Given Muammar Qaddafi’s recent death and the continued political uncertainty in Libya, tourism will likely not be the country’s boom industry any time soon. Some people, however, get paid to visit the hot, ruined, sand-blasted terrain of North Africa. Journalists, sure, and politicians, too. But also travel writers.

On account of the Arab Spring the third and most recent edition of the Lonely Planet Guide to Libya was never published, according to one of its primary authors Kate Grace Thomas. In a vignette-style article about being a travel writer in a warzone published on Guernica, Thomas explains:

I was writing a guidebook to a country that no longer exists; a country where busloads of Italian tourists gathered around hotel buffets; where billboards advertised the Qaddafi brand—forty-one years, they sang, the leader’s face peering down at the cars on the highways like that of a god who thought he created them. The guidebook I researched was a guidebook to the past.

Thomas’ dispatch from the turbulent Libyan heartland is as riveting as any other you’ve read, even lacking the injuries and explosions you’d hear about from an embedded journalist. But what really made this essay memorable was how Thomas repeatedly blurred the distinction between travel writing and traditional reporting, between natural landscape and political landscape, between tourist amenities and cultural anxieties. For Thomas, they are one and the same. Following are a few of the best tips for savvy tourists.

On the massive geographical rift down the middle of Libya:

“Tripoli and Benghazi are very far apart,” he said. “Not only in terms of kilometers, you understand? Most Libyans must choose; either we are true to Tripoli or we are true to Benghazi.”

On the best way to hire a cab:

“It is safer that way,” the driver told me. “If you want to travel safely in Libya, always ask the driver to bring his wife.”

On luxury accommodations:

“Qaddafi,” said the hotel manager, “has slept in this bed.” . . .

I couldn’t afford to stay there, so I thanked the manager and left to write up my review. This was the private wing of one of Benghazi’s largest hotels, concealed from the public by fat palm trees, elephant grass, and a thousand-dollar price tag.

On scenic routes:

We took the road south from Tobruk, past the World War Two cemeteries with their neat rows of headstones and swept pathways, stippled with aloe vera plants, flowering cacti, and simple dedications. These burial grounds were tidy, orderly, nothing like the mass graves slowly filling in Tripoli.

Back in New York, Thomas reflects on her travels, her commissioned writing, and the rapid changes sweeping Libya. Specifically, she meditates on Qaddafi’s Bab al-Aziziya compound:

The compound used to be sand. Qaddafi had concrete poured into its grounds, burying the ghosts of footprints, sowing grass seeds around its vast contours. He covered the compound with the concrete of his ideas, his doctrine. He covered Libya with them too. But when the rebels showed up, firing their rounds, chipping away at its surface, pockets of sand became visible.

Qaddafi had tried to turn Libya into rock, his rock, but underneath it was sand, shifting sand, all along.

Source: Guernica 

 

This article was originally published at TomDispatch.com.

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Now that Washington has at least six wars cooking (in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, and more generally, the global war on terror), Americans find themselves in a new world of war.  If, however, you haven't joined the all-volunteer military, any of our 17 intelligence outfits, the Pentagon, the weapons companies and hire-a-gun corporations associated with it, or some other part of the National Security Complex, America’s distant wars go on largely without you (at least until the bills come due).

War has a way of turning almost anything upside down, including language.  But with lost jobs, foreclosed homes, crumbling infrastructure, and weird weather, who even notices?  This undoubtedly means that you’re using a set of antediluvian war words or definitions from your father’s day.  It’s time to catch up.

So here’s the latest word in war words: what’s in, what’s out, what’s inside out.  What follows are nine common terms associated with our present wars that probably don’t mean what you think they mean.  Since you live in a twenty-first-century war state, you might consider making them your own.

Victory:  Like defeat, it’s a “loaded” word and rather than define it, Americans should simply avoid it. 

In his last press conference before retirement, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was asked whether the U.S. was “winning in Afghanistan.”  He replied, “I have learned a few things in four and a half years, and one of them is to try and stay away from loaded words like ‘winning’ and ‘losing.’  What I will say is that I believe we are being successful in implementing the president's strategy, and I believe that our military operations are being successful in denying the Taliban control of populated areas, degrading their capabilities, and improving the capabilities of the Afghan national security forces.”

