【时代周刊 11/12/14】2012时代年度人物 － 抗议者（封面故事）
【中文标题】2012时代年度人物 － 抗议者（封面故事）
【原文标题】The Protester
【登载媒体】时代周刊
【原文作者】Kurt Andersen
【原文链接】http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2101745_2102132_2102373-1,00.html
曾经，在那个专业人士严格审查新闻事件，并把它们印在报纸上，或者由极少数人通过媒体向公众发布的年代，抗议者是历史的重要书写者。在那个时候，人民群众赤手空拳地走上街头表达他们的反对意见，这完美地切合了新闻的定义——生动、重要、往往影响深远。60年代的美国，抗议者上街呼吁公民权力、反对越南战争；70年代，他们在伊朗和葡萄牙挺身而出；80年代，他们大声反对美国和欧洲的核武器，反对以色列占领加沙西岸，反对共产主义者在天安门广场和东欧的暴行。抗议是政治的另一种自然延伸方式。
之后，出现了《历史的终结》。1989年，Francis Fukuyama在这篇影响深远的文章中说，在全球实现“西方自由主义”的背景下，人类已经走到了“意识形态……发展的尽头”。在1991年之后的二十年中，人类见证了前所未有的生活水平提高幅度。歌功颂德伴随着自鸣得意和冷淡漠然，街头抗议看起来像是毫无意义的、用来宣泄情绪的幕间杂耍——既不合时宜，又无人问津，就像20世纪中期战争中的骑兵队。富裕国家中罕见的几起大型示威活动似乎没有取得任何结果，也鲜有人关注。
也有一些例外，比如1994年的判决和抗议终结了南非的种族隔离制度。但是在年轻人看来，针对体制的尖锐批评和抗议似乎只在流行文化中出现：“反抗强权”是一张白金销量唱片中的歌曲，“国家机器的愤怒”是一个流行乐队的名字，甚至那些我们所喜爱的、与环伺周围的暴君做斗争的英雄们，也不过是《黑客帝国》中的角色罢了。
“大规模、有成效的街头抗议”在以前是一个矛盾修辞法（译者注：指用两种不相调和，甚至截然相反的词语来形容一件事物，比如“无事忙”，这里表示抗议不可能是有成效的。），直到一年前，它突然令人震惊地成为描述我们这个时代再恰当不过的词语了。抗议者再一次成为了历史的创造者。
革命的序幕
一切都起源于突尼斯，那里的独裁政权肆意妄为和享受奢华的程度超越了卑鄙的底限，政府对一名普通公民——26岁的街头小贩穆罕默德•布阿齐齐——一次算是例行的无情侵害，成为了压垮体制的最后一根稻草。布阿齐齐住在一个乏善可陈的突尼斯小镇西迪布宰德，距突尼斯市125英里。差不多整整一年前的一个星期五的早晨，他推着手推车出门卖东西。他的家人说，警察长年累月地给他找麻烦，罚款、强迫他对官僚机构俯首帖耳。2010年12月17日，一名警察又来找他的麻烦，没收了他的小推车，据说还打了他。他直接跑到省政府大楼去投诉，但没有任何回应。就在政府大门前，他用涂料稀释剂把自己淋湿，点燃了一根火柴。
在我采访玛努比亚•布阿齐齐的时候，她对我说：“我儿子自焚是因为这关乎他的尊严。”
她16岁的女儿Basma说：“在突尼斯，尊严比面包更重要。”
“穆罕默德承受了巨大的痛苦，他努力地工作。他的自焚并不是因为他的水果摊被没收了，而是因为这关乎他的尊严。”——玛努比亚•布阿齐齐，突尼斯
