I think it’s easy to forget that many parts of the world don’t conform to our us-centred expectations. Reminds me always of questions by one of my grandmothers, no dead, in regards to my education in the UK. She struggled with the fact that people didn’t speak Russian in England. Not even a little bit. I think when she finally got around it all, she was quite shocked that anyone could go there and actually be understood.

(Which itself reminds me of an anecdote by Sergei Dovlatov – remarking on a Russian émigré family in America moving into a block of apartments and at one point their 9-year-old son riding in an elevator. An American family got in they asked him to press the button for the 5th floor. He didn’t comply, so they asked him again, and he didn’t understand, so Dovlatov explained that he didn’t understand English. “Doesn’t understand English?”, “Not at all,” Dovlatov replied. “What, doesn’t even understand ’5th Floor’?!” said the incredulous family.)

It also refers to ways of resisting authoritarianism that are neither passive, nor attempts at ‘revolution’ or violence against the state, but subtle intellectual challenges to state-sanctioned ideology.

I’m not sure I’ve phrased this very well, but certainly I think it raises interesting questions about authoritarianism.

A “soft” revolution is more like the one that took place in Tunisia, or which may be taking place in Yemen. In this case the rebel force never attains the kind of power (or never tries, preferring to proceed via peaceful means) that would be necessary to topple the regime, but succeeds anyway, often because the leader comes to regard their position as untenable or the protests as intractable and steps down. For obvious reasons this is unlikely to occur in Syria.

So the key success factors in Syria really involve both an upgrade in physical power and the emergence of a meaningful alternative. The Syrian rabble has sufficiency of manpower; its rallies are more than large enough when compared against Libyan equivalents. Their weaponry is mostly scavenged but will do if other elements are in place. But their problems are strategic rather than tactical. They can expel the Syrian army from districts, temporarily, but can’t build the level of local support required to hold them. They lack any kind of coherent alternative or plan for government, and that repels the sympathy of those in non-Sunni sects, who fear the worst. If those things become stronger, then the international community and local populations may be more prepared to take the risk of supporting the insurrection.

It just doesn’t seem like Greece can do particularly well out of this.

Compare again to Rome which almost ritually deployed it’s basic trade, logistics, law and so on in areas it conquered, turning them into Roman provinces. Republic or Empire didn’t matter, but the establishment and use of these basic building blocks gave the Roman Empire a 1000-year adaptable backbone.

Interesting also to look at edge cases such as the French/Napoleonic Empire, where all these things were also present, but also counterbalanced by constant war…

I wonder if a broader case could be made; that the difference between the empires that lasted (Rome, Archaemenid Persia, England) and those that shone briefly before spluttering out (Alexander’s Greece, Seljuk Persia, potentially America) is chiefly that of governance.