Hossam Badrawi Official Website
The Arab Spring between fact and fiction
Hossam Badrawi
Truth depends on the mind’s perception, linking information to each other, and extracting knowledge. It is said that every reality is a translation of a fantasy at some point, and politics and sociology are no different.
In the spring of 2015, I was invited to give a lecture at the Monte Carlo Forum in southern France on “The Arab Spring between Fact and Fiction.”
Today, on the anniversary of the January Revolution, I found myself reviewing what I said four years after the events in Monte Carlo, and what is on my mind today, twelve years later.
In 1895, Gustave Lebon, the French sociologist, worked on studying the collective mind of the crowd and explained the existence of a new entity emerging from the merging of people together, where a magnetic field arises from the combination, and the identification of individual behavior to become part of the collective formation, which takes over from every individual. In gathering his personal opinions, beliefs and values.
As he said in one of his sayings, “The individual in the crowd is like a grain of sand inside a sandstorm. He moves with it and merges with it, and he has no individual will.”
LeBon spoke in detail about 3 main processes that affect an individual’s behavior in the crowd:
*Anonymity,
*And the suggestion
*And infection.
*Anonymity gives a feeling of loss of personal responsibility and the person becomes more primitive, emotional and unrestrained, and gives him a feeling of invincibility.
*Contagion means the spread of a certain behavior during the crowd (such as riots, such as smashing windows and throwing stones). When one person initiates an action, others follow suit.
*As for suggestion, it is the mechanism through which infection is transmitted. Strong chants sometimes make the subconscious racist, and the crowd becomes homogeneous, flexible, and receptive to the suggestions of its strongest members. These people have become trained in the present time, and the path of any large demonstration or social media trend can be largely determined in advance.
My introduction to the lecture was intended to give a scientific background to understand what happened in the Arab world and is still happening.
The historical reference of the term goes back to the unrest in Eastern Europe in 1989, when powerful communist regimes began to fall under the pressure of mass popular protests in a succession of dominoes. In a short period of time, most of the countries of the former communist bloc adopted democratic political systems with a free market economy, in contrast to what they had been in for successive decades.
As for events in the Middle East, they went in a different direction. Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen entered an unclear transitional period. Syria and Libya entered civil war, while the wealthy monarchies in the Gulf and Morocco remained deeply unaffected by these events despite being undemocratic. .
The first specific use of the “Arab Spring” to refer to events that actually occurred was in the American Foreign Policy magazine, where Mark Lynch highlighted it in his article about the foreign policies of the United States, and the term was part of an American strategy to control (movements) and goals and direct them towards the liberal American democratic model (imagination). ), or controlled chaos (reality).
As tradition says, the father of the newborn has the right to name his child, and so the name came from the United States.
It was later revealed that many of the youth leaders of these demonstrations were trained and funded in Eastern Europe, by the intelligence services of major influential countries (the United States and the United Kingdom), and they did not deny this when the revolutions succeeded in toppling the regimes.
Political demonstrators in non-democratic monarchies demanded reform of the regimes under the administration of the same rulers. Some of them called for a transition to a constitutional monarchy, while others contented themselves with promising gradual reform.
As for the peoples living under republican regimes, such as Egypt and Tunisia, they wanted to overthrow the president and his regime, but they had no ideas about what to do next other than more calls for social justice. They had no simple idea about what to do, and the revolutions did not provide them with a magic wand for reform. Economics, overcoming poverty, or even how to gain freedom in the midst of complete chaos….
After the end of the demonstration and revolution, the original group (genuine) went to their homes, and the instigators and beneficiaries remained.
The truth is that Egypt and Tunisia in particular were on a high level of sound economic orientation that increased growth and development, and could have led to giant economic booms.
On the ground, leftist groups and unions wanted higher wages, stabilizing government employment, and canceling privatization deals.
As for the extremist Islamists, they were more concerned with the application of the strict provisions of Islamic law through their interpretations, and they sought to fill the political vacuum left by the revolutions. This was prepared by the events, in a relative or complete way, and with the support of Western intelligence services.
The form imposed by America and the West in countries where revolutions occurred was democracy and respect for human rights (imagination and double standards), considering that democracy is only the ballot boxes, knowing that what precedes and follows the voting and election process is full of deception, which we all know takes democracy out of its essence. It is controlled by those who have funding, organization, and weapons in countries where poverty and ignorance are widespread. Salafist religious thought has been injected into its conscience for years…that is, the outcome of the elections in these circumstances is predetermined.
The question is: Is the Arab Spring a success or a failure?
With the flow of information over the Internet, and the availability of YouTube sites for huge numbers of videos containing supposed facts and various news, making every person a hero or a villain, the confusion between illusion and truth has become profound as never before. With this huge amount of leaks, people have begun to repeat… Considering what they see because of their exposure to conflicting and contradictory news, and perhaps also because of a loss of confidence in everything that is presented to them.
The difficulty now (2015) has become confirming the truth amidst a lot of deception, rumours, allegations, lies, propaganda and counter-propaganda, so you cannot know what is a conspiracy and what is a coincidence..
