By now it’s almost hard to remember, but Bouazizi at first inspired not popular protests but copycat self-
immolations in Algeria and Egypt. Then the contagion altered: A mass secular movement emerged in Tunisia under the banner of liberal democracy, and Egypt’s young middle class took up the same cause. U.S.-allied armies in Tunisia, Egypt and Bahrain decided one after the other that they would not gun down their own people to preserve the autocratic status quo — and each decision strengthened the principle of nonviolence being pushed by the United States and other outside powers.
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