Robert C. Koehler
The Arab Spring -- which indeed is a global spring -- is a struggle, an upheaval, for fundamental justice and humanity. That's the problem.
We -- the Washington Consensus, the post-colonial West, the world's military and economic overlords -- have no more enthusiasm for this awakening, this cry for genuine democracy and equitable distribution of resources, than the tottering autocrats of the
In an excellent analysis of the Libyan situation last month at muftah.org, Mohammed Bamyeh, a
He defines "autocratic deafness" as "a structural inability for the regimes to hear their peoples' grievances or to understand them as little more than childish noise, which could be allayed with economic or other types of transient gifts, rather than as demands for fundamental political change."
He adds: "In this environment, the demise of the old Arab order has become certain."
What Bamyeh is talking about is not -- cannot be -- limited to the
What about our own autocratic deafness? The movement toward lasting peace and fairness, in the West as in the
The geopolitics of today's world is a hellish cauldron of competing and temporarily interlocking interests, with violence, coercion and domination the only known standards for conflict resolution. Despite widespread poverty, hunger and disease, most of our energy has gone into fighting ourselves. Military spending worldwide was an estimated
Thus, even if there is a humanitarian impulse in the Obama administration's temporary stewardship of American global relations, the only way this impulse can express itself is violently, and in relationship to other violence. Despite the absurd ineffectiveness of bombing campaigns to effect a given end, despite the certainty that we will kill Libyan civilians both immediately and over time (through the probable use of depleted uranium and all the other toxic hazards of war), and despite the danger of trapping ourselves in a third military quagmire, we embark on a regime-change operation in
"While the Libyan uprising is new and unpredictable, the US/
The real reasons for our Libyan intervention are far more complex, of course, than the smiley-face of humanitarianism, but I pause right now in a state of wonder at our geopolitical cluelessness about nonviolent action. When we began bombing
This too, as far as I'm concerned, is autocratic deafness. It's more concealed -- less domestically repressive -- than the variety practiced by our Middle Eastern allies. Indeed, the brunt of the repression is exercised beyond the borders of First World nations, not just militarily but economically, via the
"The people of the Arab world have begun to do their part,"
This prospect wouldn't seem very likely if it weren't for the efforts of the
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