In 2005, George W. Bush, whom Gates also served, used the word “victory” 15times in a single speech (“National Strategy for Victory in Iraq”).  Keep in mind, though, that our previous president learned about war in the movie theaters of his childhood where the Marines always advanced and Americans actually won.  Think of his victory obsession as the equivalent of a mid-twentieth-century hangover.

In 2011, despite the complaints of a few leftover neocons dreaming of past glory, you can search Washington high and low for “victory.”  You won’t find it.  It’s the verbal equivalent of a Yeti.  Being “successful in implementing the president’s strategy,” what more could you ask?  Keeping the enemy on his “back foot”: hey, at $10 billiona month, if that isn’t “success,” tell me what is?

Admittedly, the assassination of Osama bin Laden was treated as if it were VJ Day ending World War II, but actually win a war?  Don’t make Secretary of Defense Gates laugh!

Maybe, if everything comes up roses, in some year soon we’ll be celebrating DE (Degrade the Enemy) Day.

Enemy : Any super-evil pipsqueak on whose back you can raise at least $1.2 trillion a year for the National Security Complex. 

“I actually consider al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula with Al-Awlaki as a leader within that organization probably the most significant risk to the U.S. homeland.”  So said Michael Leiter, presidential adviser and the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, last February, months before Osama bin Laden was killed (and Leiter himself resigned).  Since bin Laden’s death, Leiter’s assessment has been heartily seconded in word and deed in Washington.  For example, New York Times reporter Mark Mazzetti recently wrote: “Al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen is believed by the C.I.A. to pose the greatest immediate threat to the United States, more so than even Qaeda’s senior leadership believed to be hiding in Pakistan.”

Now, here’s the odd thing.  Once upon a time, statements like these might have been tantamount to announcements of victory: That’s all they’ve got left?

Of course, once upon a time, if you asked an American who was the most dangerous man on the planet, you might have been told Adolf Hitler, or Joseph Stalin, or Mao Zedong.  These days, don’t think enemy at all; think comic-book-style arch-villain Lex Luthor or Doctor Doom -- anyone, in fact, capable of standing in for globe-encompassing Evil.

Right now, post-bin-Laden, America’s super-villain of choice is Anwar al-Awlaki, an enemy with seemingly near superhuman powers to disturb Washington, but no army, no state, and no significant finances.  The U.S.-born “radical cleric” lives as a semi-fugitive in Yemen, a poverty-stricken land of which, until recently, few Americans had heard.  Al-Awlaki is considered at least partially responsible for two high-profile plots against the U.S.: the underwear bomber and package bombs sent by plane to Chicago synagogues.  Both failed dismally, even though neither Superman nor the Fantastic Four rushed to the rescue.

As an Evil One, al-Awlaki is a voodoo enemy, a YouTube warrior (“the bin Laden of the Internet”) with little but his wits and whatever superpowers he can muster to help him.  He was reputedly responsible for helping to poison the mind of Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan before he blew away 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas.  There’s no question of one thing: he’s gotten inside Washington’s war-on-terror head in a big way.  As a result, the Obama administration is significantly intensifying its war against him and the ragtag crew of tribesmen he hangs out with who go by the name of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Covert War: It used to mean secret war, a war “in the shadows” and so beyond the public’s gaze.  Now, it means a conflict in the full glare of publicity that everybody knows about, but no one can do anything about.  Think: in the news, but off the books. 

Go figure: today, our “covert” wars are front-page news.  The top-secret operation to assassinate Osama bin Laden garnered an unprecedented 69% of the U.S. media “newshole” the week after it happened, and 90% of cable TV coverage.  And America’s most secretive covert warriors, elite SEAL Team 6, caused “SEAL-mania” to break out nationwide. 

