Call it the Occident’s own October Revolution. The roots of the Occupy Wall Street protest, one month old this day, may be linked by a ley line to the year’s most dramatic – and eventful – public uprisings.
From Cairo to New York City. From Tahrir Square to Times Square.
No irony that tahrir, Arabic for liberation, lent its name to this stage for revolutions that ousted authoritarian regimes in 1919, 1952, and 2011. In America the war-cry “Occupy Wall Street”, which rang against New York City’s glass-and-steel citadels, took issue with social iniquity arising from corporate greed. Since, the “Occupy” refrain has echoed across the cities of the world and continues, as we watch, to reverberate in Rome, Tokyo, Athens, Ottawa, Sydney, Seoul, Berlin and Auckland, spreading like a mushroom cloud over the map of the world. Not everywhere are the protests peaceful.
Watch: Occupy South America
Watch: Occupy Europe
Watch: Occupy Asia Pacific
Watch: Occupy Asia
Watch: Spain protests
Watch: Protests in Saudi Arabia stamped out
Protests in Yemen
Pick a strand from the backcloth of these global protests and stretch it to Ram Lila Maidan in New Delhi, where in August a modern-day Gandhian answering to the name of Anna Hazare tempted the iron arm of authoritarianism, courted arrest, and went on a 12-day fast against corruption, every moment of which was televised. Millions followed him in the most widely orchestrated campaign against corruption in recent times.
Watch: Anna Hazare leads a nation in protest against the Government's draft of the Jan Lokpal Bill
What does it take to turn a picket line of ordinary tax-paying citizens into a tidal wave of a revolution? Clearly, not Twitter and Facebook alone (for then, every day would breed revolutions, not merely marketing revelations).
Frustration. Anger. Determination born of desperation. And desperation, we learn, can thread a ragged needle through 80 countries, sparking nearly a thousand demonstrations. A million mutinies.
“Occupy!”
Ominous is the contagion in the verb, the anticipation of celebration in the sloganeering it inspires. Germaine Greer wrote that revolution is the festival of the oppressed. Contemplating the instability of the future they may usher in, one may do well to also evoke Shaw: “Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder.”
From Cairo to New York City. From Tahrir Square to Times Square.
No irony that tahrir, Arabic for liberation, lent its name to this stage for revolutions that ousted authoritarian regimes in 1919, 1952, and 2011. In America the war-cry “Occupy Wall Street”, which rang against New York City’s glass-and-steel citadels, took issue with social iniquity arising from corporate greed. Since, the “Occupy” refrain has echoed across the cities of the world and continues, as we watch, to reverberate in Rome, Tokyo, Athens, Ottawa, Sydney, Seoul, Berlin and Auckland, spreading like a mushroom cloud over the map of the world. Not everywhere are the protests peaceful.
Watch: Occupy South America
Watch: Occupy Europe
Watch: Occupy Asia Pacific
Watch: Occupy Asia
Watch: Spain protests
Watch: Protests in Saudi Arabia stamped out
Protests in Yemen
Pick a strand from the backcloth of these global protests and stretch it to Ram Lila Maidan in New Delhi, where in August a modern-day Gandhian answering to the name of Anna Hazare tempted the iron arm of authoritarianism, courted arrest, and went on a 12-day fast against corruption, every moment of which was televised. Millions followed him in the most widely orchestrated campaign against corruption in recent times.
Watch: Anna Hazare leads a nation in protest against the Government's draft of the Jan Lokpal Bill
What does it take to turn a picket line of ordinary tax-paying citizens into a tidal wave of a revolution? Clearly, not Twitter and Facebook alone (for then, every day would breed revolutions, not merely marketing revelations).
Frustration. Anger. Determination born of desperation. And desperation, we learn, can thread a ragged needle through 80 countries, sparking nearly a thousand demonstrations. A million mutinies.
“Occupy!”
Ominous is the contagion in the verb, the anticipation of celebration in the sloganeering it inspires. Germaine Greer wrote that revolution is the festival of the oppressed. Contemplating the instability of the future they may usher in, one may do well to also evoke Shaw: “Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder.”
