Saturday 13 October 2012

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Some say the Arab Spring is a reaction to dictatorship, I was going to say out of date dictatorship, but that is an oxymoron, so I’ll say despotic dictatorship grown from regressive tribal values and a religion that hates learning.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 14th 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. 

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