Wrecking the Country from the Inside |
What’s more dangerous for a country’s future: external attack or internal revolution? As a political scientist, I am not aware of any scholar who actually performed a “head count” regarding this question, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the answer was the latter. Israel still has many surrounding enemies, but right now its greatest danger is coming from within – and the present government itself is the mortal threat.
First, some general world history background. Countries have self-imploded for all sorts of governmental idiocies, and even from some occasional sane but not really thought-through policies. Among the first kind: Mao’s “Cultural Revolution,” a misnomer if there ever was one. By trying to “peasantify” the country back in the 1950s and 1960s, his socio-economic policies led to the starvation death of (approximately) 20,000,000 people! The result, after Mao’s demise a decade later, the governing Chinese Communist Party was anything but “communist” – opening the doors to “regulated capitalism.” In short, although the Communist overlord did not officially fall, the country’s regime underwent a “silent” revolution i.e., politically much the same, while socio-economically very different.
Fifteen years later, a similar attempt in the Soviet Union by Mikhail Gorbachev led to the total collapse of the Communist Party and its regime. His “Glasnost” policy was a last gasp attempt to resuscitate a moribund economy, but it was too little, too late. In hindsight, it might seem that he had intended to slowly turn........