Today, injustice goes with a certain stride,
The oppressors move in for ten thousand years.
Force sounds certain: it will stay the way it is.
No voice resounds except the voice of the rulers
And on the markets, exploitation says it out loud:
I am only just beginning.
But of the oppressed, many now say:
What we want will never happen
Whoever is still alive must never say ‘never’!
Certainty is never certain.
It will not stay the way it is.
When the rulers have already spoken
Then the ruled will start to speak.
Who dares say ‘never’?
Brecht’s words describe the extraordinary events we’ve just lived through as, in the space of a few weeks, the dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt disintegrated and tumbled.
When history moves, past certainties become retrospectively improbable. Today, the leaders of the West proclaim the triumph of liberty in Egypt. Yet, as recently as December 2010, Kevin Rudd was meeting with Mubarak to hail ‘the strength of this important bilateral relationship’.
Back then, with the US funnelling b …