Moreover, no minor drone strike in the “covert” CIA-run air war in the Pakistani tribal borderlands goes unreported.  In fact, as with Yemen today, future plans for the launching or intensification of Pakistani-style covert wars are now openly discussed, debated, and praised in Washington, as well as widely reported on.  At one point, CIA Director Leon Panetta even bragged that, when it came to al-Qaeda, the Agency’s covert air war in Pakistan was “the only game in town.”

Think of covert war today as the equivalent of a heat-seeking missile aimed directly at that mainstream media newshole.  The “shadows” that once covered whole operations now only cover accountability for them.

Permanent bases:   In the American way of war, military bases built on foreign soil are the equivalent of heroin.  The Pentagon can’t help building them and can’t live without them, but “permanent bases” don’t exist, not for Americans. Never. 

That’s simple enough, but let me be absolutely clear anyway: Americans may have at least 865 bases around the world (not including those in war zones), but we have no desire to occupy other countries.  And wherever we garrison (and where aren’t we garrisoning?), we don’t want to stay, not permanently anyway.

In the grand scheme of things, for a planet more than four billion years old, our 90 bases in Japan, a mere 60-odd years in existence, or our 227 bases in Germany, some also around for 60-odd years, or those in Korea, 50-odd years, count as little.  Moreover, we have it on good word that permanent bases are un-American.  Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said as much in 2003 when the first of the Pentagon's planned Iraqi mega-bases were already on the drawing boards.  Hillary Clinton said so again just the other day, about Afghanistan, and an anonymous American official added for clarification: "There are U.S. troops in various countries for some considerable lengths of time which are not there permanently."  Korea anyone?  So get it straight, Americans don’t want permanent bases. Period.

And that’s amazing when you think about it, since globally Americans are constantly building and upgrading military bases.  The Pentagon is hooked.  In Afghanistan, it’s gone totally wild -- more than 400 of them and still building!  Not only that, Washington is now deep into negotiations with the Afghan government to transform some of them into “joint bases” and stay on them if not until hell freezes over, then at least until Afghan soldiers can be whipped into an American-style army.  Latest best guesstimate for that? 2017without even getting close.

Fortunately, we plan to turn those many bases we built to the tune of billions of dollars, including the gigantic establishments at Bagram and Kandahar, over to the Afghans and just hang around, possibly “for decades,” as -- and the word couldn’t be more delicate or thoughtful -- “tenants.” 

And by the way, accompanying the recent reports that the CIA is preparing to lend the U.S. military a major covert hand, drone-style, in its Yemen campaign, was news that the Agency is building a base of its own on a rushed schedule in an unnamed Persian Gulf country. Just one base.  But don’t expect that to be the end of it.  After all, that’s like eating one potato chip.

Withdrawal: We’re going, we’re going... Just not quite yet and stop pushing! 

If our bases are shots of heroin, then for the U.S. military leaving anyplace represents a form of “withdrawal,” which means the shakes.  Like drugs, it’s just so darn easy to go in that Washington keeps doing it again and again.  Getting out’s the bear.  Who can blame them, if they don’t want to leave?

In Iraq, for instance, Washington has been in the grips of withdrawal fever since 2008 when the Bush administration agreed that all U.S. troops would leave by the end of this year.  You can still hear those combat boots dragging in the sand.  At this point, top administration and military officials are almost begging the Iraqis to let us remain on a few of our monster bases, like the ill-named Camp Victory or Balad Air Base, which in its heyday had air traffic that reputedly rivaledChicago’s O’Hare International Airport.  But here’s the thing: even if the U.S. military officially departs, lock, stock, and (gun) barrel, Washington’s still not really planning on leaving. 

In recent years, the U.S. has built near-billion-dollar “embassies” that are actually citadels-cum-regional-command-posts in the Greater Middle East.  Just last week, four former U.S. ambassadors to Iraq made a plea to Congress to pony up the $5.2 billion requested by the Obama administration so that that the State Department can turn its Baghdad embassy into a massive militarized mission with 5,100 hire-a-guns and a small mercenary air force.

In sum, “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh” is not a song that Washington likes to sing.

Drone War (see also Covert War):   A permanent air campaign using missile-armed pilotless planes that banishes both withdrawal and victory to the slagheap of history. 