埃及事件的导火线是2010年全国大选中荒唐的舞弊行为，和突尼斯的情况一样，这也并非不可宽恕的暴行。在美国，三个重叠在一起的大危机——受挫的经济形势、金融系统的漏洞和大规模的公共债务——加上银行业不断爆出的可疑交易内容、新颁布的州法律认定工会的要求非法，以及国会拒绝考虑对富人征税标准的哪怕些许提升，最终造成了占领华尔街运动，和数百万年的支持者。在俄罗斯，人民意识到弗拉基米尔•普京在未来6年（或者12年）的执政或许不会带来更大的繁荣和民主正常化进程。
从西迪布宰德到突尼斯，从阿历山大港到开罗，从阿拉伯城市到6000英里外的波斯湾和大西洋，从马德里和雅典到伦敦和特拉维夫，从墨西哥到民众集结反抗犯罪和腐败的印度和智利，从纽约和莫斯科到数十个美国和俄罗斯的城市，对政府及其密友的愤怒和厌恶情绪变得不可控制，最终爆发。
不同地区的抗议有不同的危险性。在北美和欧洲大部分地区没有独裁者，表达反对意见的人不会遭到虐待。而突尼斯人、埃及人和叙利亚人在广场和街道上度过的每一天，他们都知道，自己队伍中的一些人不仅会被喷辣椒水和戴上手铐，而是将遭到殴打，或被子弹击中。中东和北非的抗议者所反对的那些令人无法忍受的非民主体制，基本与马德里、雅典、伦敦和纽约抗议者们的目标类似，但他们有可能付出的是生命的代价。53岁的混凝土卡车司机Frank Castro参加了占领加利福尼亚奥克兰的活动，他说：“我觉得，其它地方的人比我们有更大的勇气。”
在埃及和突尼斯，我曾经与很多革命者交谈过，他们中有MBA、心理学家、摄影师，也有采摘橄榄农民的女儿和一个捧着电脑不离手的29岁穆斯林兄弟会超级网虫。美国占领运动的发起者是几个杂志编辑——一位69岁的加拿大人和一位29岁的非裔美国人——和一个50岁的人类学家，但是行走人群中还有飞行员、居家老奶奶、商店售货员和清洁工。
这些抗议先锋们向我们展示了惊人的相似性。无论在哪里，他们都是年轻人和受过教育的中产阶级。几乎所有的抗议活动都起因于一些独立的事件，而并非得到政治党派或者反对团体的煽动和批准。2011年，全世界的抗议者都有一个共同的信仰，他们国家的政治和经济体制已经不能正常运作，正在走向腐败和崩溃的边缘——虚伪的民主对富有和权势阶层给予不公平的待遇，而且拒绝采取任何变化。他们都是小写D的民主党人。当共产主义在二十年前被抛弃之后，他们认为目前正在经历超级资本主义的彻底失败过程，急于寻找一条新的道路，一种新的社会契约关系。
在经济泡沫虚高的年代里，或许还有足够的钱让他们过上幸福生活，但是当下这种永无止境的金融危机和不景气局面让他们觉得自己像个被愚弄的傻瓜。今年，这些人并没有戴上耳机，沉浸在互联网的神游世界里，屈从这样毫无希望可言的生活，而是利用互联网找到可以一起上街的人，高声要求公平和（阿拉伯世界的）自由。
全世界的抗议者都被老学究们斥责缺少预先构想的思想体系，而抗议者们认为这恰恰是他们的主题，而不是他们的问题。27岁的沙特阿拉伯人Miral Brinjy是一位博客写手和电视新闻制作人，11个月前，她在抗议第一天就出现在塔利尔广场上。当时，她无法清晰地预想到埃及政府和社会将会变成什么样，但她上个月在开罗对我说：“我只知道我不想要的是什么。”
不满情绪在经过多年酝酿之后，终于爆发了。也有一些先兆曾经出现。在美国，奥巴马的竞选过程其实就是一个自我感觉良好的抗议活动，让年轻人蠢蠢欲动，而后来出人意料的获胜加上华尔街的紧急援助举措最终让茶叶党上演了一场愤怒且成功的平民抗议行动，而且其延续的时间比别人给它贴上的保质期标签更久。2009年，当德黑兰政府拒绝承认反zf选举结果时，数百万伊朗人，尤其是年轻人，抗议了几个星期。网络和社交媒体在这些事件中成为了重要的战略工具。但是似乎这些都是一次性事件，无法成为开启历史新纪元的序章。