This is part of my lecture on the Arab Spring before a group of politicians from various European countries at the Monte Carlo Political Forum in 2015. I am republishing it now and thinking, seven years after the meeting and twelve years after the revolution, is my opinion still the same or has it changed?
How do we measure the event? this is the question…
By its events, results, or sustainable impact!!
After twelve years, are we better off economically?
Has the well-being of people increased and become happier?!!
Have the causes of the January Revolution, during which the beautiful youth of Egypt rose up for pride, dignity and justice before it was kidnapped by the Muslim Brotherhood, been eliminated??!!
Have we basically identified the causes of the revolution? Can we avoid repeating its negative impact and build on its positive impact?
What institutions were the source of public anger in January?
In my opinion, it was the National Party and the State Security Service.. The National Party disappeared, so did something similar to it, or an alternative, appear?? The alternatives that appeared are cartoonish and without substance, and everyone knows that.
For your information, I am one of those who support and understand the importance of the State Security Apparatus, because it is the brain of the security establishment, as I understood from my distinguished political father-in-law, Hassan Abu Pasha, the former Minister of the Interior, and that it is not a tool in the hands of any regime against its opponents. The mission of this important body is to protect the constitution and the security of the country with understanding, reason, analysis and management, and to raise the alarm bell for the executive authority about the conspiracies against stability that are going on behind the curtains, and its members are qualified for that due to the training and preparation that I know they are going through.
Sometimes I find that the lessons I learned in January teach others the opposite!! Rather, they repeat the same thing, waiting for different results.
I thought that the space for freedoms was small, and the legal transfer of power was impossible, and others understood that this small space was what encouraged people to revolt, and its outlets must be closed so that it does not happen again.
I write this now, and I see a mass movement on social media that is leading society towards a new cultural rigidity. According to Gustave Lebon’s theory, it is clear to me that there is a new creation of a dangerous wave against the modern civil state, testing the Brotherhood’s political-religious conscience, which has changed relatively after the June 30 revolution. A trend that pushes towards the suppression of arts, culture and enlightenment, and does not allow differences of opinion by using the theory of leading the flock and manipulating their religious emotions, in the face of the weakness of the state’s educational, cultural and media institutions in the face of this, as has happened historically before more than once. In my opinion, the political Islam movement is testing the ground for its next battle, especially after the factory of reactionism and extremism began closing its doors in the Gulf, but unfortunately the agents are finding good ground in Egypt, and they are increasing its fertility by fabricating depressing news and inciting the public, supported by the free time of the youth.
The only way is the modern civil state and supporting the trend of enlightenment and modernity in action and not in words.
Hossam Badrawi
Truth depends on the mind’s perception, linking information to each other, and extracting knowledge. It is said that every reality is a translation of a fantasy at some point, and politics and sociology are no different.
In the spring of 2015, I was invited to give a lecture at the Monte Carlo Forum in southern France on “The Arab Spring between Fact and Fiction.”
Today, on the anniversary of the January Revolution, I found myself reviewing what I said four years after the events in Monte Carlo, and what is on my mind today, twelve years later.
In 1895, Gustave Lebon, the French sociologist, worked on studying the collective mind of the crowd and explained the existence of a new entity emerging from the merging of people together, where a magnetic field arises from the combination, and the identification of individual behavior to become part of the collective formation, which takes over from every individual. In gathering his personal opinions, beliefs and values.
As he said in one of his sayings, “The individual in the crowd is like a grain of sand inside a sandstorm. He moves with it and merges with it, and he has no individual will.”
LeBon spoke in detail about 3 main processes that affect an individual’s behavior in the crowd:
*Anonymity,
*And the suggestion
*And infection.
*Anonymity gives a feeling of loss of personal responsibility and the person becomes more primitive, emotional and unrestrained, and gives him a feeling of invincibility.
*Contagion means the spread of a certain behavior during the crowd (such as riots, such as smashing windows and throwing stones). When one person initiates an action, others follow suit.
*As for suggestion, it is the mechanism through which infection is transmitted. Strong chants sometimes make the subconscious racist, and the crowd becomes homogeneous, flexible, and receptive to the suggestions of its strongest members. These people have become trained in the present time, and the path of any large demonstration or social media trend can be largely determined in advance.
My introduction to the lecture was intended to give a scientific background to understand what happened in the Arab world and is still happening.
The historical reference of the term goes back to the unrest in Eastern Europe in 1989, when powerful communist regimes began to fall under the pressure of mass popular protests in a succession of dominoes. In a short period of time, most of the countries of the former communist bloc adopted democratic political systems with a free market economy, in contrast to what they had been in for successive decades.
As for events in the Middle East, they went in a different direction. Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen entered an unclear transitional period. Syria and Libya entered civil war, while the wealthy monarchies in the Gulf and Morocco remained deeply unaffected by these events despite being undemocratic. .
The first specific use of the “Arab Spring” to refer to events that actually occurred was in the American Foreign Policy magazine, where Mark Lynch highlighted it in his article about the foreign policies of the United States, and the term was part of an American strategy to control (movements) and goals and direct them towards the liberal American democratic model (imagination). ), or controlled chaos (reality).
