THE ARAB SPRING

Some say the Arab Spring is a reaction to dictatorship, I was going to say out of date dictatorship, but that is an oxymoron, so I’ll say despotic dictatorship grown from regressive tribal values and a religion that hates learning.

Others will say the Arab Spring is inevitable, it is simply their Renaissance. We had our Renaissance 1400 years after Christ, so why shouldn’t they have theirs 1400 years after Mohammed. Too easy, too convenient.

No, the Arab Spring is a direct result of technology. If you want to look for sources for the Arab Spring, look no farther than Japan and Finland. And the USA and Britain. And France and Germany and anywhere that designs and manufactures computers, televisions, mobile phones and all the other gizmos. They were the harbingers of the New Age, the Arab Spring. Nokia and Toshiba, Apple and IBM, to mention only a few.

These countries and these companies, with a highly educated youth living in what are generally meritocracies, and the geniuses who came up with and promoted the Internet, they were the people who brought the Arabs their Spring.

For example, in Iran today, 70% of the population is under 30. And they all have mobile phones, pads, laptops, satellite televisions, etc. etc - in other words, they have all the best and the worst of the rest of the world in their hands, in their bedrooms, in their schools and in their heads.

Then they look round at their world, their immediate world, and discover it is still in the Dark Age, late 14^th century at best, governed by hedonistic despots determined to survive at the expense of the rest of the citizens. The youth in the Arab countries, looking round at what they have and then seeing what they could have, created the Arab Spring. That is its impetus, nothing else. 

THOSE WHO ONLY UNDERSTAND HISTORY, FORCE THE REST OF US TO RELIVE IT.

In Europe, after the end of the Second World War, conventional politics had as its main goal, the permanent prevention of German militarism. Out of this came first; the Iron and Steel Federation which eventually became The Common Market - a United Europe.

The one idea behind this United Europe was to tie the countries of Europe so closely together, intertwined politically, commercially and socially, they could never go to war with each other. This was their uninspired and superficial reading of history. But anybody who was there, or anybody who experienced Europe immediately after the Second World War, knew that the Germans would never go to war again in Europe.

This was not a secret. After the dreadful crimes of the Second World War came to light and after the Allied occupation of Germany - we are talking here particularly of the Russian occupation of Germany, the new German, the young German was an entirely different person from his father and grandfather.

Europe did need an integration, but an integration based on its future needs; trade, trade and more trade without boundaries. Here we are not talking about unregulated capitalism but a capitalism regulated but unlimited.

Instead we have the EU, a Europe constructed to meet a problem that was already history and would always be history. That is one of the reasons it’s in such a mess. The priorities were wrong because the mission was misplaced. We need a Europe which is all about trade and not about culture or history or social integration. If that comes it will come piecemeal and in its own time...