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"All of a sudden some superpowers just yell freedom in your face" This is completely false. The Arab spring was not incited by the West. It was well underway
by jariel 6y ago
"All of a sudden some superpowers just yell freedom in your face"
This is completely false.
The Arab spring was not incited by the West.
It was well underway long before the West was even paying close attention.
In Tunisia, the West was not involved.
In Libya, the West stayed away as long as they could.
In Egypt, the West avoided until they were forced to pick a winner and Obama weighed in politically to 'support' a transfer of power (they were all looking to the US Pres. at that point).
In Syria, the West stayed out for a a long while, an when they did get involved, it was mostly against ISIS.
The grievances on the Arabs street are very real.
- TurkishPoptart 6y agoThe Arab Spring would not have happened without Twitter, right?
- vladTheInhaler 6y agoSo it was Twitter's "fault" for allowing people in these countries to communicate about the injustices they were facing? And please spare me the tired comparison to the collective hallucination that the Republican party is experiencing. People in Syria and Iran were being gunned down for acts of peaceful protest.
- TurkishPoptart 6y agoIt's nobody's "fault"; no one said that. But without this western owned and operated platform, how would they have communicated?
- jariel 6y agoIt would not have happened without the Printing Press, Television, Radio, AK47s designed in Russia and Made in China, the Suez Canal or Saudi Oil either. Of all possible contentious issues with respect to the Arab Spring uprising (and there are many) - this is not one of them. It definitely was not an 'inciting' factor. Frankly, if you want to point at 'the thing' it would be Chelsea Manning's cable leaks: determined to show her own nations foibles, she did nothing of the sort, rather she exposed the vast, totalitarian corruption among Arab state leaders, which lit the match in Tunisia and then elsewhere. It was a raw, populist uprising against the 'dumb tyranny' of those systems and had predictable results in each of the nations. It was completely outside the scope of US/Western control, and by and large totally outside the foreign policy objectives of most US/Western players. Nobody really wanted it - way too much instability and risk. There were also no winners, and a bunch of losers for sure, sadly.