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Readers and social media pals respond to my post wondering why protests in MENA (Middle East / North Africa) have had major impact and toppled governments while similar huge protests have had little effect in the US and UK. ocicat_bengals (on Twitter) How many people have been killed? Good point. Our government doesn’t murder [...] Photograph: Ian Langsdon/EPA 500,000 protest cuts in London, and this is inspiring indeed. But the protests in the Middle East / North Africa (MENA)have been vastly more successfully in forcing change than those held in the US / UK. Most of the MENA protests, which have toppled governments, have been predominately nonviolent too, [...] The Middle East protesters are heroic and inspiring. They are literally putting their lives on the line. I helped organize multiple anti-Iraq war protests. Sometimes they were huge. Sometimes it got really tense with LAPD. But I knew the authorities would not open fire on us with assault rifles and that we wouldn’t be picked [...] Middle East protests may topple more governments but the underlying problems of poverty, rising prices, and income disparities will remain. Will the outcome for many of these countries be something like Pakistan is now? And who is Raymond Davis, supposed diplomat who killed two Pakistanis with highly accurate shots and is now jailed there? [...] Lenin’s Tomb Those middle class activists who think that Egyptians will now return to work to labour under a military regime – Wael Ghonim, the Google employee incessantly puffed by the Anglophone media as the ‘leader’ of this revolution, ‘trusts’ the army and urges people to go back to work – are about [...] At this point, my best guess is that when push comes to shove in Europe, the left will actually win in most nations. They aren’t wimps, they are willing to fight, they are willing to clash hard with the cops and they are willing to directly attack the interests of the ruling class. Unlike in [...] War is not politics, it is violence – murder – on an enormous scale. It does not lead to democracy, security, or good governance, it leads to anger, humiliation, and above all else, more violence. [...] Chris Bowers at Open Left squeals about why aren’t those damn lazy kids today out in the streets protesting, and where the outrage like there was in the halcyon days of 60 protests. However, the protests stopped. And so, we have new outrages. This is because there is a direct correlation between the amount of [...] StudentActivism.net has over 100 actions planned for today. March 4 Day of Action to Defend Education is a grass-roots event in which students, faculty, and others are coming together around the country to speak and act. The Day of Action was originally conceived in California as a response to the current crisis [...] YouTube Naomi Wolf, author of The End of America, argues that bureaucracy has killed effective protesting because mass social protests in the U.S. now have a feeling of “Disneyland activism.” “It feels fake, because it is fake,” she says. She says protesting in the US has been neutered by endless bureaucratic hurdles [...] |  | ||||
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