Welcome to Thursday, where Emmanuel Macron has COVID, air pollution is guilty in the death of a 9-year old, and couscous is culture. Meanwhile we look at how "cancel culture" in India is a very different thing.
SPOTLIGHT: TEN YEARS LATER, THE ARAB SPRING DELUSION MUST NOT KILL HOPE
When Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in December 2010, it first triggered a wave of revolts, then hopes of a historic liberalization in Arab countries. But the doors of democracy, barely half-opened, have been shut ever since, writes Dominique Moïsi in French daily Les Echos.
Exactly 10 years ago, on December 17, 2010, a low-key Tunisian fruit and vegetable seller felt so harassed and abused by public officials that he set himself on fire. Bouazizi's fatal act of desperation and revolt would mark the beginning of a wave of uprisings in the Arab world, that spread from Tunisia to Egypt, and then on to Libya and Syria.
A decade later, what remains of this immense flame of hope? It was of course very quickly followed — with the notable exception of Tunisia — by a wave of repression, sometimes fierce, as in Syria. How did we go from the Arab Spring to the Islamic winter? And then on to the deepening of the infernal dialectic between authoritarianism and corruption? It's as if the doors of democracy, barely ajar, had been summarily closed by those of the kleptocracy.
Was the hope unfounded, nothing more than a product of a far too Western reading of a culture that we did not understand, of images that we did not know how to interpret?
It is of course easier to destroy than to rebuild. The young people of Tahrir Square in Cairo were able to bring down President Mubarak, but they were unable to create a democratic, strong and stable Egypt. They were caught between a security apparatus — dependent for the maintenance of its wealth on its presence in power — and the Muslim Brotherhood, who would soon prove their mixture of incompetence and intolerance.
Over time, the Arab Spring has exposed the dangerous limits of Islamists and political Islam, but has not strengthened civil society and the cause of democracy. The direct, almost mathematical link between the extent of Egypt's debt and the wealth of the "Egyptian generals' was strengthened at a time when the voices that remained of freedom were being fiercely muzzled.
Was the expression "Arab Spring" – a reference to the 1848 revolution known as the "Springtime of the Peoples' – a deceptive illusion from the outset? Or is it still too early to judge whether it is true or not?
If the comparison between that revolutionary European Spring of 1848-1849 and the Arab Spring of 2010-2011 is to remain legitimate, is it not because of their respective failures In Europe. It was not the Frankfurt Parliament that unified Germany, but Bismarck's Prussia. And, in France, it was Louis Napoleon Bonaparte who was able to reap the benefits of revolutionary unrest.
In the traditional heart of the Arab world, in Egypt, after the very inconclusive experience of the Muslim Brotherhood in power, the army regained control of the country, even more brutally than in Mubarak's time. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi knows that he can count on the mixture of fear of radical Islam and the mercenary appetites of many Western countries to weld friendships that ethics should condemn, but that politics encourages. Read the full article.
— Dominique Moïsi / Les Echos
THE SITUATION: 7 THINGS TO KNOW RIGHT NOW
- COVID-19 latest: French President Emmanuel Macron tests positive for COVID-19, less than a week after an in-person summit of top European leaders. The U.S. once again records the highest daily number of cases, as the spread rates soar "exponentially" in South Africa, and Sweden's king says the national coronavirus strategy has failed.
Charlie Hebdo trial: A French court convicts 14 people linked to the 2015 attacks in Paris on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, which killed 17.
Pollution-asthma case: A London court rules unlawful air pollution levels as a factor in a nine-year-old girl's death, following an asthma attack.
China's Moon rocks: China's Chang'e-5 lunar probe has returned to Earth with 4.4 pounds of rock samples from a previously unexplored area of the Moon.
U.S./Taliban talks: Top U.S. military officers hold unannounced talks respectively with Taliban peace negotiators and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to try and reduce violence across the country.
Bitcoin breaks record: The value of Bitcoin jumped 4.5% to as much as $20,440 amid stock market turmoil this year.
- Couscous culture: UNESCO has added couscous to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list, praising the dish (shared by Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia) for its ability to bring people and cultures together.
Tunisian daily Assabah features a cartoon on its front page showing the declining protest movement since the Arab Spring was sparked 10 years today, when Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Ben Arous.
"CANCEL CULTURE" IN INDIA LOOKS LIKE OLD-FASHIONED BIGOTRY
Hindu nationalist groups want to force the cancellation of Netflix shows that celebrate inter-religious romance with Muslims — it's both censorship and ethnic prejudice, writes Debangana Chatterjee on Indian news website The Wire.
Richie Mehta's original Netflix series Delhi Crime, based on the 2012 Delhi gang-rape, sparked an outcry for banning Netflix India — and a #BanNetflix campaign was launched. What set the furor off though was an episode of another Netflix show, A Suitable Boy, and the "inappropriate" on-screen kiss between a Hindu (Lata) and a Muslim (Kabir) character in the backdrop of a temple. Members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took no time to demand the all-out ban of Netflix India.
In the West, "Cancel Culture" first arose in a much different context, notably around the #MeToo movement that sought to shame and shut down alleged perpetrators of sexual harassment and violence. The dynamic has expanded to publicly shame and silence a wide range of public figures whose ideas or words have clashed with the young generation's progressive "woke" culture.
Unfortunately, unlike its Western counterpart (which itself raises eyebrows), India's cancel culture coupled with the dogma of Hindu nationalism has taken a malicious turn. Under this precarious political climate, anything that antagonizes the Hindutva ideology faces indelible wrath.
This goes hand-in-glove with the government's new-found interests in OTT (Over-the-Top platforms) regulations. Last year in October the government made its intentions clear on promulgating a set of "not to do" lists for the streaming platforms that include Netflix, Hotstar, Amazon Prime, as well as the digital news media.
➡️ Read more on Worldcrunch.com here.
2,215
According to a new investigation led Brazilian daily Folha de S. Paulo, police in the country have shot dead 2,215 children and adolescents between 2017 and 2019.
We'd hoped that the dead of Bergamo could have protected the rest of Italy. Instead our sacrifice has been in vain.
— Luca Fusco, who heads a group of survivors of the record numbers of people killed by COVID-19 in in the northern Italian city of Bergamo, speaking with weekly magazine L'Espresso. The group, which wants to hold government officials accountable for mismanagement of the crisis, has denounced continued bad policy that has led to a deadly second wave in Italy.
PHOTO DU JOUR
See top photo
A mystery man tricked U.S. artist Joshua Hawkins by paying him to paint an enormous Soviet-style mural of Sesame Street creature Cookie Monster, with three Russian words spelling "Peace Land Cookies!," on a commercial building in Peoria, Illinois. It turned out that the man had impersonated the building's owner, who was furious to see the "Soviet Muppet," and had the mural painted over white. The apparent prankster with a taste for the absurd — who paid the artist in full for the work — has not been identified. Meanwhile the real owner of the wall is holding a contest to decide a new design for the wall.
