Revolution and the Internet

Sparked by the current live debate at the Economist.com (Internet a Force for Democracy?), I'm taking a brief digression from the Health Care Reform series to discuss the historic events in the Middle East and Africa over the last few weeks. 


If you even just keep up on current events through Facebook and other social networking sites, you cannot be unaware of the wave of protests taking place in several nations. 

• In Tunisia, an unemployed would-be vegetable vendor set himself on fire, setting off a wave of anti-government protests, leading to the resignation and flight of President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali (1). 
• In Egypt, an 18-day revolt forced the retirement of Hosni Mubarak after a thirty-year tenure as president (2). 
• In Libya, the battle for the western side of the country began as Col Muammar Qaddafi, who has led the nation since 1969, turned gunships onto Tripoli, the capital city (3). Benghazi, the largest city in the eastern part of the African nation is now under the control of the protesters. In a desperate attempt to maintain control, Qaddafi has turned the military on the people, ordering plans to unload bombs onto cities and crowds of protesters. Many of the upper level government and military officials have resigned (4). 
• In Yemen, protesters also call for the resignation of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has held this title since 1979 (5 and 6). 
• In Bahrain, the tiny, wealthy, island nation in the Persian Gulf, the Shia Majority are calling for the Sunni al-Khalifa dynasty to establish a Constitutional Monarchy (7). The crown prince has offered 1,000 Bahraini dinars ($2,660) to every family to help calm the protests. Similarly, Libya's Qaddafi doubled the salaries of all government workers to bolster their support (8). 
• In Morocco, peaceful protests demanding a new constitution and calling for democratic reforms have swept the streets of Rabat, the capital city (9).
• In Iran, tens of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets, twice this week, to call for the end of the Islamic Republic's rule (10).

Beyond the Middle East and Africa, protests in China have begun, at the urging of opposition websites, in spite of heavily censored internet access (11). The referenced Wall Street Journal article reports: "The lackluster popular response, however, demonstrates how much harder it would be to organize a sustained protest movement in a country with a well-funded and organized police force, and with the world's most sophisticated Internet censorship system."

Cuban leaders are also nervous as the revolutionary winds gust across oceans, and they receive warnings that "Castro government officials that pro-Democracy organizers in Cuba and the United States were using social media, like Facebook and Twitter, to foment a political uprising in the island nation (12). 

In the United States, we're testing our own democracy, protesting wage reductions for public servants, collective bargaining issues, and general class conflict in Wisconsin. Protesters received pizzas that had been ordered from Cairo as a sign of solidarity.  Many of the pizzas had been ordered online (13).

Without the internet, none of us would hardly know that dictators all over the world are cracking down with violence out while they desperately cling to their hold on power amidst overwhelming civic protests. One man, whose spectacular act of self-sacrifice has sparked world-wide revolution, and we know about it, through the internet.