THE EXPERTS

Experts agreed and duly informed us that Tunisia represented the stable face of the Maghreb. It was the North African country with whom the EU was most anxious to establish warm trading relations, the proverbial basket into which the community came to place the majority of its eggs. True this was a police state, foreign reporters were denied access to the country and power was concentrated in a small mafia style family unit, but still a blind eye could be turned to these things in return for the invaluable prize of stability.
I listened to one such expert on Sunday, an ex ambassador barely able to conceal his anger at the mobs on the streets busy unravelling this elaborately woven fiction. 'They must stop the looting!' he intoned. The track record of these people, from CIA analysts to spooks and diplomats from London to Paris and Brussels, to the gurus that inform think tanks is so abysmal that I wonder that anyone takes them in the least bit seriously any more. Of course they cannot and do not understand the complex reality of popular moods, a sudden surge in confidence amongst the mass of ordinary people can suddenly turn the game on its head. Think now of all those sage folk only so recently solemnly informing us that the days of student protests were long gone, whilst in the background something stirred like an old collective folk memory, immortalised in lines by Shelley:-

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few

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