The Arab Spring from Oman

[ARCHIVES]: Yankour Global, birthplace of the 2012 student movement


6/17/2011
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
- George Santayana

Social inequality, staggering income disparity, military expansion, a powerful religious right, horrendous working conditions for labourers, unprecedented expansion of trade to colonies, trampling of civil liberties and human rights in the pursuit of a Laissez-Faire economy and a despotic rule. Scenes of despotism and utter chaos that seemed possible in renditions of visionary dystopias have jarred our consciousness to a rude awakening. These are our times, but they are not uncommon to the annals of history. This was 18th century France, a time when the light bulb was not even a pipe dream waiting to become the symbol of an idea. A time when that 96% of the populace realised that they were France, and not the monarchy who told them to eat cake when there was no bread to feed their starving families. A time when they stood shoulder to shoulder - merchants, doctors, lawyers, teachers, farmers and peasants - and declared with one pragmatic voice that liberty, equality and fraternity would form the construct for the Déclaration des droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen - the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen - the realisation and culmination of a retaliation to the many decades of oppression and indignity. The French revolution encapsulated the sovereignty of the people and became the canvas for the modern society to paint secularism and  civil equality.

Things have gotten a lot more expensive, the stakes are much higher and most of the social pariahs that plagued the civilized world of that age have been abolished. Yet, the challenges for the lower class still abound in the anachronistic cruelty of history repeating itself. The United States is rife with social inequality, stemming from structurally fundamental socio-economic deprivation and segregation that has got itself etched unabashedly into the psyche of the American people through bills like SB1070. The greed of the wealthy has looted the working-class to fill their coffers creating an obscene income disparity, with the top one-tenth of a percent of the population controlling ninety-five percent of the wealth, while twenty percent of the population gripes for food stamps for basic sustenance and a growing number of people are without health care and afraid of going bankrupt from trying to pay their way through a pneumonia infection, despite working two jobs to make ends meet, being nickeled and dimed along the way, as Barbara Ehrenreich poignantly put it.

England in the meantime is witnessing massive protests to the marginalisation of the public worker through severe austerity cuts, programs that helped older generations to emerge battered and bruised from the war that ravaged both their lives and economies, but secure in their futures. Futures set up by transforming the convection of power from the wallet to the ballot and through public service measures like the NHS. These futures are ever-dwindling for the working class today; futures deprived to engorge private corporations and financial institutions, reducing the masses to a paucity of general services. Corporations like Vodafone that evade accountability to their dues through legal manoeuvring, or companies like Arcadia Group that circumvent taxes through more cunning means, are the ones that not only elude paying their share, but manage to get government funding that would otherwise be invested in the well-being and prosperity of the nation. The same holds true for countries like Spain and Portugal that are seeing massive levels of unemployment coupled with cuts in spending, while giving huge breaks to corporations and their financial backers. However, the most stunning facet to the protests in the UK by UKUncut - an organisation embodying a lack of pandering to the menagerie of red herring issues and dealing with the core flaws of tax evasion by corporations and their direct links to austerity cuts - is the drowning out the cacophony of ludicrousness and offering tangible, doable solutions.

The religious right is another powerful and serpentine institution influencing everything from foreign policy to domestic health care, with ostentatious science, creationism and archaic religious ideologies; corrupting the very fabric of secularism and social justice, all the while ignoring that their greatest teacher was a communist and social justice advocate.They wave the banner of conservative Christianity, leading their lemmings to believe that they are engaged in a cosmic battle for good against the radical Islamists, flailing their red herring message for anyone to take heed. History has a lot to teach us, if we only took the time to learn we would realise that the British played out a similar strategy to overcome the growing instability to their rule in India.

Thanks to the efforts of revolutionaries like Gandhi, they rallied - rather poorly - nonetheless in unity to overthrow their oppressors. Remnants of that divide-and-conquer strategy still plagues much of the sub-continent today, egged on by vapid ideologies and social pariahs like caste and abject poverty, the latter coaxed on through the rapid urbanisation of much of the land, moving away from a previously well established, now rather down-trodden, agrarian populace.

Military expansion was key to keeping French assets in check and protecting the supply lines of resources that in turn allowed that expansion, as was the case with all the colonising European nations at the time. The same is true in the 21st century. It is no longer a matter of just public opinion, but fact, that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were about resources and their control, and not spreading democracy. We are more than a decade into these wars and have yet to see a functioning democracy that serves the people of those countries. Instead, we see private military contractors, plans for setting up permanent military bases and protecting those ever so crucial supply lines as growing agendas, while ignoring the egregious and mammoth losses in human life and the psychological condition of the soldiers deployed to those regions, some even resorting to forming ‘kill teams’ to exterminate civilians as if they were vermin.  Meanwhile there is a massive proliferation of small arms that kill more innocent civilians than soldiers and the only insurgents are the occupying troops. Troops and bases set up to keep despotic, brutally subjugating, nihilistic regimes in place. The flashy lifestyles of the rich and famous published on the front pages of newspapers and tabloids serve as the juicy carrot at the end of the stick, enslaving the general populace to work jobs they hate in order to buy things they don’t need, while the stick, which is stern reprimand for not keeping your head down and being invisible is job loss that could devastate the bread-winner trying to feed their family. The precarious condition of the labour supply is something we have allowed to happen just as people of the Roman empire did, before they went from being the people of Rome to ‘Rome is the mob’ - Control the mob and you control the empire.