Is it even a “war” if only one side ever appears in person and only one side ever suffers damage?  America’s drones are often flown from thousands of miles away by “pilots” who, on leaving their U.S. bases after a work shift “in” a war zone, see signs warning them to drive carefully because this may be “the most dangerous part of your day.”  This is something new in the history of warfare.

Drones are the covert weaponry of choice in our covert wars, which means, of course, that the military just can’t wait to usher chosen reporters into its secret labs and experimental testing grounds to reveal dazzling visions of future destruction.

To make sense of drones, we probably have to stop thinking about “war” and start envisaging other models -- for example, that of the executioner who carries out a death sentence on another human being at no danger to himself.  If a pilotless drone is actually an executioner’s weapon, a modern airborne version of the guillotine, the hangman’s noose, or the electric chair, the death sentence it carries with it is not decreed by a judge and certainly not by a jury of peers.

It’s assembled by intelligence agents based on fragmentary (and often self-interested) evidence, organized by targeteers, and given the thumbs-up sign by military or CIA lawyers.  All of them are scores, hundreds, thousands of miles away from their victims, people they don’t know, and may not faintly understand or share a culture with.  In addition, the capital offenses are often not established, still to be carried out, never to be carried out, or nonexistent. The fact that drones, despite their “precision” weaponry, regularly take out innocent civilians as well as prospective or actual terrorists reminds us that, if this is our model, Washington is a drunken executioner.

In a sense, Bush’s global war on terror called drones up from the depths of its unconscious to fulfill its most basic urges: to be endless and to reach anywhere on Earth with an Old Testament-style sense of vengeance.  The drone makes mincemeat of victory (which involves an endpoint), withdrawal (for which you have to be there in the first place), and national sovereignty (see below).

Corruption:  Something inherent in the nature of war-torn Iraqis and Afghans from which only Americans, in and out of uniform, can save them. 

Don’t be distracted by the $6.6 billion that, in the form of shrink-wrapped $100 bills, the Bush administration loaded onto C-130 transport planes, flew to liberated Iraq in 2003 for “reconstruction” purposes, and somehow mislaid.  The U.S. special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction did recently suggest that it might prove to be "the largest theft of funds in national history"; on the other hand, maybe it was just misplaced... forever. 

Iraq’s parliamentary speaker now claims that up to $18.7 billion in Iraqi oil funds have gone missing-in-action, but Iraqis, as you know, are corrupt and unreliable.  So pay no attention.  Anyway, not to worry, it wasn’t our money.  All those crisp Benjamins came from Iraqi oil revenues that just happened to be held in U.S. banks.  And in war zones, what can you do?  Sometimes bad things happen to good $100 bills!

In any case, corruption is endemic to the societies of the Greater Middle East, which lack the institutional foundations of democratic societies.  Not surprisingly then, in impoverished, narcotized Afghanistan, it’s run wild.  Fortunately, Washington has fought nobly against its ravages for years.  Time and again, top American officials have cajoled, threatened, even browbeat Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his compatriots to get them to crack down on corrupt practices and hold honest elections to build support for the American-backed government in Kabul.

Here’s the funny thing though: a report on Afghan reconstruction recently released by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Democratic majority staff suggests that the military and foreign “developmental” funds that have poured into the country, and which account for 97% of its gross domestic product, have played a major role in encouraging corruption.  To find a peacetime equivalent, imagine firemen rushing to a blaze only to pour gasoline on it and then lash out at the building’s dwellers as arsonists.

National Sovereignty:  1. Something Americans cherish and wouldn’t let any other country violate; 2. Something foreigners irrationally cling to, a sign of unreliability or mental instability. 

Here’s the twenty-first-century credo of the American war state.  Please memorize it:  The world is our oyster.  We shall not weep.  We may missile [bomb, assassinate, night raid, invade] whom we please, when we please, where we please.  This is to be called “American safety.” 

Those elsewhere, with a misplaced reverence for their own safety or security, or an overblown sense of pride and self-worth, who put themselves in harm’s way -- watch out.   After all, in a phrase: Sovereignty ‘R’ Us.

