{"id":33010,"date":"2015-10-12T01:00:16","date_gmt":"2015-10-12T05:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=33010"},"modified":"2015-10-01T14:34:37","modified_gmt":"2015-10-01T18:34:37","slug":"qotd-the-inevitable-result-of-the-arab-spring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/10\/12\/qotd-the-inevitable-result-of-the-arab-spring\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The inevitable result of the &#8220;Arab Spring&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>When journalists were going nuts a few years ago about the wonders of the wave of \u2018revolutions\u2019 that they decided to refer to as an \u2018Arab Spring\u2019, I was reminded how few modern academics, let alone journalists, have any understanding of history. None of the political analysts or professional pundits seemed to have much more of a clue about how things would INEVITABLY turn out, than babes in a wood.<\/p>\n<p>Which is ridiculous, because you would imagine that anyone with a pretense of being worth consulting might have at least a clue that there might be historical parallels worth considering. Frankly it is terrifying that our modern \u2018chattering classes\u2019 honestly seem to imagine that they are above being able to learn anything from history.<\/p>\n<p>1848 of course saw a wave of \u2018revolutions\u2019 all across Europe, which many people at the time hailed as the inevitable downfall of the ancient regimes, and the prelude of the rise of true modern democracy. How sweet.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, of course, the revolutions led to a re-imposition of the ancient regimes, or much worse dictatorships: often with harder edges to prevent such things happening again. In fact it can be credibly argued that the results of this wave of revolutions was to slow down the democratization of Europe by at least 50 years.<\/p>\n<p>I suspect the same thing will result from the Arab Spring.<\/p>\n<p>Nigel Davies, <a href=\"http:\/\/rethinkinghistory.blogspot.ca\/2015\/09\/the-arab-spring-1848-and-30-years-wars.html\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;The \u2018Arab Spring\u2019, 1848, and the 30 Years War\/s&#8230;&#8221;, <em>rethinking history<\/em><\/a>, 2015-09-19.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When journalists were going nuts a few years ago about the wonders of the wave of \u2018revolutions\u2019 that they decided to refer to as an \u2018Arab Spring\u2019, I was reminded how few modern academics, let alone journalists, have any understanding of history. None of the political analysts or professional pundits seemed to have much more [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,28,53,41],"tags":[506],"class_list":["post-33010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-media","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-revolution"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8Aq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33010"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33010\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33011,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33010\/revisions\/33011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}