As tradition says, the father of the newborn has the right to name his child, and so the name came from the United States.
It was later revealed that many of the youth leaders of these demonstrations were trained and funded in Eastern Europe, by the intelligence services of major influential countries (the United States and the United Kingdom), and they did not deny this when the revolutions succeeded in toppling the regimes.
Political demonstrators in non-democratic monarchies demanded reform of the regimes under the administration of the same rulers. Some of them called for a transition to a constitutional monarchy, while others contented themselves with promising gradual reform.
As for the peoples living under republican regimes, such as Egypt and Tunisia, they wanted to overthrow the president and his regime, but they had no ideas about what to do next other than more calls for social justice. They had no simple idea about what to do, and the revolutions did not provide them with a magic wand for reform. Economics, overcoming poverty, or even how to gain freedom in the midst of complete chaos….
After the end of the demonstration and revolution, the original group (genuine) went to their homes, and the instigators and beneficiaries remained.
The truth is that Egypt and Tunisia in particular were on a high level of sound economic orientation that increased growth and development, and could have led to giant economic booms.
On the ground, leftist groups and unions wanted higher wages, stabilizing government employment, and canceling privatization deals.
As for the extremist Islamists, they were more concerned with the application of the strict provisions of Islamic law through their interpretations, and they sought to fill the political vacuum left by the revolutions. This was prepared by the events, in a relative or complete way, and with the support of Western intelligence services.
The form imposed by America and the West in countries where revolutions occurred was democracy and respect for human rights (imagination and double standards), considering that democracy is only the ballot boxes, knowing that what precedes and follows the voting and election process is full of deception, which we all know takes democracy out of its essence. It is controlled by those who have funding, organization, and weapons in countries where poverty and ignorance are widespread. Salafist religious thought has been injected into its conscience for years…that is, the outcome of the elections in these circumstances is predetermined.
The question is: Is the Arab Spring a success or a failure?
With the flow of information over the Internet, and the availability of YouTube sites for huge numbers of videos containing supposed facts and various news, making every person a hero or a villain, the confusion between illusion and truth has become profound as never before. With this huge amount of leaks, people have begun to repeat… Considering what they see because of their exposure to conflicting and contradictory news, and perhaps also because of a loss of confidence in everything that is presented to them.
The difficulty now (2015) has become confirming the truth amidst a lot of deception, rumours, allegations, lies, propaganda and counter-propaganda, so you cannot know what is a conspiracy and what is a coincidence..
This is part of my lecture on the Arab Spring before a group of politicians from various European countries at the Monte Carlo Political Forum in 2015. I am republishing it now and thinking, seven years after the meeting and twelve years after the revolution, is my opinion still the same or has it changed?
How do we measure the event? this is the question…
By its events, results, or sustainable impact!!
After twelve years, are we better off economically?
Has the well-being of people increased and become happier?!!
Have the causes of the January Revolution, during which the beautiful youth of Egypt rose up for pride, dignity and justice before it was kidnapped by the Muslim Brotherhood, been eliminated??!!
Have we basically identified the causes of the revolution? Can we avoid repeating its negative impact and build on its positive impact?
What institutions were the source of public anger in January?
In my opinion, it was the National Party and the State Security Service.. The National Party disappeared, so did something similar to it, or an alternative, appear?? The alternatives that appeared are cartoonish and without substance, and everyone knows that.
For your information, I am one of those who support and understand the importance of the State Security Apparatus, because it is the brain of the security establishment, as I understood from my distinguished political father-in-law, Hassan Abu Pasha, the former Minister of the Interior, and that it is not a tool in the hands of any regime against its opponents. The mission of this important body is to protect the constitution and the security of the country with understanding, reason, analysis and management, and to raise the alarm bell for the executive authority about the conspiracies against stability that are going on behind the curtains, and its members are qualified for that due to the training and preparation that I know they are going through.
Sometimes I find that the lessons I learned in January teach others the opposite!! Rather, they repeat the same thing, waiting for different results.
I thought that the space for freedoms was small, and the legal transfer of power was impossible, and others understood that this small space was what encouraged people to revolt, and its outlets must be closed so that it does not happen again.
I write this now, and I see a mass movement on social media that is leading society towards a new cultural rigidity. According to Gustave Lebon’s theory, it is clear to me that there is a new creation of a dangerous wave against the modern civil state, testing the Brotherhood’s political-religious conscience, which has changed relatively after the June 30 revolution. A trend that pushes towards the suppression of arts, culture and enlightenment, and does not allow differences of opinion by using the theory of leading the flock and manipulating their religious emotions, in the face of the weakness of the state’s educational, cultural and media institutions in the face of this, as has happened historically before more than once. In my opinion, the political Islam movement is testing the ground for its next battle, especially after the factory of reactionism and extremism began closing its doors in the Gulf, but unfortunately the agents are finding good ground in Egypt, and they are increasing its fertility by fabricating depressing news and inciting the public, supported by the free time of the youth.
The only way is the modern civil state and supporting the trend of enlightenment and modernity in action and not in words.