伊朗政权对绿色革命的镇压必然让中东和北非的阿拉伯独裁者和帝王们感到欣慰，你也许会想，这同时打击了这些国家未来的民主自由战士。据一家国际监察组织“自由之家”的调查，全球解放浪潮在几十年前就已经达到了一个高峰。中东和北非依然是世界上最暴政的地区，到2010年末，自由之家宣布阿拉伯世界四分之三的国家“不自由”，其中包括突尼斯和埃及。阿拉伯国家过去十年中经济的增长并未掩盖其蕴含的危机（埃及经济即使在全球衰退期也增长了5％以上），社会学者认为人民提高的期望值得不到满足是抗议的主要原因。无论是开罗、马德里还是奥克兰，抗议人群中的大部分对于个人的成功前景诉求——舒适的生活和美好的《历史的终结》——其实都很模糊。他们只不过是受够了，当政府的行为超越底限时，他们的愤怒和沮丧情绪爆发了。
总之，2011年与1989年之后的任何一年都不相同，它更加波澜壮阔、更加具有广泛性、更加民主。1989年的政权瓦解全部源于单一核心政权的崩溃，莫斯科的电闸一被拉断，整个体系的电力全部瘫痪。2011年也与1968年之后的任何一年都不相同，它所带来的影响更加重大，因为各色人群都参与其中。他们的抗议不是1968年那样的反文化行走，也没有迅速演化成全面的反叛行动，并立即推翻一个政权，改变历史的轨迹。换句话说，它不像我们生命中的任何一段时期，甚至与1848年以来的任何一年都不尽相同。巴黎的一次街头抗议迅速演变成3天的革命行动，推翻了君主制国家，并且在几个星期之内——要感谢新科技提供的便利（电报、铁路、印刷机）——建立了共和民主制国家。这场行动带来了慕尼黑、柏林、维也纳、米兰、威尼斯和欧洲一系列城市的连锁抗议和暴乱。当然还有纽约的和平民主示威，人们沿百老汇街走下，占领了华尔街北面几个街区的公园。在这个前所未有、异乎寻常的暴乱的一年中，把德语中Zeitgeist（译者注：时代思潮）这个词移植到英语中，是多么完美的一个举措啊。
在1954年的奠边府战役期间，当法国殖民主义者即将败在共产主义革命军手下，被逐出印度支那时，德怀特•艾森豪威尔总统召开了一个新闻发布会。他说：“现在那里是一排多米诺骨牌，”他认为越南是夹在崩溃的中国和朝鲜与亚洲其它国家间的一块骨牌，“你推到了第一块，很快一切都会结束。”但是到了1975年，共产主义在越南和柬埔寨取得了胜利，其它国家却没有追随，所以这种连锁性的多米诺国家解放运动理论就被人们永远抛在了脑后。
永远，直到今年。多米诺在2011年开始倒下——以下就是一些推到它的人。
抗议者之年
身上的火并未让穆罕默德•布阿齐齐立即死亡，过路人用水浇灭了火焰，并把他送到医院。他当时还有一口气在。
那天下午，其他一些小贩和镇民也在政府大楼外与布阿齐齐一起抗议。他的一位表兄在网上发布了一段示威过程的视频。事件得以迅速蔓延要感谢半岛电视台的视频和互联网——三分之一的突尼斯人使用网络，其中四分之三的人有脸谱网站账号，其它城镇很快也响应了抗议行动。布阿齐齐于1月4日死亡之后，抗议达到了高潮，全国范围内有十多名抗议者被警察打死。巴萨玛布•阿齐齐对我说：“我边看电视边说：‘天啊，突尼斯人民觉醒了。’”
自发性抗议？在2011年？在一个阿拉伯国家？英雄主义、毫无希望、难逃一死。事件发生后的三个星期内，全世界对抗议结果的猜测几乎可以总结在《经济学家》的第一篇报道中：“突尼斯的混乱不大可能让74岁的总统下台，甚至不可能撼动这个国家的独裁制度。”
