{"id":33438,"date":"2011-01-18T15:18:22","date_gmt":"2011-01-18T20:18:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=33438"},"modified":"2011-06-03T16:50:28","modified_gmt":"2011-06-03T20:50:28","slug":"you-say-you-want-a-revolution-tunisia-has-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/daily-astrology\/you-say-you-want-a-revolution-tunisia-has-one\/","title":{"rendered":"You say you want a revolution? Tunisia has one."},"content":{"rendered":"

Apparently those looking for updates about the revolution in Tunisia via mainstream media were largely out of luck, according to Amy Goodman and her guest today on Democracy Now!<\/a>, University of Michigan professor of history Juan Cole. <\/p>\n

In recent days, Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali has been ousted and sent into exile in Saudi Arabia, following more than four weeks of protests throughout the country over food prices, unemployment and government repression. Just last week, the protests spread to Tunis, the relatively wealthy capitol city. Many Tunisians are calling for him to be extradited back to Tunisia to be tried.<\/p>\n

The French media and Facebook had the US beat on coverage of what is the first popular revolution in the middle-east in decades, since the 1979 revolution in Iran. Said Cole, “But the American corporate news just blew off this story. They\u2019re not interested in it. They don\u2019t seem to think it\u2019s important. Or maybe they\u2019re a little bit afraid of it, because it is, after all, a revolution made by workers, and American corporate media are a little nervous about things like that.”<\/p>\n

Nervous, indeed. Especially given the sudden recent focus on inflammatory speech, violence and calls for ‘action’ in American media these days, that nervousness makes sense. But it’s really no excuse to ignore an important world event. One reason Cole mentions for the lack of interest in this country is that the Tunisian revolution is not one fueled by Muslims. Were that the case, the so-called War on Terror would be invoked, stoking the rampant fear of Islam in America. Instead, as Cole remarks, “since it was a labor revolution and an internet activist revolution, it wasn\u2019t seen as connected in any way to the master narrative of American foreign policy, which is now the\u2014still the war on terror, even though they don\u2019t call it that.”<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Goodman’s interview with Cole makes it quite clear that like all revolutions, this one is happening on many levels at once (economic, class, education, etc.). Unlike some, it has many sectors involved in the uprising: labor groups, internet activists, rural workers. Cole describes it as “a populist revolution, and not particularly dominated in any way by Islamic themes, it seems to be a largely secular development,” and he further points out that so far at least, this distinguishes it from the Iranian Revolution of 1979 in that the latter was “ultimately taken over by the ayatollahs, by a clerical elite.”<\/p>\n

It may in part be the multi-faceted, populist aspect of this particular revolution that has many leaders of the Arab world (as well as Israel, given its neighbors) concerned. According to Cole, this is something very new for them and even former revolutionary and now longtime dictator Muammar Gaddafi of Libya has gotten rather comfortable with the status quo, scolding the Tunisians for not being patient — presumably hoping his own citizens will heed the caution.<\/p>\n

The revolution is being called by many a “WikiLeaks revolution.” Cole remearks about the WikiLeaks factor:<\/p>\n

One thing to keep in mind is that Tunisia is not an oil state. And it suffered from a kind of nepotism that was extreme. I mean, the U.S. leaked cables from WikiLeaks suggest that 50 percent of the economic elite of that country was related in one way or another to the president or to the first lady, Leila Ben Ali, and her Trabelsi clan. So, the combination of not having any extra resources to bribe people and buy them off and also of monopolizing the country\u2019s economic resources in the hands of a few relatives was unique to Tunisia.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While this exact situation may be unique to Tunisia, surely the issues of hunger, poverty, nepotism, corruption, frustration, classcism and workers’ rights are not. They seem to exist in various combination the world over, no matter how developed or underdeveloped the country. It remains to be seen what other glimpses behind the wizard’s curtain the leaked US diplomatic cables give us, and how the information gets used by those with the desire for change. In Tunisia, at least, it would seem a box of matches has been struck.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Apparently those looking for updates about the revolution in Tunisia via mainstream media were largely out of luck, according to Amy Goodman and her guest today on Democracy Now!, University of Michigan professor of history Juan Cole. In recent days, Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali has been ousted and sent into exile in … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":191,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33438"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/191"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33438\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}