3mo ago

What happened?

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What did the Arab spring give the people in the end?
Syria? never ending civil war between factions controlled by foreign interests
Lybia? never ending civil war between factions controlled by foreign interests
Tunesia? temporary improvements now to be revoked by a new authoritarian
Egypt? temporary improvements followed by an US backed coup installing an even worse military dictator
Maybe we were just naive in thinking that social media back then wasn't already doing the bidding of governments against people.
- One could say the same about the Liberal Revolution of 1848. It failed, and yet it took many years before much of the liberal and progressive values became culturally ingrained.
  "The arc of moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."- Martin Luther King Jr
  Good or bad, that's why any ideas never die. That's why the powers-that-be love to censor.
  
  Excellent point
- The conclusion: as soon as a country is destabilized, you can bet your ass the US is going to come in and fuck up any democratic progress in their own favor.
  
  Not only the US though.
  
  Mostly the US. Even indirectly.
- Tunesia is the only one with a success story where the mass protests were successful in creating reform (new president and constitution). In the other countries, the mass protests for reform were violently suppressed, and still are in the present day.
  
  The Arab Spring, which started out as an enormously hopeful movement for progressive change, has now largely been subjected to brutal repression and pushback from the forces of the status quo ante. It represents a poignant and tragic example of social struggle.
  Consequences of Capitalism - Chapter 6 - Noam Chomsky and Marv Waterstone
- It gave women significantly more rights than they had before, but we all know that shit doesn't matter apparently.
  
  Is this true?
- Democracy implies a system to translate people's will into action, and that implies both physical institutions for collecting information relating to the demands of the population, physical technology for processing that information, and physical institutions that can act on those demands.
  The problem is that westerners treat political systems as if they're entirely built upon vibes. You can go to the poorest place in the world and as long as you have good vibes, as long as you get enough people to say the right "democracy" slogans and do the right "democracy" rituals, then you can introduce a true utopian democracy.
  The problem is they ignore that we live in a physical world and not a vibes-based world, all societies are built upon a particular material foundations. The idea that you can go to a country that is so ridiculously impoverished that barely anyone can even read, like in Afghanistan, and then through good vibes convert it into a western-style democracy, is just completely ridiculous. The institutions just aren't there, it takes decades to build that.
  Westerners then use their vibe-based politics as justification to destroy these countries. "If you don't agree that we should go to war with them, you're just a dictator lover! You have bad vibes!!" Even westerners took centuries to actually evolve to their pseudodemocracies they have now, but they refuse to let other countries go through this same process. They insist they must skip this development process and just become western-style democracies right now, or else they'll get bombed into the stone age, or the CIA will foster some sort of coup or color revolution to overthrow the government and plunge it into civil war or a military dictatorship.
  But all this endless war does is make it harder to develop, so in reality western countries end up being the biggest barrier towards actually moving towards democracy. They keep destabilizing them, either through war, coups, or color revolution, which destroys the physical foundations of their society, destroys their institutions and infrastructure, and this makes it more difficult for them to actually progress as a society, and then westerners condemn them and paint them as genetically inferior for not having progressed as much.
  
  You still assume, that western countries would like to establish democracies as they would consider democracy in itself a value.
  But you have plenty of cases where actual democracies were overthrown violently in order to install a compliant authoritarian regime. Iran, Chile, Egypt...
  It is never about democracy and the "vibes" are just a farce. It is about installing compliant regimes that grant cheap access to their natural resources, labor, trade routes, markets...

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