Arab Spring: the Idealization of a Violence as "Nonviolence".

in the same sense that the significance
of the Vietnam War for the Vietnamese themselves may be something quite different from the significance of the Vietnamese war for Americans we have to recognize that the rise and fall of the Arab Spring phenomenon meant something very different for the people of Libya for the people of Egypt so on and so forth then it did for the predominantly white Western english-speaking world and that's what this video is about this is not the first time I've discussed this problem on the channel but very few members of my audience were watching perhaps five years ago the last time I discussed it I'm just checking on my girlfriend off camera do you remember I was challenging the nascent ideology of a vegan extremist movement called direct action everywhere when they first put forth their Radiology here on YouTube and on the internet in writing and other formats they explained what they were doing as learning the lessons of history applying the methodology of the Arab Spring to the struggle to establish animal rights to end the meat industry and so on and so forth at that time so that's just about five years ago now maybe now closer to six years they were treating the Arab Spring as a success story they were treating the Arab Spring as being the proof of the correctness of a theory that began with Mohandas Gandhi also known as Mahatma Gandhi politically here in India as it is it's the ideology of gothy had anything to do with what was happening then in Egypt and Libya and Tripoli and so it's just heartbreaking it's heartbreaking really stupid and you know as if the Arab Spring were not at that stage already a disaster a negative example you know tragedy that we should learn from but instead this was something to be celebrated imitated and and emulated and the strangest part of this all is the white western english-speaking attempts to kind of appropriate the theory interpret the significance of the Arab Spring also rests on insinuating into the narrative of a series of key points in history like like looking up at the sky and then drawing a line between stars in the sky insinuating into each of these points non-violence when the reality is that each and every one of those moments in history was defined by violence period no exceptions so I'm sure there are philosophers right now in the Arab speaking world um you know inclusive of Egypt and so on but I mean some of these people could be philosophizing about this in countries that didn't directly participate in the Arab Spring with people who could read the same language used in the newspapers throughout the region and really follow what's happened till I'm sure there were people drawing really meaningful philosophical conclusions about what would write it what went wrong but all of those people know that these so-called peaceful so-called nonviolent revolutions and changes of government every single one of them depended on basically military LED coup d'etat what it depended on was the military being mobilized against the government that was the decisive step we have a crucially important witness to the development of the white Western ideology of the Arab Spring in a mother jones article from the year 2012 I remember this article at the time this article is important in itself and it's also important in I don't know reflecting or prefiguring a thousand other articles that took this same line of reason he took it further and they might have been derivative this article directly because this article interviewed the author of a book who was celebrated or heralded as having written down many of these ideas before they happen so in the middle of this interview the link to this articles below this video and many points in this is article I have to sort of cringe at the sort of spectacle of self-deception that's being indulge in here but again this is this is the year 2012 all right the interviewer says quote you point to four key moments in history the French Revolution the American Revolution the Glorious Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution and then describe how the real revolution the nonviolent one took place in the hearts and minds of people in those countries so this is what I want to emphasize the ideology the Anglophone world created out of the Arab Spring it didn't just rely on forcibly misinterpreting what was happening in the Arab world all right it's not just that it's drawing a false line in a constellation where the final link from some fine historical tradition is then connected to the present by a false or dubious line or step of inference right each and every step is equally false what are the four the four moments here mentioned there's a fifth I'll come back to it section in the paragraph part of this which is of course the fifth that some engineer is is Mohandas Gandhi in in India and in South Africa okay the French Revolution what kind of a lunatic could describe the French Revolution as nonviolent the American Revolution what kind of an imbecile from what perspective could you say anything about the American Revolution in its in its resolution and its aims and its objectives and how it achieve them is nonviolent who could use either of these revolutions as a symbol of or demonstration of the importance of non-violence in achieving political change these may be very grim and instructive chapters of history for us to reflect on on the importance of violence of military discipline and someone of the third example I think is just obscure to most people the Glorious Revolution was the glorious revolution in England nobody talks about it anymore you know why because it was basically about aunty Catholicism it was one of many quote-unquote revolutions or you know political events any one that fundamentally had to do with the struggle of Protestant against Catholics so today we don't think of it that much it involved war and armies and Oh what do you mean this shows that the the real revolution the nonviolent one took took place in the hearts and minds of people how can that possibly be the lesson Vanity's and then the fourth and final one the Bolshevik Revolution he doesn't even see the Russian Revolution I'm sorry cuz these these are there's a significant difference here specifically the takeover of power by the Bolsheviks in Russia this is not merely a revolution but also a civil war this is unbelievably violent sadly the lesson we would draw from these four examples that they've set out here is that violence and only violence matters that the only thing that matters is who takes over so as I've already given away in the paragraph both before and after this in the same article there's a great deal of talk about Mohandas Gandhi and how what he represented is supposedly an ideal of non-violence okay but what is the actual example September of 1906 in Johannesburg South Africa okay what what was