulder-to-shoulder with opposition activists from various Christian communities and Walid Jumblat's Druze sect, chanting "we want the truth, we want sovereignty, we want Syria out." The Sunnis make up the biggest bloc among Lebanon's eligible voters. (via Publius Pundit, who has much more)
The fact that these people haven't been intimidated by the goose-stepping, automatic weapon carrying Hezbollah goons is pretty impressive. It's almost like freedom is on the march or something.
Update: Speaking of freedom, Mickey Kaus on the Feiler Faster Thesis:
The FFT says that people are comfortable processing that information with what seems like breathtaking speed . It's not a demonstration of the FFT, in other words, if millions of people in Lebanon learn about the Ukrainian revolution and the Iraq vote within hours of those events. It is an example of the FFT if they then suddenly realize that their existing government and social structures are fragile and obsolete and expeditiously act on that belief.
I'm not saying that that's what is happening... But it certainly does seem like the Arab world is blowing through the dialectic of history with impressive speed.
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