Arab Spring: What Does It Really Mean?
Remember, when a president refuses to look at what can — and will — go wrong and at what the threats are — if only to combat them more effectively — his country is in very serious trouble. And so are its friends.
And by the way, where did the term “Arab Spring” come from?
The term “springtime of nations” was applied to the revolutionary upheavals in Europe in 1848. In France, the revolution against the monarchy led to free elections. Unfortunately the free elections were won by Louis Napoleon who made himself dictator, ruled for about two decades, and led his country into a disastrous war that was followed by bloody massacres. France did become a functioning democratic republic but it took almost a quarter-century.
Hungary had a nationalist upheaval. It became a free country afterward — 70 years later. It then went through a brief revolution followed by a dictatorship, followed by an alliance with Nazi Germany, followed by a Communist regime. Today, it’s a relatively happy and peaceful place; 142 years went by, though, after its springtime before that happened.
More recently, the term was applied to the Prague Spring of 1968, crushed by Soviet tanks. The country finally became a truly independent democracy, 32 years later.
But in Middle Eastern usage it comes from the “Beirut Spring” in which hundreds of thousands of Lebanese demonstrated against the Syrian military presence and domination of the country.
In the short term the Lebanese protesters won. But because of a lack of U.S. and Western help along with the ruthlessness of Syria, Iran, and their local allies (notably Hizballah), the Beirut Spring has been defeated. Syria is back in control to a large degree and while the Syrian-backed government (including Hizballah) has been kept at bay for months by bureaucratic maneuvers, presumably it will get into power at some point.
So the term “Arab Spring” is appropriate if we remember that the Beirut Spring, a good example of what’s being faced now, turned into the Beirut Winter.
Ah, but now we have Google!!
”Arab Spring” means one thing to gullible Western liberals & quite another thing to Middle-Easterners.
For the naive, gullible, generally uninformed, Westerner, it means, ”they’re just like us, see, we have the same values, doesn’t everyone want the same things in life, blah, blah, blah ad nauseum.
But for the majority in the Middle-East, the ”Arab Spring” means freedom – freedom to hate Jews, freedom to persecute Christians, freedom to support Jihad, freedom to support terrorism, freedom to oppress women, kill gays, freedom to impose Shari’a, freedom to kill blasphemers & apostates, & all the other charming aspects of Islamic culture.
To be sure, there are some real liberals in the Western sense, the one-in-a-million anomaly.
But scratch the surface of a Muslim liberal …….voila, not so liberal.
We here in the US are gullible, naive, stupid. Always open for a catchy slogan we don’t understand.. We don’t want to get involved etc…
Always ready to elect someone that lies…eg..Scott Brown, Obama, etc…
Frankly I think it’s the Arab winter and America’s dooms day…
I have said it several times but I will say it again, the “Arab Spring” is a result of the cultural Judo the US performed in Iraq. And while we may not get the domino effect we got in Central and South American and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the late 1900′s, (because cultures evolve at glacial speeds, and Islamic culture may not be ready), we have gotten movement from the stagnate frozen Muslim tyrannies. And if all we get is “One Man, One Vote, One Time” then that is still a Victory for US. A US Victory over the dying Islamic culture, whose death throughs are interfering with mankind’s advancement.
If Obama really does think that democracy will ‘spring’ forth from these riots and demonstrations he’s a bigger fool than I thought. And he’s given no indication he believes otherwise so far.
Muslims have been under the thumb of oppression for so long I doubt they’d know what to do if given the chance to reorganize their culture politics and religion (really – where do you divide that line?) into something that is capable of handing over power to the next dully elected official. Iraq is still having many problems with this. Basically they’ve been ordered at the point of a gun (ours) to dis-organize (separate their politics culture and religion) and become more like us. One can only wonder how long this grand experiment with Iraq will last before some egotistical (political or otherwise) leader will step up and declare himself king of the sandlot.
Not long methinks.
This is one of those questions that gets asked a lot, in different contexts, and the problem is always that the answer is much more complicated than the question is. There are hundreds of millions of Muslims in the world. Tens of millions, maybe more than a hundred million, in the Arab Muslim world. It’s tempting to say that they want something, as if Muslims in Egypt want the same thing that Muslims in Algeria, Afghanistan, or Libya. But like I said, the issue is much more complicated than that. I can see this, and I’m not even an expert in the subject.
