From the beginning, we knew that the Arab Spring would never happen.
Bloggers, anchors, and researchers; CNN, FOX News, and twitter; political reporting, live reporting, and self-reporting ensure every moment is located, captured, understood, and transmitted back to us in real-time, so that we are never confronted by the diverse others of the world. We interpolate the events in the arab spring back into our American democratic problematic that sees the arab spring as an extension of the American revolution, and a clear calling for us-styled democracy assistance.
Spanos ’11 [William V, highly acclaimed author, World War II Veteran, POW at Dresden, distinguished professor of English and Comparative Literature at the SUNY Binghamton…]
Since the only language …multiplicity of resisting perspectives
Remarks of President Obama. “A Moment for Opportunity.” US Department of State. May 19, 2011.
“countering terrorism...securing the free flow of commerce, and safeguard the security of the region…the West was blamed as the source of all ills, a half century after the end of colonialism”
Even though Obama stressed that we will assist the Arab Spring by recreating them in our image, focusing particular attention on freedom to avoid betraying our real fear;
Spanos ’11 [William V, highly acclaimed author, World War II Veteran, POW at Dresden, distinguished professor of English and Comparative Literature at the SUNY Binghamton…]
What the panoptic gaze ….if not Jihadist, Islam
This panoptic gaze, both of the administration and of the media, is what we see in current efforts in the region, and we see the revolution reflected back at us from Fox News to CNN, twitter to facebook, presidential addresses, even our fake news programs. The Egyptian protesters use of twitter to organize flash mobs even allowed Western viewers to tune in and receive real-time updates sent straight to our phones, and on our news, we could hear soundbites from rebels telling us exactly what it was like in the midst of it all;
Baudrillard 95 [jean, way cooler now that he’s underground, the gulf war did not take place, intro, p2]
Occasionally, the absurdity …was happening.
The revolution has expanded beyond the protesters, beyond the Egyptians, beyond Bouazizi, beyond the Middle East, and their governments, and their people, and their cultures, and their desires. No, now it is about “DEMOCRACY”, or at least the appearance of democracy. Baudrillard explains that:
Baudrillard 95 [Jean, way cooler now that he’s underground, The Virtual Illusion: Or the AutomaticWriting of the World, Theory, Culture & Society (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 12 (1995), 97-107]
There is always …the sign of its end.
“In that empire, the art of cartography attained such perfection that the map of a single province occupied the entirety of a city, and the map of the empire, the entirety of a province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.” But the people chafed under the cartographers guild, and the perfect exactitude of their map, locating every building, person, and thing in its proper place, and one day they overthrew the guild. And not without some pitilessness, they delivered the map up to the inclemencies of sun and winters. And in the Arabia deserts, still today, there are tattered ruins of that map, inhabited by animals and beggars.” (Quoted from or paraphrasing Jorge Luis Borges. “On Exactitude in Science.” Collected Fiction. Trans. Andrew Hurley. 1999).
Welcome to the greatest country on earth.
Spanos ‘11
Equally important,… this beast” of revolution
Beginning from a starting point that places so much overdetermined value in democracy, which our activity secures and reproduces in both content and form of – deliberation and citizens inscribes and subtly directs the very trajectory of how we relate to the issue of democracy, with democratic assurance.
Baudrillard 95 [jean, way cooler now that he’s underground, “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place”, p 85]
“The crucial stake,…the entire West.
In all these measures, we negate any liberatory potential of the Arab Spring and ventriloquise the protesters as masses of potential American citizens, like Emma Lazarus' tired, poor, hungry masses, yearning to breathe free. In this ventriloquism,
Baudrillard 95 [jean, way cooler now that he’s underground, “The Gulf War Never Happened”, Translated by Paul Patton, Indiana University Press, p. 37-9]
Thanks to this war…is no decoy.
Spanos explain this is just one more manifestation of the American puritan mission in the wilderness that has evolved into our errant mission to spread democracy to the world.
Spanos 2K10 [Exceptionalist state of exceptionalism, p. 148-9]
To be more specific…‘‘visionary’’ possibility.
We prefer not to be accomplices to the dominant framing of the Arab Spring and the resolution which serves onto to quell dissent and denies the possibility of existing outside the map of US politicians and media in colonizing the world. Rather than transform these diverse events into the “Arab Spring,” into merely another media event, we affirm the singularity of this year's Resolved: The United States Federal Government should substantially increase its democracy assistance for one or more of the following: Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen.
We instead affirm the singularity of this event. We – as western intellectuals – affirm their democracy in the only way we can while allowing it to remain their democracy and not our own, which can only be through an unnaming of the revolts in Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen. We take our cue from Spanos, who writes:
Spanos 11
The Revolution… of Hannah Arendt).