突尼斯大学28岁的语言教师Lina Ben Mhenni多年来在网络上用“突尼斯女孩”的网名披露突尼斯的监察制度和操纵选举的行为。她前往距西迪布宰德25英里的城镇莱古贝，为一名被枪杀的年轻抗议者拍摄照片，并传到网络上。她说：“在那一天，我完全抛弃了恐惧，我准备付出我的一切，甚至是生命。”在那个周末，她回到了突尼斯市，在作为政府所在地的白色灰泥城堡外抗议。人群里还有23岁的失业面包师Hilme al-Manahe。她的母亲Sayda al-Manahe说布阿齐齐的自我牺牲激励了Hilme，“这个可怜的人，我能理解他为什么这样做。他只不过想谋求一条生路，他的故事就是我的故事，也是我朋友的故事。”
Sayda说：“我告诉他，安静地待在家里，想都不要想去掺和这件事。”但是1月13日，他还是去参加了突尼斯的示威行走。当他用手机给他的一个朋友摄像时，一颗子弹——或许是发自某个警察的狙击枪——穿透了他的心脏。
第二天早晨，29岁的软件开发者、反zf博客写手Majdi Calboussi在现场用黑莓手机拍摄了示威场景和警察，“人们高喊：‘本•阿里，滚出来！”他把这段视频传到推特上，一天内就有50万人浏览。几个小时之后，本•阿里乘飞机流亡到沙特阿拉伯。抗议者在短短四个星期之后就取得了胜利，下一块多米诺骨牌开始晃动了。
我遇到的所有埃及人都坚信一件事情：突尼斯是埃及革命的火种。32岁的医生Shady el-Ghazali Harb说：“如果没有他们，这里的事情也不会发生。”他是塔利尔广场运动13名主要领导者之一。突尼斯不仅给予埃及精神上的鼓励，还提供了实用的经验。一位互联网企业家和长期的反派政治活动家、50岁的Wael Nawara说：“这就像是一本用户手册，指导你如何用和平方式推翻一个政权。”一位开罗民建工程师、埃及最著名的活动家Ahmed Maher 说，突尼斯人在1月份“传递给我们很多信息，比如使用醋和洋葱”——凑近人的脸，起催泪效果——“以及如何让坦克停驶。他们给我们建议，我们就去使用这些方法。”
埃及也有自己的穆罕默德•布阿齐齐——一位被大材小用的28岁中产人士，名字叫Khaled Said。去年的一天，他侵入了一名警察的手机，发现了一个视频文件，警察们在展示毒品和一堆堆的现金。后来，他被逮捕，然后被殴打致死。29岁的谷歌公司高管Wael Ghonim在脸谱网站建立了一个主页纪念他，叫“我们都是Khaled Said”。网站很快风靡开来，1月的时候，Ghonim从迪拜返回埃及，帮助策划1月25日的抗议行动——塔利尔广场的“愤怒之日”。Maher和其他活动人士受邀参加准备工作，他们在互联网上相互约定，然后面对面地商讨活动细节。Brinjy说她“很害怕，我想这只是一个尝试，如果出现意料外的事情，我们就马上逃走。之后我们就加入了庞大的人群，向塔利尔广场行进，我知道这是一个声势浩大的行动。”
29岁的摄影师Mohammed Ramadan说：“从一开始，我就知道我们一定会成功。我一生中从未见到过这样的抗议行动。女孩们，有的带着穆斯林头巾，有的没戴，还有基督教徒和穆斯林教徒，我从来没见过这样的场景。”穆斯林兄弟会并未授意采取抗议行动，但34岁的兄弟会成员Khaled Tantawy还是加入进来。他也被这样的场景惊呆了：“我看到这么多不同类型、信仰迥异的人在一起抗议和高呼，哇，真有这样的事啊！”
以个人身份来到塔利尔广场的兄弟会成员Mohamed el-Beltagy说，那天晚上，“令人吃惊的是年轻人突破了心理的恐惧障碍。当午夜时分警察暴力驱赶人群的时候，抗议者们并没有逃回家，我知道这是一场革命。”
