concrete. On 17 December 2010, a street vendor called Mohamed Bouazizi walked into the traffic in the Tunisian backwater of Sidi Bouzid, carrying a can of gasoline, and set himself on fire: he had, he claimed, been slapped by a corrupt local official, and his street goods had been confiscated. Within eight months, what began with Bouazizi had ripped away the fabric of autocratic rule across the Middle East.
And with hindsight we can now see that the fabric had already begun to fray elsewhere.
Athens and Gaza
From late 2008, events began to happen in which the new predominated over the old; in which the forces that would defy fatalism began to flex their limbs. Almost simultaneously the neocon faction of the US political elite lost the ability to ‘create reality’ as described by Karl Rove— starting with the loss of the White House.
The clearest precursor event for the new unrest was the December 2008 uprising in Athens. For three weeks after the police shooting of fifteen-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos in the student district of Exarcheia, students rioted, struck and occupied their universities, their actions eventually drawing in parts of the Greek labour movement.
The disturbances in Athens created a template of ‘social explosion’: an uncontrolled and randomly provoked reaction to economic crisis, in which students and uneducated urban youth come together to make mayhem. One second-generation Greek immigrant remembered:
This was my first time ever to cast a stone, first time I covered my face … I had been before in demonstrations and protests but never before I had participated in riots. It was something like an initiation for me and I have to admit I felt liberated, you know. It made me feel like I regained control over myself.15
The next precursor moment is the Israeli invasion of Gaza, which began two days after the Greek riots ended, on 27 December 2009. Operation Cast Lead would radicalize many Egyptian youths and discredit sections of the mainstream media in the eyes of young people both in the West and in North Africa. Though in fact a military victory for Israel, it appeared as a moral defeat to the Arab youth, and to Muslim youth in Europe. In the West it would bring onto the streets the same core alliance of anti-capitalists, inner-city youth and the labour-orientated left as had staged mass protests over Iraq earlier in the decade. On 9 January 2009 a quarter of a million people took to the streets of Madrid; big demos occurred in every European capital, plus huge protests in Jakarta and Manila. The London demonstrations ended with violence and large-scale arrests: more than sixty Muslim men aged between seventeen and twenty were jailed.
One of the few commentators to predict the Arab Spring was the sometime adviser to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, Alan Woods. As demonstrations flared across the Middle East during the Gaza war, Woods observed that ‘all the pro-Western regimes there are hanging by a thread … Saudi Arabia … Egypt … Lebanon … So is Jordan, so is Morocco. These ruling elites were terrified by the demonstrations that took place during the Gaza war.’16
The invasion of Gaza even struck home among some sections of the Western political elites. ‘Our policy is disgusting,’ one Labour ministerial aide told me in January 2009. ‘If I were not a government adviser I would be on the anti-war demonstrations myself.’
Iran: The ‘Twitter Revolution’
Then came Iran. On 13 June 2009 the incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was re-elected with 62 per cent of the vote. Turnouts above 100 per cent in two provinces, massive discrepancies between pre-election polls and the results, plus widespread ballot-rigging, sent supporters of the reformist candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi onto the streets within hours. ‘If Iran sleeps tonight,’ tweeted @mehri912, ‘it will sleep forever.’ It did not sleep.
The first of the iconic cellphone videos shows a crowd of protesters moving swiftly down Tehran’s Valiasr Street, chanting: ‘Mousavi, take back my vote!’ These are office workers: men with briefcases, women wearing the minimum headgear required to avoid harassment from the religious authorities. Another YouTube video, fifty-eight seconds long and shot on a cellphone, shows what happened next.17
It starts with a crush of people against a shop façade, women screaming as they fight for space. Now the camera-holder, like the men in front of him, elbows his way forward as uniformed cops start batoning protesters, none of whom show any sign of belligerence. This is pure dictatorship: the collective punishment of a crowd for the act of being there. Riot police with shields run after them as they flee, beating their legs and backs, and on the soundtrack, again, we hear women screaming.
Next the cameraman spins round; the visored face of a policeman looms into shot as he hits the cameraman on the leg and tells him to get lost. Off-camera you hear the repeated thud of truncheons on flesh and more screaming. Then the shot becomes of running feet.
By nightfall, that video was zipping around the global Farsi networks via blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. If it had been taken by a TV cameraman, that fifty-eight-second single shot would have won awards. It captures reality in a way you rarely see on TV news: terror, chaos, innocence, the sudden tremor in the policeman’s face as he bottles out of hitting the cameraman again. But the point about the video is that it was not shot by a news crew, nor was it shown in full on any TV network.
Social media’s power to present unmediated reality has never been better demonstrated. And the Iranian demonstrations produced hundreds of similar videos, both of the protests and the crackdown that confronted them. Thanks to Twitter, these images exploded like a virus onto the screens of young people all over the world. The Washington Times called it ‘Iran’s Twitter Revolution’:
Hackers in particular were active in helping keep channels open as the regime blocked them, and they spread the word about functioning proxy portals. Eventually the regime started taking down these sources, and the e-dissidents shifted to e-mail. The only way to completely block the flow of Internet information would have been to take the entire country offline, a move the regime apparently has resisted thus far.18
Though the Ahmadinejad regime now took down Twitter, Facebook and SMS, it could not prevent the imagery circulating. No revolution in history had been recorded so comprehensively, and in such minute detail. In one video, police pick on a bystander at a bus stop; as they baton him a woman in a headscarf, about five feet tall, karate-kicks the police, two of whom then turn on her. One batons a car bonnet, randomly, in frustration. Then they stop and the woman merges again into the queue at the bus stop.19
Future social historians will gorge themselves on evidence like this, the micro-detail of social responses to unrest: but for now, its importance lies in the way it enables participants to judge what kind of history is being made in real time. Banned from reporting in Iran, the mainstream media quickly began to realize the value of this user-generated content, and to run it. The momentum of the protests fed off this cycle of guerrilla newsgathering, media amplification, censorship and renewed protest.
By the time the death of protester Neda Agha-Soltan was shown on YouTube, on 20 June 2009, the once-forlorn slogan of the anti-globalization movement had become a reality: the whole world actually was watching.
Bystanders posted three separate videos of Neda’s shooting by a member of the regime’s Basij militia: Time magazine called it ‘probably the most widely witnessed death in human history’.20 Blood trickles over her face. Her eyes roll sideways. She says, ‘I’m burning.’ Her grey-haired singing teacher vainly tries to staunch the flow of blood. Later, the crowd detains the alleged perpetrator and his security pass is photographed: this too gets uploaded to YouTube.
Another image resonated across the world that summer from Tehran: the so-called ‘rooftop poems’. As demonstrations were repressed, student dorms invaded and young men handed over to the Basij rape-gangs and torture squads, protesters retreated to the rooftops by night to call out Allah-o-Akbar. On 16 June an anonymous young woman, whose YouTube username is Oldouz84, began improvising poems as she filmed the rooftop cries. In the last clip, taken the day after Neda’s death, she whispers:
Allah-o-Akbar is no longer about being a Muslim. It’s become a call for unity, whether