SVARTMAN marcio

 A Winterly Cold Spring

A brief look over the Arab Spring

 

After hearing so much about the Arab Spring, I decided to look into the Idea of the spring. My first shock came from a simple experiment. I googled the word and immediately images of beautiful  sunny flower fields appeared on my screen. Images quite different from what I've seen in Arab countries where the movement is taking place. The Spring is a natural flow, that silently spreads and surprises us with a beautiful day of flowers blooming quietly under a warm sunny light, causing the birds to sing and and small animals to leave their caves. It expresses the spirit of tranquility and calm, honoring life with more life and colors. It's the end of a cold and scarce season.
Excuse me, but I see little spring in what is going on in different countries of the Middle East and North Africa.

I notice the almost natural birth of a movement that spreads like pollen. But I think the colorful flowers Will take quite a while to rise. I think the feeling of peace and tranquility will not come with this flourish. The image of spring is beautiful and inspiring, but it seems, for me, to be born of desire, not reality.
Dictatorships are evil structures, but some of them in their wickedness, find a delicate balance. This balance, over time, offers a touch of freedom, which once experienced, increase the hunger of those who experienced it. But, no illusions, these regimes are authoritarian, and will react harde and strongly, Just as it’s already happening, in order to avoid this cry of freedom. Repression is obviously hard and bloody.

The Winter does not forbid the spring to emerge and do not try to stop it.

But if something else in Spring is similar to what is happening, is the fact that this is a impermanent phase in the cyclical history of the world. And in this case, the next season is a mystery.
Building a democracy is not an easy process, much less a quick one. A democracy, to consolidate, demands intitutions reputable and solid. This does not exist in countries that have lived for decades under dictatorial regimes. Also there is a shortage of people who remember and know how to live democratically. The tendency is to reproduce dictatorial models, under structures based on personal influences. It happens because this is the reference people know. We have to remember that the population under a dictatorship, do not learn about democracy in school, and certainly not how to build it.

A democracy without quality education can be as perverse as a dictatorship. Sometimes even worst, since the choice is given into the hand of the people. The population of these countries had their ability to choose withered and beaten over the years. It has been deliberately weakened and it will take time to strengthen again. It will, for a long time, be weak and inefficient.

In Brazil, we live in a democratic regime for twenty-five years, and we still pay the price in our democracy for decades under a dictatorial regime.
I'm not saying I see this movement with bad eyes, and that I approve dictatorships. On the contrary. I lost part of my family under the Nazis and spent my childhood feeling a fuzzy fear that the door would oppen and secret Police would come in, with a family where there are many stories of persecution and torture.

But, whatever meaning we might find for the word, I do not share the view that we are undergoing an Arab spring that Will replace dictatorship with colorfull flowers. I think taht important and definitive changes began. But the future, I believe, Will still show a hard winter, before we see fields full of shinning flowers.