From Daily Kos: If a picture speaks a thousand words, then this video about the early days of the Libyan Revolution speaks millions. Not only does it clearly show that the Revolution was initially peaceful, but also that it was an uprising that took place in basically every major town and city in Libya. I've been watching videos from the Tunisian, Egyptian, Libyan, and Syrian Revolutions since the beginning of this year. I've seen terrible things, beautiful things, inspiring things, horrifying things. Throughout it all, my respect for the peoples of the Arab Spring, my admiration of their bravery and courage in the face of the severest repression, has gone through the roof. While the Tunisians and Egyptians achieved their goals of getting rid of their Western-backed dictators quite fast and with relative ease, the Libyans and Syrians had their initially peaceful revolutions changed into deadly events because the regimes there are not as susceptible to international pressure and are thus able to brutally crack down on their own people. Libya has, as we all know, now become a full-blown international affair, with the U.N., NATO, the Arab League, and the U.S. coming down in support of the Libyan people and their struggle to be free of an incredibly repressive regime. So the Libyan Revolution grinds on, with the Libyan people paying a high price as they slowly, yet surely, push the Gaddafi Regime from power. The tragedy in all of this is that things did not have to be this way. Gaddafi could have given up, like Ben-Ali and Mubarak did, yet he chose the path of attempting to squash the revolution by slaughtering his own people. Those who are against intervention on behalf of the Libyan people often argue that "it's a tribal split in the country", that "the revolutionaries are not representative of Libya", that "they are islamic extremists from Eastern Libya", that "it's all about oil, banks", that "the Libyan Revolution was not peaceful", etc. They often also compare Libya to Iraq and Afghanistan, completely ignoring the fact that Afghanistan and Iraq aren't even on the same continent as Libya and that Libya does not have the ethnic and religious divides that are present in Afghanistan and Iraq. Anti-interventionists also frequently ignore that the Libyan Revolution is firmly embedded within the people's movements of the Arab Spring, in which huge majorities of the population are chasing out their dictatorial dinosaurs. What bothers me the most is that some Democrats and progressives who are against the U.N. - backed intervention resort to conspiracy theory and distorting facts about Libya, thus also degrading the incredible bravery of the Libyan people. We liberals are supposed to be about people power, about compassion with our fellow human beings, about democratic and equal rights, and about progress. I urge those who question why military intervention in Libya was necessary and who may have missed the peaceful, country-wide nature of the Libyan Revolution to watch the incredible video that I posted above, to witness the joy of the Libyan people at finally being able to express themselves. This is, without question, a people's revolution, and the Libyan people clearly deserve our full support in achieving their freedom. (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/06/28/989405/-The-Most-Incredible-Video-of-the-Libyan-Revolution?via=siderecent) [More] [Less] |