政府的暴力回击并未出乎人们的预料。就像突尼斯的局势一样，当镇压行动升级——从催泪瓦斯到橡皮子弹、到真子弹、到Ghonim被监禁、到全国范围切断互联网、到骆驼队在塔利尔广场横冲直撞——开罗和埃及全国的抗议者人数也不断上升。在三个星期里，至少450万埃及人参与了抗议行动，占埃及14岁以上人口数量的8％。
52岁的Hisham Kassem是一位著名的独立记者和出版商，他从未参加过任何街头抗议行动。他的头脑异常清醒，是个顽固的守财奴。1月28日，他因为向警察投掷石块而遭到了催泪瓦斯的攻击。当他在10个月之后告诉我这件事时，我依然不能完全相信，他说：“因为我看到身边的人中弹倒下。”骆驼攻击那一天他就在塔利尔广场，“那完全是一场战争，我几乎被暴徒们折磨死。”之后的一天，当他来到塔利尔广场时，“有个孩子质问我的身份：‘你站在哪一边？’我说：‘你这是什么意思？’”但是，就在此事此刻，在自由广场的一个角落里，他突然顿悟了——自己长期以来就是亲民主的VIP，而民主就要出现了。他说“我突然有了一种奇怪的归属感，我一点也不嫉妒别人。”
军方在当时宣布：“军队已经了解到你们合法的诉求……将不会使用武力。”侯赛因•穆巴拉克总统下台了——塔利尔广场上的一条标语写道：“走吧，因为我想舒舒服服洗个澡。”——但在此之前，穆巴拉克在11天里经历了拒绝、愤怒、乞求和沮丧地接受现状这样一个过程。25岁的开罗失业者Abdo Kassem在去年1月份遵循脸谱网站上的抗议指引之前，从未参与过任何政治活动，他说：“穆巴拉克下台那一天，我哭了。这对我来说就像一个冒牌的上帝轰然而倒。”
数百万人的抗议群众、军方解除戒严、独裁者下台，这些两个星期之前的疯狂梦想现在都成为了现实。“愤怒之日”的感染力和民主梦展示出异常强大的作用，不仅仅波及那些相对软弱的帝王独裁政府——约旦、巴林、摩洛哥——而且还撼动了也门、阿尔及利亚，以及铁腕的军管国家——叙利亚和利比亚。
春天的时候，抗议情绪扩散到欧洲。5月15日，数万人集结到马德里的太阳门广场，还有更多的人在其它十几个城市集会，把他们团结起来的口号是“我们不是政客和银行家手中的商品”。让这些人不满的是失业率、缺少机会和毫无方向的国家政策，他们称呼自己为Los Indignados，即怒火。
西班牙为期一天的行走演化成一个月的自主宿营活动，这其实也是2011年公众抗议的招牌行为之一。全国4600万人口中的600万人参加了“怒火”抗议。31岁的Olmo Gálvez是马德里行走队伍中的一员，他是一位互联网企业家，在中国工作三年州刚刚回国，对政治一无所知。他帮助建立了抗议的社交媒体网络，他说：“真了不起，人们变成了他们生活中的主角，你亲眼看到他们变被动为主动。”
马德里示威后的第十天，抗议扩散到了希腊。36岁的George Anastasopoulos持有社会学博士学位，但从事DJ的工作。他谈到雅典人在议会眼皮下的锡塔玛广场上的活动时说：“第一个星期日我们看到10万人参加抗议，我们都欣喜若狂。第二个星期日，广场上出现了50万人，我们受到了莫大的激励，情不自禁地幻想一些伟大的事情或许会发生。”
31岁的雅典时尚业人士Christina Lardikou说：“我们的抗议都起源于‘怒火’。”但其实也受到其它方面的启发。去年春天民主制度诞生地（译者注：指希腊）的一个口号就是“是的，我们可以”，Anastasopoulos还保留着一个旗帜，上面写着“让自由之声响彻”——这是来自马丁•路德•金所引用的《我的国家属于你》中的语句。
