Russian Warships Head To Syria In Show Of Power

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22. The "Arab Spring" revolutions are not only grass roots "democratic" movements, but

there is a large element of just that. Are Sunni fundamentalists, elements in the West, dictators in the region and others taking advantage of the chaos to pursue their own goals? Undoubtedly. That does not mean that the desire of regular people to live under non-repressive governments was not a major factor. They are not that different from us. One of their goals in life is not that of living with no rights.

Just because the Great Terror came shortly after the French Revolution does not mean that the French people overthrew a king because they wanted to be ruled by a non-royal dictatorship. Just because Stalin was one result of the Russian Revolution does not mean that the Russian people wanted to replace the Tsar with a non-royal brutal dictator. The French, the Russians, the Syrians and the Egyptians all want about the same things that we want. They (and we) do not always get what we want, but that does not mean that we learn to passively accept bad government just because the alternative may prove to be worse.

Juan Cole: Tunisia's 3-way class polarization - workers, upper class and fundamentalists

Tunisia is roiled not just by a religion/secular divide but by a Religious Right vs. Workers and peasants divide, with many middle class intellectuals siding with the latter. That is why the protests took place in hardscrabble rural towns as well as in downtown Tunis. Rural Tunisia is relatively religious, but it is also disproportionately unemployed, and al-Nahda has yet to do much for them. Indeed, where they have tried to strike and protest on labor issues, it has put them down (in a way it seems uninterested in putting down violent Salafis).

As usual, a lot of pundits are looking to use the instability in Tunisia to indict the Arab Spring. But the divisions and the structural problems in the country were largely produced by the old dictatorship, which could no longer deal with them by state coercion. Tunisia is wracked by that new phenomenon, of open political struggle. The country needs to rework it into peaceful civil politics if it is to go ahead, but the struggle itself is salutary. The old Tunisia of 80,000 secret police spying on citizens’ every word and the criminalization of political speech is gone, and good riddance. People who want that back for the sake of ‘stability’ are being unrealistic; it is what produced the instability, because it was untenable in the long run.

http://www.juancole.com/2013/02/tunisias-spring-turmoil.html

Human Rights Watch: Before the Arab Spring, the Unseen Thaw

Why didn’t we see the upheavals coming? One reason was because we overestimated the robustness of some of the authoritarian regimes, and underestimated demands for a better life, measured partly in human rights terms. Yes, we heard a lot about the hogra, an Algerian term used throughout North Africa to denote the contempt of rulers toward their people. But we failed to see how quickly it could ignite into a region-wide revolt that is, in large part, a struggle for dignity.

Long before Tunisian peddler Mohamed Bouazizi set himself ablaze on December 17, 2010, to protest a humiliating run-in that day with local police—igniting unrest that ousted President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali one month later and spread as far as Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen—there were countless, equally poignant protests against indignity that passed unnoticed. But they added to the pent-up frustrations that gave resonance to Bouazizi’s desperate act.

Even in Syria and Libya—where the governments were among the region’s most brutal—human rights contestation picked up during the past decade. In the former, the “Damascus Spring” reform movement and the Committees for the Revival of Civil Society that launched shortly after Bashar al-Asad succeeded his father as president in 2000, as well as the Damascus Declaration of 2005, displayed a new assertiveness by small groups of Syrians demanding basic rights, although many wound up serving long prison terms. And in Libya, families of victims of the 1996 mass killings in Abu Salim prison became the first group in the country to demonstrate regularly in public after a North Benghazi court in 2008 ordered the government to reveal the fate of Abu Salim prisoners who had “disappeared.”

We didn’t see the Arab Spring coming because we missed signs of the thaw. But we would do well to keep in mind what Arab peoples showed us about the power of the aspiration for dignity, a power that they are unlikely to surrender anytime soon.

http://www.hrw.org/world-report-2012/arab-spring-unseen-thaw