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In any review of recent history of the middle east, satellite television has to be considered. Since 2000, more than 200 pan-Arab television channels have sprung up. This happened not because the governments of the region decided to open the world for their people, but because Europeans, building direct broadcast satellite systems, decided to engineer the signals to make more money by including N. Africa and the middle east in the satellite footprint (coverage area).
When Saddam fell to American power in the Iraq, one of the biggest selling items immediately was satellite dishes, which had been officially banned previously. The demand around the world for visual information is all but insatiable. As cable television gradually became available across South America, people in small villages would elect to take television service over getting a phone installed in their houses.
With digital transmission of what had been analog signals previously, ten times more channels could be accommodated on each satellite. Television is, in varying degrees, both a liberator and potential enslaver (rampant consumerism), but above all it opens the eyes, especially to the young, to another world beyond family, Mosque and neighborhood. It offers a vivid impression of another way of life, somewhere, out there, waiting. The greater the distance one is from that world, in many cases, the greater the allure.
While television, as an idea, is put down here, its power to inform, in many different ways, should not be underestimated. Charles DeGaule once asked how America could be ruled without the president controlling television. Decades later, another French president visiting the U.S. (I believe it was Mitterand) had a request for his first place to visit: CNN.
International travel should not be overlooked. It would be fascinating to know what percentage of those involved in organizing the uprisings had traveled to London or New York or elsewhere, such as places in Europe. Some of the young people in Cairo traveled to Romania to learn techniques that had been employed there for public protests. Travel disrupts the staid mindset. Many revolutionary movements can be traced, for better or worse, to time spent in Paris by foreign visitors.
Travel brings contact and this brings change. The long trail of history shows that port cities, where ships from around the world stopped, were often considered places of intrigue and subversion. It is no accident that the social/musical revolutionaries, The Beatles, came from the port city of Liverpool where they had easy access to American blues and roots music from merchant marines and sailors. The new port city is the Internet, television and easy travel.
The whole modern world begs for change and development and this force cannot be restrained by all the kings horses and all the kings men. We live in a revolutionary period where reactionaries rise insistently upward, propelled by the fears of those tied to older ways of older generations and older solutions. The reactionary right in America has been using the turmoil of the 1960s and '70s as its engine of choice for three decades now. The autocratic regimes of the middle east were shepherded in their power grab by the west's fear of communism.
The election of Obama surely figures into all of this. For one thing, the middle east must surely know that no American troops are available to hold dictators, such as Mubarak, in power.
Obama's election showed the power of democracy to make peace (at least to the outside world) with fairly radical change. In the space of less than fifty years, America went from segregating races to electing a person of African heritage to the grandest office we have to offer. It could easily have raised the bar in the minds of many around the world about what is possible for them and what is possible through democracy. Could it be the world believes in the U.S. more than most of us do ourselves?
Doug Terry 3.2.11
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