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Fouad Ajami, whose academic credentials are impressive, said in an op-ed in today's New York Times:

[Today's Arab demonstrators for political freedoms] will make their own world and commit their own errors. The closest historical analogy is the revolutions of 1848, the Springtime of the People in Europe. That revolution erupted in France, then hit the Italian states and German principalities, and eventually reached the remote outposts of the Austrian empire. Some 50 local and national uprisings, all in the name of liberty.

Just within the past few hours Libya has had a "regime change."  Whether it is now Gaddafi's son who is in power or not, the momentum of change is clearly past the point of no return.

Dear reader:  Do you understand what is deceptive and transient in this situation, and what is crucial and abiding?  In my last headline I was content to go with what "sources say"; that was in error.  What those many thousands of Egyptians were doing in the public streets -- demonstrating, non-violently, for change -- that was the unquestionable essence of the situation, and the stubbornness of an authoritarian octogenarian could not stand against it.

According to Juan Cole, some 300 Egyptians were shot dead in the last week, protesting the dictator Hosni Mubarak's regime.  One can reasonably estimate a couple of thousand (at least) have been wounded.  The resolve of the demonstrators, in the face of the usual tactics of the American Empire, remains.  It is on that basis that I conclude that real change is under way in Egypt.

Thomas Babington Macaulay was a nineteenth-century English politician and historian, whose Essays contain an interesting characterization of a political party.  It seems to me not without relevance to the Pacific Green Party, torn as we now are in the Portland area by internal dissension.