Few expected that the protests that have swept much of North Africa and are catching on in the Gulf states would happen and be effective so suddenly and quickly.

The self-immolation of an unemployed graduate in Tunisia, after the ham-fisted authorities upset the stall from which he was trying to earn some money selling fruit and vegetables, was literally the spark that set Tunisia, Egypt and Libya ablaze.

Many people in the Western democracies were critical of the autocratic regimes that held tight sway there. Yet practically every government, for one reason or another, buttered up to them.

The US wanted Egypt as a counterweight to Iran and was happy that Hosni Mubarak, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and Muammar Gaddafi kept Islamists in check, even though they used an iron fist to do that.

Libyan crude oil was another soother to the West, even though the US depends barely at all on it for its supplies. When the Tunisian spark lit off the mass protests, the West changed its face and attitude.

It was right that democratic countries finally found their voice to condemn autocrats and the practice of tyranny. One hopes that the process triggered off will lead to fully-fledged democracies being established.

Democratic as the West is, including our country, everybody has something to learn from the speed with which the protest rage swept almost all before it. For the remarkable thing is that, tyrannical though the leaders of the three regimes were, and however much they strove to keep opposition in check, they were taken by surprise by the depth of feeling among them.

I put down that surprise to the fact that three autocrats practised central control that brooked no opposition. Thereby they not only made democracy conspicuous by its absence. They also stifled basic freedoms that could have served to alert them to how tinder-dry the situation was, waiting for even one spark to set it off.

In particular, the tyrants stifled freedom of speech. In Libya, Gaddafi did that totally; in Egypt and Tunisia, Mubarak and Ben Ali allowed some vestiges of freedom, particularly at election time.

But it did not take much to realise that such slack of the whip was no more than a sham. During the years in between elections the voices of dissent were silenced with a brutality that knew no bounds.

There were Egyptian, Libyan, and Tunisian individuals effectively living in self-enforced exile abroad who were critical of the regime in their home country.

But their voices did not carry much, and in any event were outweighed by the fawning attention the US and members of the EU gave to the tyrants the exiles or émigrés wanted to expose.

In the end, the absence of freedom of speech served to leave the autocrats ignorant of the extent of bad feeling against them. There were not enough warnings for them to pick up.

Which is why, when the protest marches and uprisings came, they were taken almost completely by surprise by the ferocity of it all.

The most prepared of the three was Libya’s Gaddafi, which is why it will take much longer to dislodge him from his Tripoli fortress, and that must probably wait until rebellion rises in the family personal army as well.

What is the lesson for Western democracies in all this? It would be crass and misleading to compare their situation to that in North Africa and a number of the Gulf States. Nevertheless, care must be taken that freedom of speech exists not as matter of democratic principle only, but also for the warnings that may be picked from its practice.

There is too much of a tendency, not least in Malta, to pooh-pooh criticism and call it negativism, rather than to digest it properly to see what grains of truth might be found in it. It seems to be a basic rule for the government of the day to brand the criticism of the opposition of the day as an effort to unsettle the governance of the country.

The rule needs to be revisited as critically as can be, especially since it also extends to criticism which comes from outside the political arena. Citizens who respect freedom and a properly working democracy should use their freedom of speech to criticise whatever they see wrong in the country.

They may not always be right. But they would definitely be very wrong to silence themselves. As much as it would be wrong for the government not to pay full attention to the criticism levied at it.

That might happen out of sheer arrogance. Whatever the reason for it, it’s wrong. It will not lead to the sort of upheaval that is taking place in North Africa and extending to the Gulf States. But it would still be as unhealthy as can be. The freedoms of democracy are there to be fully exercised as a matter of right, and to be heard as a matter of sense.

It does not automatically happen that way. Governments, instead of digesting criticism, often resent it, missing the forest for the trees.