History leaps to life.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Egypt and Tunisia demonstrations

There are times when history seems dead. And then there are times when history leaps to life. This is such a time, a time when people, rather than being the passive victims of history, have become agents of history, agents of their own liberation.

That's what was so exhilarating about watching the events in Tunisia and Egypt, events that may turn out to be as momentous as the anti-colonial revolutions of the middle of the twentieth century.

Today, people are no longer abiding by their own corrupt and brutal leaders who were doing the bidding of the United States.

Hosni Mubarak's dictatorial dealings were essentially OK with Washington so long as they were off camera and so long as they didn't threaten to discredit the United States or render the puppet useless.

For years, Mubarak's thugs would rough up and round up dissidents.

For years, Mubarak's thugs would imprison human rights activists.

For years, Mubarak's thugs would torture people behind bars.

For years, Mubarak himself would rig elections.

It was appalling, then, for the Vice President of the United States to say, when the protests erupted, that Mubarak wasn't a dictator. And it was appalling for the Secretary of State to say, "We are on the side" of the Egyptian people, "as we have been for more than thirty years." No one in Cairo was buying that.

The uprisings were tricky for the mainstream corporate media in the United States to deal with. Haltingly, they had to acknowledge that our government supported Mubarak for three decades--and other dictators like him.

For a moment at least, the empire was out of the bag. There was no denying it, no way of saying the empire was benign.

We're supposed to be for freedom and self-determination. And yet we've been propping up dictators.

We need to abandon either our principles or our empire. I'd choose the latter...