"From Arab Spring to global revolution"
"In
an excerpt from his book Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere, Paul
Mason argues that a global protest movement, based on social networks,
is here to stay"
"The Protester" may have made it on to the cover of Time – but not a single protest has yet achieved its aim.
"Two years on from the fall of Hosni Mubarak, the new Egyptian president is from the Muslim Brotherhood;
on the streets of Cairo, the same kind of people who died in droves in
2011 are still getting killed. On the streets of Athens, the neo-Nazi
party Golden Dawn is staging anti-migrant pogroms. In Russia, Pussy Riot are in jail
and the leaders of the democracy movement facing criminal indictments.
The war in Syria is killing 200 people a day. It's an easy step from all
this to the conclusion that 2011, the year it all kicked off, was a
flash in the pan. But wrong. Something real and important was unleashed
in 2011, and it has not yet gone away. I am confident enough now to call
it a revolution. Some of its processes conform to the templates laid
down in the revolutionary wave that swept Europe in 1848, but many do
not: above all, the relationship between the physical and the mental,
the political and the cultural, seem inverted."Paul Mason, The Guardian,
Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/05/arab-spring-global-revolution
For a somewhat unusual angle in the midst of unmitigated confusion:
"Alif the Unseen: speculative fiction meets the Arab spring
G
Willow Wilson's novel about Egyptian hackers is a delirious urban
fantasy which puts the unlikely case for religion in an age of
empowering but intrusive technology"
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