Wednesday, 22 June 2011 00:27
The Peninsula Newspaper
The Arab spring is not a coup against the dictators who desecrated the nation for decades and still wishes to continue in power for longer period of time and hands over the power after him to his children or his clan or tribe or party. It is a complete coup against the dark phase of history in which the homeland and the citizen lived in the caves and prisons under the ground and above it and despite the scream, cry, complaints, injustice, massacres, hunger and poverty for many years, no one moved at home and abroad. The situation did not change, but those who stuck to the power and those who were close to them remained the masters in the centre of the city turning its population into slaves and servants! A situation akin to the one described in the famous novel by the English writer George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), where the past, present and future is hijacked by an insignificant group of degraded people, spies and hypocrites and any person wishing to challenge the grip of power, domination and control finds himself in the gallows. All who live in the world of “Big Brother” and his laws has to comply with the submission, cooperation and betrayal. All other options shall be canceled and no voice shall be louder than the voice of authority and its decisions! The president or king or Prince or the big brother in the novel is the ruler who is dictatorial, intellectual, mufti and the legislator. He is a tyrant, but no one knows if there is a real person who is ruling in real or he is just a fantasy and those who run the power are a group who are living in the shadows or behind the scenes. The big brother made for himself a special world which is different from the authoritarian and typical worlds. It is a world which has its own ideologies, ideas, slogans and names. This world has its own logic to understand the power and tools and apply them to people in a way that guarantees its continuity and control, eliminating all those who are thinking about change and reform for the better, because the reform and change simply mean the end of the dictatorship forever.
The human being in Orwell’s novel dies and annihilated in the day and night under the lights on the bed. In the dark without a single report on the conditions of detention, people simply disappear and their past is controlled because the control over the present and the future from the perspective of Big Brother cannot be accomplished without the control of the past and transforming the language of people used in speech, writing and understanding to a coded language as the language is the basic tool of political domination, persuasion and control. It is a means to achieve complete dominance on the ground and on the minds of citizens together. The ultimate goal is not to achieve the control over the expression of the new human being, but the complete formulation for everything that can be said and thought about as well. The new language is the embodiment of the violated language. After reading the novel I open the world map and look at Arab states, which occupies the Middle East to North Africa and tried to count the number of countries to which the events of the novel apply other than the countries where the people rebelled against the Arab dictatorships and toppled the argument launched by eras of tyranny during the period of their control over the fate of the country and people. Orwell began the first sentence of his novel in the squib “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen” in the emergence of the moment that we did not expect to fall in our time at the beginning of this particular year. We still ask in wonder, surprise and concern, without getting a convincing answer to how did this happen. Why now and not yesterday or tomorrow! How the giant of Arab peoples managed to come out of the bottle at a period of time when he was forgotten?
The Arab revolutions with that believing group that came out in the street in defiance of the tyranny of the system, its tools, destructive weapons, lethal tanks and mercenary armies, are the closest to the hymn of the novel “War and Peace” where Leo Tolstoy negates the role of the individual that has been magnified in the books of history written by the writers of sultan and provides the spirit of community. The history in his view is the people that make the events. The history is the people who stand to defeat the dictator, his regime and his tyrant army, which was admired by the aristocratic and corrupt class in Russia when it talked about Napoleon and his journey (where he as a lieutenant managed to become an emperor!) Tolstoy exposed this class and questioned its loyalty to the country and adherence to its culture. It reminds us a lot of Arab writers. Tolstoy showed the difference between the defeat in front of Napoleon in the war in Austria and the victory in Russia. The first war was not the war of the nation and the people, but it was a war of a class which was exploiting the people and driving them to its own interests, as some of the Arab revolutions which carried the foreign agendas failed. But in Russia the battle was led by the people who overcame the fear, pain and suffering and fought the battle and won by confronting the dictator abroad after fighting the dictatorship at home. The people in Tunisia and Egypt defeated the dictator’s regime. The country cannot be liberated from the outside until it is liberated from the inside.
The difference between the real intellectual and fake one that we lived at the end of the journey of Tolstoy “The Last Station” is that he abandoned his character as one of the nobles and joined the general farmers. He left what he had in order to devote himself to the life of struggle and sufficiency with the poor life in search of clarity of soul and lift it from the pleasures of world and rid it of impurities of material as he briefed in his timeless golden saying: “The wealth is destroying us”. It is a lesson for all the hypocrites, traders, advocates of power and surveyors of cloth and boots in the Arab countries, who we saw are desperate in the media, satellite channels and social networking sites to defend Ben Ali, the fugitive from Tunisia and the collapse of the patient Mubarak’ regime in Egypt. They are still defending the indefensible -- Saleh in Yemen and Assad, the wanderer in the jungle just for a small price and to get close to power.
We can only applaud that position undertaken by some intellectuals in the Gulf with the participation of 184 writers and human rights activists from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and the UAE in which they disregarded the official move of their silent governments over what is happening and they with the weakest faith issued a statement declaring their solidarity with the Syrian people and their demands for freedom and future civil choice.
They rejected the brutal massacres and abuses committed by the regime, demanding the expulsion of the ambassadors of the regime that is killing its people in their countries.
Last point:
Four or five
They come in a tank
They alone possess
Freedom to Write
Right to control
Prevention and answer
Security and dignity
Money and hopes
Correction and the goal
All those who crawled
Did not receive the booty
Crushed by tank.
-Ahmed Matar
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