The end of the age of the dinosaurs

We still don't know precisely why the age of the dinosaurs came to an end. Some catastrophic change in their environment seems to have been the culprit, but whether this was a climate change or meteorite strike we cannot tell. Reflecting on this, we may well also ask whether the age of dictatorships is also coming to an end.

The environmental change is, of course, modern communications and media. This change was first perceived by Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid 1980s after the Chernobyl disaster. He knew then that, as a result of satellite communications, he would not be able to hide the truth from the rest of the world and his own people. News of Chernobyl was leaking into Germany and from there to the rest of the world, ironically rather like the fallout from the nuclear plant itself. Making a virtue out of necessity, therefore, Gorbachev institued the glasnost movement and started the process which ended with the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union. This lesson was not learned quickly by other dictatorships, who ploughed blindly on in the belief that they could 'fool all of the people all of the time'. It has taken the Arab Spring to rekindle the perception that the world has irrevocably changed and these political dinosaurs will not survive.

There are signs that Raul Castro in Cuba and the Burmese junta have indeed learned the lessons of recent history and are cautiously moving towards reforms which will ultimately remove them and their kind from power. Assad in Syria and the Egyptian army leadership are, however, rather slow learners.

George Orwell presented us, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, with a vision (not a prediction, he always insisted) of a state where all information and language are controlled, making any forms of 'alternative' thought impossible. In the event, the Internet has created the very opposite of this world.It remains true that, if future states develop the ability to control the Internet the Orwellian nightmare will become possible, but this looks to be implausible at this stage. Assad and his kind clearly do not understand that autocratic regimes can never surivive without the consent of the people and, more significantly, that the new world of independent information can only hasten this inevitability.

It may well be, of course, that many dictators suffer from an advanced form of insanity which prevents otherwise intelligent and educated men (yes, it is always men) from recognising clear historical truths. In Gadaffi's case, this seems almost undeniably true, but Assad, for example, presents himself as frighteningly rational. Perhaps he has not been in absolute power long enough to start demonstrating the kind of giddy behaviour we saw from Gadaffi in his later years.

Perhaps we can hope that Assad and his kind do eventually understand that they have to adjust to the new environment or perish like the dinosaurs. In other words, they need to understand that it will all end for them in a sewer pipe in the desert.