Gandhi what was Gandhi actually actually trying to achieve in in South Africa it wasn't the liberation of of black people it was most Americans you guys know this the first the first thing he wanted was legal recognition of Hindu marriages I'm sorry I'm cursed I've actually read the history here unlike the various vegans and so on who tried to weaponize the city ology to make it into something convenient okay um the second thing what really made him famous what really got him published in the newspapers and made his name notorious was in the lead-up to World War one Gandhi was fighting against the racism of the British Army and the British Army only wanted what people fighting in the military and he wanted ethnically Indian people ethnically brown-skinned people from India to be able to volunteer and fight for the British Empire it's the army in the end he got a halfway concession people of Indian ancestry in South Africa were allowed to play a support role they were allowed to be something like a nurse or carry heavy equipment but not to actually fight so so not only was there nothing nonviolent about the means is nothing on the hood about the objectives at the ends and he was in a caste system in an apartheid system in South Africa so she never be forgotten South Africa was not simply about the inequality of blacks and whites there were many specific ethnic groups including people from India that each had their precise station in an incredibly racist and evil social system um and he was a lawyer who was an advocate for one of the moderately privileged people he wanted them to be more privileged he was not helping the upliftment of the weak and the poor he was not helping the indigenous people with blacks he was not opposed to British Empire at that time he was in fact hilariously wanting people of Indian ancestry to be able to volunteer for and fight for the Empire look guys I'm not an expert this is not my expertise I I don't care this is not my passion in life there are so many things I've researched to death and everything we've covered this video I wouldn't even normally disclaim my ignorance of and yet I seem to be so much better informed than people like Wayne's young the leader of direct action everywhere people like the professional journalists at Mother Jones people like the author of this book Jonathan schnell there was this rotating cast of characters who back in the year 2011 2012 2013 at that time we're appearing on respectable news programs like you know BBC HARDtalk so you know British Broadcasting Service and so on you know uh and you know in very sober serious voices talking about how yes the Arab Spring proves once for all that really the way to make political change is non-violence this is like I say the last star in the constellation in the sky that really sets out the way to change the world is through this nonviolent tradition of political protest that somehow miraculously linked to Mohandas Gandhi and India as if as if it were so easy to find something in common between you know the struggle for India's independence from the British Empire and you know veganism or ecology or wanting to have democracy in North Africa and it's you know it's just surreal the comparison to begin with and then as I'm sitting here I mean relatively succinctly in this YouTube video what's interesting about the analysis is that it requires dishonesty it requires a peculiar leap of faith from us at each and every stage of the analysis all right so as I disclaim the beginning this video I am NOT here discussing the reality of the Arab Spring at all I am NOT discussing the significance of the Arab Spring from an Arab perspective what it means for the people who are living today in Egypt and one of the reasons I'm not doing that is I think all of those people are aware the Arab Spring was a failure it was a catastrophe was a calamity I was almost moved to tears where we saw an interview just via the Internet but is a TV recorded interview with a man who had fought for democracy in the Arab Spring but now his country is in such a constant state of internecine violence descending into tribalism and so on he said in his own voice that when he looks back now he would have fought to maintain the despotism they had before instead of fighting for democracy if he'd had the knowledge that this was where democracy would lead was to this you know a horrible state of a war of all against all they're okay to a much greater extent than the Vietnam War became a symbol in the minds of Americans utterly divorced from and relate unrelated to the reality of the Vietnam War for the Vietnamese the Arab Spring has taken on a significance in the white Western english-speaking imagination completely divorced from the reality what this meant for Arab Arabic people in general or Egyptian people in particular Libyan people in particular any of these examples you you want to talk about how is this possible in the year 2020 when the simple facts of the matter can be so easily googled you know I'm sorry this is I don't know this is depressing or an uplifting note to end on but you know guys I can remember when I physically had to walk into an archive and go to a shelf nobody ever went to was the government publications section and go through and find like the the serial number of the document number this wasn't secret information but to get government information was this incredibly laborious task and now I can Google around and in 30 seconds fine things so much more effectively and I can find the whole history of the prior documents and the revisions and I can find an interview with the people who wrote that legislation and why it happened and so on so much is knowable so immediately but there's this kind of commitment people have to living in this this dangerous mix of truth and fiction you know people want to believe in this mythology they want to believe in the myth of Mohandas Gandhi as the hero as was presented in a Hollywood movie with you know a western actor playing the role of condi that movie is unbelievably far removed from the reality of who Gandhi was that what happened in it his independence struggle they want to believe in a myth sort of just directly quoting this one article from Mother Jones Mother Jones is supposed to be nonfiction this myth that the French Revolution the American Revolution the Glorious Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution that those four all represent ideals of of non-violence in the pursuit of social and cultural change to me the most dangerous warning that we can at any time return to the the horrors of the revolution that we can at any time return to the extreme violence that was indeed unleashed by the Arab Spring itself is precisely the people are so willing are so eager to live in a world that is not defined and not described by facts where they don't learn the lessons of history that they're so eager to commit themselves to mythology