Note: As we still live on a one-way imperial planet, don’t try reversing any of the above, not even as a thought experiment.  Don’t imagine Iranian drones hunting terrorists over Southern California or Pakistani special operations forces launching night raids on small midwestern towns.  Not if you know what’s good for you.

War:   A totally malleable concept that is purely in the eye of the beholder.

Which is undoubtedly why the Obama administration recently decided not to return to Congress for approval of its Libyan intervention as required by the War Powers Resolution of 1973.  The administration instead issued a report essentially declaring Libya not to be a “war” at all, and so not to fall under the provisions of that resolution.  As that report explained: "U.S. operations [in Libya] do not involve [1] sustained fighting or [2] active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve [3] the presence of U.S. ground troops, U.S. casualties, or a serious threat thereof, or [4] any significant chance of escalation into a conflict characterized by those factors."

This, of course, opens up the possibility of quite a new and sunny American future on planet Earth, one in which it will no longer be wildly utopian to imagine war becoming extinct.  After all, the Obama administration is already moving to intensify and expand its [fill in the blank] in Yemen, which will meet all of the above criteria, as its [fill in the blank] in the Pakistani tribal borderlands already does.  Someday, Washington could be making America safe all over the globe in what would, miraculously, be a thoroughly war-less world.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book isThe American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books). 

[Note:  My special thanks go to three websites without which I simply couldn’t write pieces like this or cover the areas that interest me most:  Antiwar.com, Juan Cole’s Informed Comment, and Paul Woodward’s the War in Context.  All are invaluable to me.  In addition, two daily services I couldn’t do without are Today’s Terrorism News, which comes out of New York University’s Center for Law and Security (and to which you can subscribe by clicking here), and the Af/Pak Channel Daily Brief, which comes out of the New America Foundation (and to which you can subscribe by clicking here).  Both represent monumental effort and are appreciated.]

Source: TomDispatch.com  

Image by thomashaugen, licensed under Creative Commons.  

Former military interrogator Matthew Alexander urges Rep. Peter King of New York to stop demonizing a group of people who’ve made sacrifices for the U.S. at home and abroad.

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Now that the shootings in Tucson are yesterday’s news, states and the federal government can continue slashing their mental health budgets without a peep from the mainstream media.

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With an NFL lockout looming, radical sports scribe Dave Zirin explains why true sports fans, labor activists, and progressives should stand proudly with the NFL players.

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The cerebral environmental writing of Loren Eiseley is too often overlooked, say his fans. Read one admirer’s tribute to the unsung eco-lit pioneer.

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Banksy meets Angry Birds in a brilliant design mashup: Angry Birdsky.

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Losers: Presidents Hosni Mubarak and Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. Winners: rappers, ravers, and metalheads.

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Cartoonist Mark Fiore weighs in on the aggregation of aggregators in the Huffington Post-AOL merger, and what it means for what we used to call journalism.

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Have you ever seen a rapper take on greenwashing and eco-consumerism? Enter Sims, with his new video for “One Dimensional Man.” 

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A fabulous archive of the BBC's interviews with great writers. The general BBC archive itself is chockful of terrific stuff.

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Finally, the masters of heavy metal pay tribute to Old Blue Eyes.

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One of the most touching photo projects in recent years: KayLynn Devaney's The Day-to-Day Life of Albert Hastings.

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What's an “Intellectual clutch bag,” you ask? This.

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On Libya:

The press has had a hard time figuring out what’s happening on the ground in Libya, but The Atlantic’s InFocus photo blog can give you a glimpse.

If McCain had been elected president, would we be invading Libya right now?

Gaddafi, Qaddafi, Kadafi, Qadhafi, Qazzafi, Qadhdhafi, or Qaththafi. How do you spell that guy’s name anyways?

An addictive dashboard developed by Al Jazeera tracks tweets from protestors in Libya, Egypt, Yemen, and Bahrain.

And, in case you missed it on our Tumblr: the sad clown Gaddafi.

