Posted on 11/25/2011 7:55:19 PM PST by nickcarraway
It's November, and the revolutions of the Arab Spring still fill the streets from northern Africa across the Middle East. Important votes, massive rallies and outbursts of indefensible government brutality continue to command headlines in Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and Yemen. Bahrain reels from confirmation of its government's abuses during protests earlier in the year. Jordan trembles at the possibility of its own crisis. Rumblings are felt in Saudi Arabia and in Iran. In none of these places have the uprisings of the Spring produced the full or final reforms sought. In every place, entrenched elites squirm and dig in their heels and try to cling to the privileges and the economic bounties they have controlled for so many decades.
It's no longer Spring, nor is it even Summer any more. And while the reforms sought by brave protesters throughout the region hold the promise of rebirth that made the term Arab Spring so apt, this torturous process will clearly go on not just through the Winter to come, but for years and years. To expect otherwise is to be unrealistic. To hope for the swift transformations that came to Eastern Europe two decades ago will only bring disappointment.
Indeed, it is worth remembering that the Prague Spring, after which this period of tumult and aspiration has been named, took place so long before the advent of real and lasting reforms in Czechoslovakia (now, of course, two countries) that when a spokesperson for Mikhail Gorbachev was asked the difference between his reforms and those of Alexander Dubcek in 1968, he said, "nineteen years." Communism did not fall there until 21 years after the "end" of the Prague Spring. When it did, the transformation that came so "swiftly" was called by an entirely different name -- "the Velvet Revolution."
(Excerpt) Read more at rothkopf.foreignpolicy.com ...
Come next November, we’ll be celebrating the “Autumn of Relief” as the Holidays will turn much brighter—Americans will be celebrating the defeat of Hussein and his lackeys in Congress.
No, we already had that. It happened on the sidewalks and streets inhabited by the Barak-upiers.
Truth in labeling would give them other names anyways.
Islamic Uprising or whatever
Is it ever. The phrase no doubt the neologistic creation of some wide-eyed, woefully naive member of the MSM
Islamist uprising or fundamentalist uprising would have been most more accurate.
How bout IslamoFascist takeover. A bit more descriptive I think.
How about we do an American Spring and demand el-douche bag resign for destroying the American dream?
Obama’s Jihad.
The winter of our despair
“BAAAAA!”
(“Arab Spring...manly, yes, but I like it too.”)
“No, we already had that. It happened on the sidewalks and streets inhabited by the Barak-upiers.”
There was some relieving going on, wasn’t there?
I think the term is a spin-off of Prague Spring; that is, according to Wikipedia: The Prague Spring (Czech: Praské jaro, Slovak: Praská jar) was a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia during the era of its domination by the Soviet Union after World War II. It began on 5 January 1968, when reformist Alexander DubÄek was elected the First Secretary of Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and continued until 21 August when the Soviet Union and members of the Warsaw Pact invaded the country to halt the reforms.
Arab Spring - a puddle of water in the middle of the desert.
Arab Sprung.
It’s such a nice sounding term like the soap Irish spring, ah refreshing no?
We went straight to winter. No summer. No fall. No hope.
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