Do they want Democracy, as we experience it here in the United States? Probably not. Much of what we consider the “free world” has governments that are significantly different from ours. Parliaments fall after a vote of “no confidence”, Presidents and Prime Ministers squabble with one another in different ways. Societies act differently, with class systems we don’t have (or pretend we don’t), labor unions that are more powerful, news media outlets controlled by the government, etc. Point is this: do they want Democracy? Probably not in the sense we mean, or the French, or the British, or even the Japanese or the Koreans. What do they want then? Probably a national system more like China’s, or maybe Russia’s, where a strong authoritarian central government allows business to flourish, and uses its influence to make some people wealthy. Muslim society has no tradition of Democracy as we know it, but they do have a vibrant history in the economic department, with Arab traders wheeling and dealing their way around the region for centuries. Remember, Christ drove the money changers out of the temple, but Mohammed himself was a merchant and something of a land-based pirate. Getting ahead financially isn’t something Muslims abhor; it’s the political freedom that we have that they object to.
In sum: I think the Arab Spring means that for the most part, Arabs are tired that a few people in each of these countries makes most of the money. The vast majority of people in these countries wants this changed, so that another group of people (maybe a bit bigger) is the one making the money. I think the best we can hope is that when things settle down, they have governments in place that are *more* Democratic. I don’t think they’ll turn into a Western-style Democracy overnight, but hopefully they won’t revert to dictatorship under another despot. I’ve heard wistful musings, here and there, that Mubarak, for instance, was good in that at least he could be trusted not to attack Israel. As long as Mubarak was in power, conspiracy theorists in the Middle East (and they seem to have more per square mile than anywhere else in the world) believed that this was the principal reason that Mubarak was “kept” in power, and ascribed this “keeping” to the United States and, indirectly, Israel. Since Mubarak fleeced his populace regularly, every poor Arab in Egypt blamed his poverty, in some part, on Israel. Does anyone think this is a good way for things to be? Smoldering resentment doesn’t neccessarily lead to peace.
I’ve said before that this is going to be a long process. It’s not exactly a war, though there will probably be shooting at some point. Anyone care to guess what the Muslim world’s chief *manufactured* export is? I don’t mean oil; that gets extracted from the ground by outsiders, I mean something that they actually make. The chief export is rugs. Oil of course is much more important, rugs are barely a blip on the radar screen, but that’s the point. No one in Muslim countries *produces* anything anyone else wants. Those Arabs who are capable of making something they can sell often wind up going to other countries, usually in the West, to live and sell their product, because if they stayed home someone in the government would steal all they made from it. Until they start making stuff, and learn to respect each other’s right to have the fruits of their labor, and worship who they choose, however they choose, they’re going to have trouble, and we’re going to have trouble with them.
It’s obvious that the term “Arab Spring” was shopped around, had a nice ring to it and thus was thrown out into the news media which dutifully repeated it ad nauseum.
Thank you, Barry Rubin, for the historical reference to the 1848 revolts and to the destruction of Lebanon.
Now that Obama has picked up on it, he can see the light at the end of the tunnel (for the muslims, anyway). With the 2011 revolts in many middle east countries spuring him on, Obama forges ahead to make all the middle east another Lebanon except this time, Iran will emerge as the hegemonic power (just as soon as Obama withdraws our troops from Afghanistan).
This turmoil is actually historical and consistent for Arab Muslim countries. Because of the nature of Islam, our Christian-type democracy won’t function as we would like it to. It always degenerates toward the Somalia model (total anarchy). So, brute force and repression is required to keep any semblance of state-like activity. The problem now is, succession. The military leader (Ghadaffi or Mubarak, for example) can’t simple resign and be replaced by an elected leader because the inevitable Islamic slide to chaos. So some kind of rebellion needs to be staged to replace an aging dictator with a fresh one. How else can this be done? All we can do is engage peripherally, hoping to stir the pot a bit – which we seem to be doing quite well. As long as the Muslims continue fighting each other, they won’t be much trouble to the rest of the world. This is actually the best that any Islamic country can hope for.
Arab Spring means Christian and Jewish head are going to roll, while our organizer tries to make nicee, nice with the arabs!
The best thing about Muslim democracy is that, when they finally decide to band together to annihilate Israel, they will be so busy fighting each other’s brand of it (and the differing sects of Islam) they will kill each other and fashion their own demise.
lscFqL thinkingof what?
Christ is KING. Who cares about aribs!!!!!!!!!The only way to heaven is to have faith in CHRIST our LORD!!!!!!