Can’t stop the signal

I never thought I’d ever say this but I’ve been admiring the people of the Middle-East lately. Anyone not living under a rock can’t not be watching the riots breaking out in most of the North African states and wondering WTF is going on? It all started in Tunisia last month and has subsequently spread to several other states in the region most notably Egypt. It’s too early to tell if this is just simply civil unrest or if it’s the beginning of a far more protracted revolution that’s going to forever change the face of the Islamic world. I’m kind of pinning my hopes on the latter because a democratic middle-east would be probably the biggest step towards securing a future for our civilisation and indeed our species in general that we can make this century. Without this happening we’ll forever be locked in the cycle of East-West tensions being locked at boiling point ready to bubble over at any minute.

But why now and what the hell is causing it all? The reason for some of these events is simple – the Internet. It’s difficult to censor, it’s not a centralised network, there will always be ways and means of getting information from one place on it to another no matter how effective attempts to prevent that from happening are. It’s a bit like the tagline from the film Serenity – can’t stop the signal. I would imagine the most effective censorship of the Internet comes from North Korea, who as part of their ridiculously restrictive information controls as an entire country aren’t in the strictest sense even connected to the Internet at all. The media although tightly controlled in many of these countries still can’t prevent that trickle of information coming in through that medium and neither can those governments prevent the organisation of demonstrations through that very same medium. But the fall of one government in one country seems to be triggering the uprising against governments in adjacent countries – the so called domino effect.

So is the domino effect  - the impetus that saw an extremely paranoid cold-war era United States commit to a major war in Asia even a reality? Recent history would suggest it is – we saw it happen before our eyes in Eastern Europe after 1989. One revolution in country one day, another revolution in a different country the next. There remains only one totalitarian state in Europe now  and the future of that country is anyone’s guess  - probably it will end up being reabsorbed back into Russia at some point. Granted the socio-political situation in those states was radically different but the fundamental theory remains the same. People see neighbouring states with similar economic hardships and restrictive freedoms rise up against oppressive governments and the idea inspires the same kind of actions in their own. 

The biggest problem with the current revolutionary winds of change sweeping the middle-east as I see it is that the majority of the region is hopelessly lost to primitive superstitious minds in the form of radical Islam. And as we all know radical Islam is a über fucked up variant of an already catastrophically dangerous religion. So the danger for these people now is that they’ll be swapping one despot for another and fuck all will change. They’ll carry on hating the Jews and they’ll still be threatening to wipe them off the face of the Earth. I can understand the animosity felt by Muslims against Jews in some ways. To the outside observer it looks like this – Jews are the most economically successful, most educated, most over-achieving people on the planet. Extremist Muslims are the exact opposite of this and they deeply resent it. Why? Because they make a virtue of ignorance. A casual glance at the YouTube videos of Islamic clerics shows very clearly just how profoundly moronic some of these people are. Even as democracies the road forward isn’t clear but I suspect a hundred years of dialogue will achieve more than a thousand years of war. Fingers crossed that some good will come of all this but I won’t hold my breath because I still can’t see it. Only time will tell.

I also saw a fantastic quote by Benjamin Netanyahu on another blog this morning that is only too true:

'If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel.’