Activists and intellectuals in the West always say, we have to support unfortunate workers of the South, sign this petition or that petition, as if international solidarity were just an act of charity, handed out by the fortunate. I say it's the other way around. We should learn from examples set by peoples of the South, since the US government, as well as an increasing number of governments in the North, has begun to introduce laws and practices that have long been the norm in the South, especially in the US-backed states. Emergency rule in the South, frequently imposed there with the backing of the governments of the North, has become globalized and now begun to impinge on our lives in the North, beginning with the lives of Muslims and immigrants. In other words, our governments are now importing political products -- machineries of repression -- from the South that they used to export to the South . . . just like the globalization of production in general. Working people of the South know how to resist -- and sometimes defeat -- emergency rule. We can learn from them if we don't assume we are the ones who know better and instead study how they manage to do it.
[WS:] You may have a point here, albeit your Maoist-style didactic tone, besides being utterly annoying and turning the audience off (I read it only because I know who you are), seems to prevent you from an analysis why this may be the case.
One possible explanation of these different reactions of people in developed and under-developed countries to repressive policies are structural differences, especially social cohesion. Societies with greater levels of social cohesion and solidarity are more likely to put up a resistance to oppressive policies, because social networks provide protection for individual members of the group and reduce personal cost of participation in protest actions.
Economic development facilitated social mobility, which had the effect of weakening social cohesion, especially vis a vis less developed countries. In the US, that weakening was additionally augmented by immigration and internal migrations, which produced a fragmented, individualistic society. This explains why individuals in developed countries are less likely to openly defy repressive policies than people in less-developed but more socially cohesive countries. It poses too big of a personal risk, especially that they have more to lose than the proverbial rags and fetters, and that risk is not mitigated by social networks and solidarity support.
>From that point of view, preaching that "south can tech the north" borders
on meaningless babbling along the lines that "cats can teach humans how to
jump" or "birds can teach pigs how to fly." The developed and
under-developed countries are structurally different. Expecting that the
practices of one can be teleported to the other makes little sense, whether
those practices pertain to financial institutions, government policies, or
strategies of social protest.
Wojtek