It is eerily apt that on the 402nd anniversary of Guy Fawkes’ foiled attempt in the Gunpowder Plot, we find ourselves again observing a series of failed revolts against oppressive rule. The most recent is the swift conversion of Pakistan from an outwardly-democratic junta to a thinly-veiled military dictatorship. General Musharaff, facing the loss to his political legitimacy under a likely ruling by the Pakistan Supreme Court, pre-emptively declared a state of emergency. His first acts were particularly telling: dismissal of the Chief Justice and substitution with a loyal subordinate, armed guards impounding the rest of the court, acting judges forced to swear an oath of loyalty, widespread arrests of lawyers, and suspension of the Constitution - all undermining any judicial opposition. Political opponents and civil rights activists have likewise been put under house arrest. Following his televised announcement of the state of emergency, all private television stations were shut down, leaving only the state-run Pakistan Television Corp in operation, while FM radio is forbidden to broadcast news, and the press is forsworn from engaging in any criticism of Musharraf or his government. None of these actions seem even remotely related to the militant threats laid out in the televised announcement, although the judiciary is widely condemned for “constant interference” and embarrassments of the current administration.

Add to this the previous crackdown on the pro-democracy monks in Burma, violent reactions to student protests in Venezuela over a constitutional bid to give Hugo Chavez expanded powers and extended terms, plus slow regression towards authoritarianism under Vladimir Putin in post-Yeltsin Russia and of course certain steps taken by the Bush administration, and a more worrisome pattern emerges. In each, the dynamic is of government acting at odds with its people, and taking progressively greater autocratic steps to consolidate power within a finite ruling class. As has been deployed with great success here in linking all policy efforts to an unbounded, ill-defined ‘war on terror,’ the Pakistani emergency declaration describes the “fight against terrorism and extremism” as its justification for expanded police powers, loyalty pledges, and effective consolidation of power within the executive branch as headed by a military official. As Putin had Chechnya, and Bush the agents of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan/Iraq/Iran/Syria, Musharraf has the pro-Taliban militants arrayed at his borders to serve as both rallying cry and boogeyman for explicitly anti-democratic power shifts.

The downside for those in power is that one’s allies in this pervasive engagement with the forces of terror have the potential to become international embarrassments, further entangling attempts at diplomacy. Much as it empowered brutal dictatorships during the height of the Cold War to counter the “Red Menace” of communism, the US now finds itself unable to act effectively when other sovereign nations act brutally towards subsets of their population - the Russian assaults on Chechnya, China’s human rights record in Xinjiang, Turkey’s Armenian genocide as the Ottoman Empire, and now Musharaff’s proxy war with the judiciary over pro-Taliban militants. In each case, the foreign government’s assistance in the wider war effort as engaged by the Bush administration has undermined any leverage in taking a strong stance on humanitarian grounds. The US response to the effective ’second coup’ in Pakistan is embarrassingly tepid, with both President Bush and Secretary of State Rice taking caution not to upset a military ally, just as the US did with the Ottoman Empire during World War I as the Armenian genocide progressed. China and Russia, meanwhile, have strategic ties in nations like Burma and Sudan which keeps them from acting in concert with the US, UK and France in passing resolutions by the UN Security Council to condemn those states’ human rights abuses.

The other parallel between these events, and behind even the Gunpowder Plot, is that each is ultimately about religious practice by the state. The decision to blow up Parliament and King James I was a response to religious oppression of Roman Catholics by the Protestants then in power. Meanwhile, Chechnya separatists, Xinjiang’s militant Uyghurs and Pakitan’s pro-Taliban militants are all factions pushing for an independent Islamic state in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, while the Ottoman Empire was predominantly Islamic, with the unequal delineation of Muslim and Dhimmi under sharia law creating friction. Time and again, the establishment of a predominant state religion without provision for freedom of worship by other faiths proves itself a recipe for bloody, intractable conflict.

These trends - religious fundamentalism as the basis for armed insurrection, military ‘threats’ as the basis for retraction of civil liberties, and consolidation of power within a single branch of government - are not new, and each has terrible exemplars in world history. Many bear the earmarks of state or clerical fascism, and stand in stark contrast with the democratic principles that some of these movements ironically cloak themselves in. So it is with great vigilance and due concern that we must monitor attempts at reducing the role and access of people to their government, and the extent of the powers a government grants itself over its people. Thus we can draw real insight into a populist, take-back-the-reins movement from another celebration of Guy Fawkes, Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta - or less dystopically (and explosively) as recently portrayed in the British series, “The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard,” where a supermarket manager fed up with a do-nothing, squabbling Parliament creates a new platform and ends up Prime Minister. To quote Thomas Jefferson,

“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”

Or, as popularized by V for Vendetta:

“People should not be afraid of their governments; governments should be afraid of their people.”