Iran hangs two activists who joined last year’s street protests and distributed images of them on the Web and (the horror) chanted slogans.

Up the road in Syria a 19-year old woman blogger has been sent to prison for five years for spying:

The judge did not give evidence or details as to why she was convicted, they added. However, when she was charged, one official claimed that "her spying led to an attack against a Syrian army officer".

"Trumping up charges that imply treason as a lesson for others is quite old fashioned," one human rights activist told the Reuters news agency. "Sadly, the regime has not learnt any lessons from Tunisia or Egypt."

It is hard to put one’s mind round the massiveness of the stupidity and cruelty which this sort of thing represents. Day after day, year after year across this benighted region different regimes have been brutalising their own people. The accumulated frustration, hatred and bitterness must now be monumental.

And growing. 

When the end finally comes, as come it will, the level of violence needed to destroy the power-structures which have propped this wickedness up for so long will be pretty startling.

In the meantime, here is Gerald Seib at the WSJ wondering whether the age of Big Men is giving way to something quite different, networked mass action with powerful symbols but no obvious leaders:

For most of the last century, the world operated on the big-man theory of politics: Towering personalities were required to drive big changes.

We now seem to have moved into the small-person era of history, in which seemingly insignificant people are setting off sweeping movements. This may be the most significant example of how the Internet is changing the world.

The Middle East’s nervous national socialist regimes will read this and quickly brutalise even more bloggers and tweeters.

But it’s one thing to put out a raging concentrated fire – quite another to extinguish myriad swirling sparks.