Totalitarian military regimes tend to react the same way when faced with a rebellion: they distract the population’s attention toward an even scarier enemy so that they can claim to be saviors rather than oppressors. And so whenever there is a revolution, there’s usually a counter-revolution, too.
It has been almost a quarter of a century since the Iron Curtain fell, and almost a quarter of a century of freedom in Eastern Europe as a result. Though the comparison isn’t drawn often enough, in many ways, the domino-like protests that swept the Arab region in 2011 mirror these earlier anti-communist rebellions in Europe. Indeed, the events in some of these countries hold many lessons for Arab states currently in transition, especially as people wonder what happened to their revolutions.
The Romanians, for instance, lived through the bloodiest of the anti-communist rebellions in Eastern Europe. In December 1989, over 1,300 people died in a mere few weeks. While most people correctly know that it was the communist crackdown on protesters that killed all those people, few grasp the full scale of the regime’s violence.
The full article: https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentaryanalysis/526771-counter-revolutions-arent-anything-new
YALLA SOURIYA 