The Arab Spring, 10 years on
THE MASS UPRISINGS WERE A FAILURE — AND THE WEST DOESN’T CARE
STABILITY IS WHAT THE NATO CAPITALS PREFERRED TO THE IDEALS OF THE ARAB SPRING. — TERRY GLAVIN
If you wanted to make the point that the two great lessons of the Arab Spring are that there is no depth of barbaric depravity to which tyrants will not stoop to maintain their wealth and privilege, and that the leaders of the world’s democracies are perfectly content to welcome any old blood-soaked despot into the glittering temples of global capitalism, you will have an easy time of it this week.
These are not the only lessons to take on the 10th anniversary of the historic convulsions that radiated outwards from Cairo’s Tahrir Square and went on to engulf the greater Middle East, but this week, the point does rather make a case for itself.
With the tentative exception of Tunisia, where a pro-democracy revolution preceded and inspired the revolution that emanated from Tahrir, the slave revolts that erupted across the Maghreb and the Levant were each in their turn crushed over the past decade, owing in no small measure to the Chinese strongman Xi Jinping and russian oligarch-in-chief Vladimir Putin.
And yet, there they were on the program this week, the both of them — amid the sessions and panels on how to save the planet, delivering social justice in the recovery and health buses and vertical veggies — wowing the well-to-do at the World Economic Forum (WEF). Not at davos this year, but virtually convened, what with COVID-19 and everything.
Both Xi and Putin have served alternately as the chief guarantors, bankers, benefactors and bombers in service of the Arab police states that have so brutally stretched their peoples on the rack these past 10 years. Both have used their veto power at the united Nations Security Council and their malign influences in the un’s various commissions and agencies to stifle what few attempts have been advanced to staunch the inconvenient hemorrhaging of Arab societies. And both have implanted their boots sadistically on the necks of their own peoples. And yet, there was WEF founder and chairman Klaus Schwab happily introducing Xi and Putin this week as world statesmen who are necessary to achieving a constructive dialogue.
“Each country is unique, with its own history, culture and social system, and none is superior to the other,” Xi said, which is exactly what you would expect a democracy-loathing dictator to say. Along with saying that the world mustn’t allow itself to stumble into a new Cold War, as if Xi’s regime hasn’t been waging an all-out war of that very kind on the world’s liberal democracies for some time now.
Germany’s increasingly insipid (and thankfully outgoing) Chancellor Angela Merkel piped in to the effect that, well, you know, Xi has a point, and while newly elected u.s. President Joe Biden is a nice man, we Europeans can’t be expected to side with vulgar Americans in any competition between Xi’s grotesque torture state and the free world, now, can we?
Then we heard from Putin. “International institutions are weakening, regional conflicts are multiplying, the global security system is degrading,” he warned, as though Moscow itself isn’t deliberately inducing and abetting each of these global pathologies, and “the situation might develop unpredictably and uncontrollably,” descending into “a fight of all against all.” In other words: nice little neoliberal world order you’ve got here; it would be a shame should anything befall it.
On Tuesday, the G7 countries issued a sternly worded press release (that’s about as good as things get these days) expressing a deep concern for the thousands of protesters and journalists Putin’s police arrested last Saturday. The G7 — the united States, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the united Kingdom and Canada — was also united in condemning the Putin regime’s “politically motivated” arrest and detention of russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, who barely survived an attempted assassination by nerve-agent poisoning last year, courtesy of Putin’s secret police.
We were all terribly concerned, too, a decade ago this week, when tens of thousands of Egyptians thronged into Tahrir Square, and u.s. Secretary of State hillary Clinton declared: “Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people.”
Eighteen days later, Egyptian President hosni Mubarak’s 30-year reign came to a crashing end. The Muslim Brotherhood eked out an election win in the chaos that ensued, only to have its puppet, Mohammed Morsi, overthrown in mass protests and a military coup. And now Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-sisi presides over a broken county with a state apparatus every bit as cruel as in the worst of the Mubarak years.
Tyranny is not so stable after all, it seems, but stability is what the NATO capitals preferred to the ideals of the Arab Spring. It’s what Washington and the G7 and NATO wanted in Syria, where a peaceful, American-friendly pro-democracy uprising was smashed along with much of the country by the Assad regime. And now, in what was a country of 21 million, 14 million people have been driven from their homes, nearly half of them flung to the four corners of the earth as refugees.
In Libya, a popular revolution aimed at overthrowing the psychotic Moammar Gadhafi succeeded, only to find itself abandoned by the Europeans who had encouraged the insurrectionists, and betrayed by u.s. President Barack Obama’s White house and the Arab League states that helped bring Gadhafi down. Everybody just walked away. Then there’s yemen, which is again on the brink of a mass famine following years of a proxy war that has pitted Iran-backed houthi rebels against the Saudi air force.
That’s the other lesson from the Arab Spring, and over the past 10 years it’s echo has been heard in the streets of Beirut and Tehran and Isfahan and Basra, and in the streets of hong Kong and Bangkok and Minsk and Moscow, and Caracas and Khartoum and Managua.
Arabs are not specimens of some separate species. They are human beings just like everybody else. They’d rather prefer justice and sufficient liberty to get themselves sorted without having to overthrow strongman governments in bloody uprisings. Just like the rest of us.
So plead for stability all you want, and enjoy your “constructive dialogue” with mass murderers while you can, because sooner or later, the slave will turn on his master.