Income stagflation is another factor that has contributed to an increasingly disparaged work force. Workers’ conditions have become deplorable, so deplorable that they have to be shipped outside to countries that allow those conditions. Taiwan, Bangladesh, Honduras, and many more have become industrial cattle sheds of labour, where corporations have more rights than the people who live there. Heinous atrocities that resulted in the labour movements of the late 18th and early-mid 19th centuries, that fought for better and safer working conditions; rights fought for and won, are now being stripped away systematically by those with the power to lobby and influence lawmakers. Politicians armed with visceral speeches and corporate funding are staggeringly disconnected from the flailing populace, ever increasing their margins and deflating the commoners they were elected to serve. Corporations are extirpating ways of life for entire generations of communities in countries like Mexico by introducing genetically engineered, highly resistant corn seeds with suicide genes, forcing farmers to abandon their farms and move to the cities to look for better opportunities.

This fuels the market for new, cheap labour that can be easily exploited to the benefit of other corporations. The same has happened to much of Central/South America, made worse by treaties such as NAFTA and CAFTA that serve no purpose other than to enrich the already subsidized and tax-dodging corporations like Monsanto. (many of those abandoned farmlands are used to grow crops like opium to fuel the pharmaceutical industry). Cheap labour is apparently not cheap enough as incarceration rates in the US have risen to staggering levels through measures set up by the Department of Homeland Security, the unpatriotic Patriot Act, detention of undocumented immigrants and the war on drugs, to name a few. The latter two have ballooned the now thriving prison industrial complex to a patently obvious slave trading racket: A multi-billion dollar industry orchestrated by heavyweights like the Corrections Corporation of America, the Management and Training Corporation and the GEO Group, owning more than 200 facilities across the US, profiteering like a hotel by increasing the inflow of inmates through vigorous lobbying for legislature like SB1070 and capitalising on their adverse effects. It is the slave trade of our time. (According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics the incarceration rates in the US are close to Soviet Union levels before WWII - close to 800 people per 100,000. A high percentage of those being Hispanic or African-American, and a majority of them for non-violent crimes; in fact, rather ironically, there are more African-Americans in prison now than there were slaves in colonial times).

These are the very voices that now resound across the globe - workers, teachers, doctors, intellectuals - fighting for those rights that they won not so long ago. Voices of protests against injustice and a system that is so depraved that human life has less value than a bomb. Protests that are brutally quelled and disbanded by military and police forces loyal to the governments they serve. (In fact, during the French revolution, the nobles and clergy called on the military to quell the growing unrest amongst the assembled people. They refused to fire upon their own, which really does shed some light into why a country like the U.A.E is spending millions of dollars in hiring former Blackwater Worldwide CEO, Erik Prince, to train an army of eight hundred foreign nationals as mercenaries to be used for crowd control in the event of a protest against human and labour rights). Protests in countries like Egypt and Tunisia to gain rights that were suppressed for decades, and protests in Madison, WI to keep the rights they had fought for and won, but are now being dismantled. Protests in countries like Bahrain, Yemen and Libya, against corrupt and self-absorbed governments, and protests all across the EU against corrupt financial institutions that are being rewarded for plunging their countries into deep recessions. The voices of the common people being heard through echoes of chaos and fear-mongering that has kept them, far too long, silenced and incapacitated to mobilise against the tyranny that is social engineering for profit.

This is not merely a call to arms, but a recognition of the paradigm shift in the worth of a human being. We live in a manufactured system where we are but chattel and money equates to power. Without power we are forced to be constrained to a life of servitude, ted the notion that all we can do is follow orders and hope for the best. Our humanity has been made destitute as we have been misled to conclude that the pursuit of happiness is congruent with a pursuit of wealth. We have borne witness to our travails and now we want to do something about them so we can invest in our futures. Too long have we been trundled upon, allowed to feed on the scraps, chasing our carrots on sticks as our world is exploited beyond repair by those with power to manufacture our consent. The illusion of choice and a free-market are mere vagaries of a system designed specifically to immobilise free thinking and social reform. But the choice exists only if one has the power to choose, and if you are shackled in debt you cannot choose. This delusion, coupled with a policy of indoctrination infiltrating the deepest levels of the education system, that teaches us the same cycle of wealth equals happiness, is radically detrimental to us understanding the core flaws in the system that needs, desperately, to be dismantled.

The shift stems from the vicissitude of representation to change the system to fit the needs of the common people, to representation to manage people, effecting change to accommodate the system. The moneyed interests are revoking our power to vote because it takes power from them and transfers it to those who have no vested stock holder interest. The voices we hear today - solidarity against a system so corrupt that it destroys the very fabric of society that it is meant to serve - across the globe are voices of indignation and resoluteness. 2011 is our march for freedom; freedom from corporate tyranny, social strife, inequality, injustice and detriment. It is our collective initiative to better the world we live in. It is our revolution for a new ‘declaration of the rights of man and the citizen’, illuminating the dark corners of powers attempting to frame a subservient society, exposing their festering cores and rewriting our futures. It is not a cosmic battle, it is not a battle of guns or bombs. It is a revolution for humanity, and it is about bloody time. Viva la revolucion!

by Rohit Nair, Muscat, Oman (Arabia)