What has happened in Egypt, and what is still happening there today—people seem to be seamlessly pouring in and out of Tahrir Square—feels very personal to me. I’m a Palestinian-Egyptian-American (though lately I’ve been finding myself proudly saying I’m an Egyptian-Palestinian-American). My grandfather was one of the group of Free Officers who, in 1952, marched to Montazah Palace—where I would one day go swimming and later make out with my first boyfriend—and instructed King Farouk to leave Egypt forever. I was told this story often as a child, and I felt proud of it. Only later, on my visits to Egypt as an adult, did I begin to question whether that was really the last needed revolution in Egypt, or whether it ultimately did the Egyptians any good. My grandfather died a year-and-a-half ago. It feels today like a symbolic death; a passing away of the old guard to make way for the youth of Egypt who have taken their fates into their own hands.

It also feels personal to me because as an Arab-American, and as an Arab-American novelist, part of my daily activism has to do with writing about Arabs and Arab-Americans in ways that break both Arab cultural taboos and existing Western stereotypes. I treat my characters as human beings, deserving of flaws and dignity and a real future. And yet, the story that surrounds me, the story that persists in the media and in some literature today, is that Arabs are dangerous; that Arabs are savages in need of squashing or children in need of saving, or both; that Arabs are a violent people who don’t deserve to shape their own destinies—because they would elect terrorists. (Look at all the fear-mongering that happened the first days of the revolution, and that persists in the media about the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.) That’s the story that I fight against every day when I sit at my desk, and so it thrills me and moves me in ineffable ways that Arabs have been seen on televisions and in newspapers and websites everyday for weeks protesting peacefully for their rights to self-rule, dignity, and freedom.

One of the most amusing moments in the protests came when Mubarak’s regime claimed that the protesters were paid agents from the West; people who didn’t really want to protest or have an organic, authentic desire for change. The same rhetoric is being used in Libya, when Qaddafi calls his protesters “drugged cockroaches.” It reminds me of the letter my father wrote me when he officially disowned me over writing what he deemed a “dirty book.” Someone must have paid me or influenced me or convinced me, he said, to write about sex and masturbation. He could not fathom that I would want to write about these things because they are authentic interests of mine; that I genuinely choose to go against the silence that was prevalent in my upbringing surrounding sexuality.

Now, when I try to write about this new Egypt, I think, I‘m just a fiction writer, what the hell do I know? But it’s precisely women and fiction writers such as Ahdaf Soueif and Nawal el-Saadawi who have been reporting from Egypt and participating in protests. Nawal el-Saadawi was called a few days ago by Al-Jazeera “The mother of the revolution.” She was arrested under Sadat and exiled by Mubarak. In spite of all this, she still managed to agitate against and help outlaw female circumcision in Egypt a few years ago. She also “symbolically” ran against Mubarak in 2006. In an interview last Wednesday, she said she was putting together a list of female activists she wanted the movement to consider for President of Egypt.

Women in Egypt faced daily sexual harassment under Mubarak and their legal rights were and continue to be limited under an archaic family law. When I was there in 2007 I swore I would never go back, because of the way men treated me on the street. In a recent poll, 83% of Egyptian women say they were sexually harassed in public. I think this poll shows how serious the problem is, and I have a personal theory now that 17% of Egyptian women are shut-ins.

Female protesters saw Tahrir Square to be a kind of utopic environment where women had a voice and were not sexually harassed. A friend of mine in Cairo says there’s now a man down the street from her house who holds up a sign all day that reads: “Men: Do not harass the women of your country.” But unfortunately, revolution is not a light-switch. When Mubarak stepped down, it did not mean that rapists instantly disappeared from the streets—see what happened to Lara Logan for example—or that respect for women was turned on as quickly as a song. This is a long process. I hope the women and activists of Egypt do the work to ensure that all of society there, including women, will be treated with dignity and respect.

I am reminded now of a tweet I saw the other day from a Filipina activist who was remembering her own country’s people power revolution in 1986. Moments later, a teenager replied to her in a tweet, “What happened? Where did we go wrong?” The activist tweeted back, “We did not realize a revolution goes on and on and on and must be nurtured 4ever. U make me cry with your question.”

