With the recent passing of North Korea’s ‘Dear Leader,’ Kim Jong-il, it will be interesting to
see if such a closed society will be swallowed by the kinds of tumultuous changes that the Arab world has faced in the last twelve months. Democracy (in all of its guises), a more western-style fluid economy and, of course, freedom are all selling points that even North Korea will have a hard time dampening.
In a similar way, Russia is now throwing off its political shackles with its burgeoning middle class, asking why they are still living with Soviet-era leadership, when the holy cow of Western free market choice has been firmly rooted in the country for several decades. Putin is getting it in the neck now, and all of his KGB cronies can’t save the ‘Twitter tide’ from tightening the noose. Apropos this recent Moscow uprising, an interesting piece in the Economist magazine briefly outlined how the Russian bear has changed, with one protester quoted in the article as saying, “The protesters are no longer just classical democrats, the intelligentsia, and pensioners…now they are also students, and people in their thirties and forties with good cars and nice clothes. They feel a lack of freedom. They know they can choose a new phone, choose the food they want. But they can’t choose their political leaders.”
It’s fascinating to see how this amazing volume of information we, as humans, are currently able to process and share demands that ‘quality’ and ‘transparency’ are present in products, services and now, political leaders. Propaganda, of the old-world-variety can’t survive in this age of smartphones. We’re too tuned-in. Putin was admittedly a Luddite with the Internet age, and now it’s caught up with him. Corruption is now something that the people can track and comment on; democracy has to keep up with this rate of change, and leaders are required to be much, much faster because of it. There are more big changes afoot, just wait.
