• @baroug
    baroug

    This is an Arab 1848. But US hegemony is only dented | Tariq Ali | Comment is free | The Guardian
    ►http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/22/arab-1848-us-hegemony-dented

    If there is a comparison to be made with Europe it is #1848, when the revolutionary upheavals left only Britain and Spain untouched – even though Queen Victoria, thinking of the Chartists, feared otherwise. Writing to her besieged nephew on the Belgian throne, she expressing sympathy but wondered whether “we will all be slain in our beds”. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown or bejewelled headgear, and has billions stored in foreign banks.

    Like Europeans in 1848 the #Arab people are fighting against foreign domination (82% of Egyptians, a recent opinion poll revealed, have a “negative view of the US”); against the violation of their democratic rights; against an elite blinded by its own illegitimate wealth – and in favour of economic justice. This is different from the first wave of Arab nationalism, which was concerned principally with driving the remnants of the British empire out of the region.

    #démocratie

    baroug
    • @nidal
      Nidal CC BY

      Pepe Escobar : Gaddafi goes Tiananmen
      ►http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MB24Ak05.html

      Blame it on that self-immolation in Tunisia. The great 2011 Arab revolt is very much like 1848 - the people’s spring that in a few months took Europe by storm and turned the political system of the Congress of Vienna upside down. The problem is the “domino” revolutions of the time, from the Sicily of the Bourbons to the Paris of Louis Philippe, failed. But still - what a pleasure today to reread Karl Marx as a journalist and editor of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, expanding on revolution and counter-revolution. His ultra-sharp analyses still apply.

      Would Marx be facebooking and tweeting today he would see Arabs, everywhere, fighting for their dignity and self-expression. He would see how the young protester in Tahrir Square in Cairo, the Shi’ite lawyer in the Pearl roundabout in Bahrain or the anti-Gaddafi teacher fighting for his life in Benghazi have erased the caricature of the bearded terrorist - which now only exists in Gaddafi’s imagination (and the nightmares of US neo-conservatives).

      No religious fanaticism; no single-minded nationalism. Just like the Europeans in 1848, the Europeans in the 1940s fighting fascism, the Europeans of 1989 getting rid of the Berlin Wall. And Marx would probably predict how those poor conscripts in Libya - just like in Egypt - would rather join their compatriots than smash them with a Tiananmen option.

      Nidal CC BY
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