Women in 1919 in Egypt were told to go home after the revolution, just as American women were told after WWII that their help in factories was appreciated but that they needed to get their aprons back on and head to the kitchen where they belonged. Activists are watching very closely to see how or if women will figure into the new Egypt, and I hope they keep watching and also that they are inspired by their participation in their own revolution to continue to elbow their way in.

What is happening across the Arab world today, literally today, this frenzy of concurrent demonstrations in Libya, Bahrain, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Yemen—what we are seeing, feels like a new Pan-Arabism to me, different from the one we saw in the ‘60s. This time, it’s not foreign entities and agents the people on the street are protesting, it’s the very story they’ve been told: that they are a chaotic and savage people that need the iron fist of a decades-long government for their own good; that they don’t deserve dignity or freedom because they would squander it; that they are violent and infantile.  Arab men and women the world over have stopped believing this story about themselves, and in doing so, have shown the world that the story was never anything more than a fiction.

Read “Loosely Based” from the July-August 2010 issue of Utne Reader, where Jarrar reflects on the perils of writing about family 

Randa Jarrar is the author of the critically acclaimed novel A Map of Home. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Five Chapters, Guernica, The Oxford American, The New York Times Magazine, and The Progressive. She was chosen to take part in Beirut39, which celebrates the 39 most gifted writers of Arab origin under the age of 40. 

Image by monasosh, licensed under Creative Commons.

This is a global moment unlike any in memory, perhaps in history.  Yes, comparisons can be made to the wave of people power that swept Eastern Europe as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989-91.  For those with longer memories, perhaps 1968 might come to mind, that abortive moment when, in the United States, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Brazil, and elsewhere, including Eastern Europe, masses of people mysteriously inspired by each other took to the streets of global cities to proclaim that change was on the way.

For those searching the history books, perhaps you’ve focused on the year 1848 when, in a time that also mixed economic gloom with novel means of disseminating the news, the winds of freedom seemed briefly to sweep across Europe.  And, of course, if enough regimes fall and the turmoil goes deep enough, there’s always 1776, the American Revolution, or 1789, the French one, to consider.  Both shook up the world for decades after.

But here’s the truth of it: you have to strain to fit this Middle Eastern moment into any previous paradigm, even as—from Wisconsin to China—it already threatens to break out of the Arab world and spread like a fever across the planet.  Never in memory have so many unjust or simply despicable rulers felt quite so nervous—or possibly quite so helpless (despite being armed to the teeth)—in the presence of unarmed humanity.  And there has to be joy and hope in that alone.

Even now, without understanding what it is we face, watching staggering numbers of people, many young and dissatisfied, take to the streets in Morocco, Mauritania, Djibouti, Oman, Algeria, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Yemen, and Libya, not to mention Bahrain, Tunisia, and Egypt, would be inspirational.  Watching them face security forces using batons, tear gas, rubber bullets, and in all too many cases, real bullets (in Libya, even helicopters and planes) and somehow grow stronger is little short of unbelievable.  Seeing Arabs demanding something we were convinced was the birthright and property of the West, of the United States in particular, has to send a shiver down anyone’s spine.

The nature of this potentially world-shaking phenomenon remains unknown and probably, at this point, unknowable.  Are freedom and democracy about to break out all over?  And if so, what will that turn out to mean?  If not, what exactly are we seeing?  What light bulb was it that so unexpectedly turned on in millions of Twittered and Facebooked brains—and why now?  I doubt those who are protesting, and in some cases dying, know themselves.  And that’s good news.  That the future remains—always—the land of the unknown should offer us hope, not least because that’s the bane of ruling elites who want to, but never can, take possession of it.

Nonetheless, you would expect that a ruling elite, observing such earth-shaking developments, might rethink its situation, as should the rest of us.  After all, if humanity can suddenly rouse itself this way in the face of the armed power of state after state, then what's really possible on this planet of ours?

Seeing such scenes repeatedly, who wouldn’t rethink the basics?  Who wouldn’t feel the urge to reimagine our world?

Read the rest of Tom Engelhardt's essay at TomDispatch>> 

Source: TomDispatch