希腊的抗议活动持续了一个多月的时候，有150名年轻的以色列抗议者在特拉维夫的罗斯柴尔德大道上扎营。他们也有类似的苦衷：好工作太少、生活成本太高、政客腐败、有关系的富人瓜分了不公平的财富。很快，以色列出现了100多个类似的露营地，甚至包括工人阶级和雅皮士聚居的城市。当9月份活动接近尾声的时候，这个国家770万人口中的40万人参加了行走，高喊：“人民要求社会正义！”埃及革命领导人el-Ghazali Harb告诉我，他很高兴地看到塔利尔广场行动激发了全世界相同的抗议行为。我问他是否为以色列人民的行动而骄傲，他笑着说：“我们对此也是非常高兴。”
8月初，伦敦警方射杀了一名被捕的年轻黑人，一些暴徒在英格兰全境引发了混乱。当然，暴徒们诉诸武力的行为并没有博得全世界的同情。但是，《卫报》和伦敦经济学院经过三个月的研究之后，认为这些暴徒其实也是抗议者，他们被贫穷、失业和社会不公等问题困扰，情绪无处宣泄。警方过分的行为不过是一个导火索。
回到马德里，当抗议者们发现他们的行动效果在逐渐递减时，就开始撤营离开。Gálvez说，7月份，他们听说占领华尔街运动即将开始，“怒火”抗议者开始在网络上向美国人传授经验。
《Adbusters》是一本既郑重其事又荒唐可笑的双月刊杂志，没有广告内容，服务对象是“为改变我们社会中信息流动方式和意义而斗争的活动者”。自从1989年以来，他就一直在布道式地传递相关信息。杂志的编辑在7月份刊出了一张全页图片，一个赤脚的芭蕾舞者站在华尔街铜牛塑像上，背景是催泪瓦斯烟雾中戴着防毒面具的造反者。顶部是一句被分为4行的话：“我们的一个诉求是什么？”，底部是：“#占领华尔街，9月17日，带上帐篷”。《Adbusters》还发出了一封邮件，题目是“美国需要自己的塔利尔”，独立日那一天，他敦促一小群推特粉丝：“亲爱的美国同胞，今年的7月4日梦想是反对一切既成制度。”
如果你使用推特，人们就会响应
7月底，在纽约金融区的一间办公室里，占领华尔街的策划者和几个具有抗议经验的西班牙人、希腊人和北非人会面。为了确定“占领华尔街”运动的主旨，他们在两天后又进行了一次参与者不受限的会议——几个小时的会议在华尔街铜牛附近的公园中举行，而且是在一个正常的工作日，当着数千名不知情的过路人。
50岁的David Graeber是一位著名的人类学家，也是一个温和的无政府主义活动家，他出现在会议中。一些左派成员强力主张举行一次标准的集会，提出标准的要求——不可以削减政府的社会支出预算。Graeber和他的朋友——32岁的希腊移民艺术家Georgia Sagri——缓慢而又坚定地游说策划团体接受一个新主张：在公共场所的一次长期露营行动，一个没有正式领导人的临时性民主示威，提出相对模糊但含义广泛的诉求——美国经济衰退、政治腐败、大笔财富流失。这其中不包含任何对具体立法行为和行动的主张。正是Graeber这个一生痛恨公司作假行为的人提出了这场运动富有创意的口号：“我们是99％。”
直到9月底，99％的纽约人都没有听说过祖科迪公园，那是一个私人拥有的公共广场，夹在联邦储备银行和世贸中心遗址之间。在夏季的一个星期六——阳光明媚，60华氏度，天气绝好——一千多人在这里出现，有100多人扎营过夜，占领运动拉开了序幕。乍看起来，整个世界似乎对这场运动没有多达兴趣。然而在第三天，一些戴着盖伊•福克斯面具的抗议者因违反了纽约州一项古老的法令而被捕，世界开始关注了。
我是通过推特上的信息才知道我所居住的城市发生了什么事情。接下来的周末，我在YouTube上看到纽约警察漫不经心地向女性抗议者喷辣椒水。几天之后，我24岁的侄子Daniel Thorson从他在纽约西部的家中给我发电子邮件，说他要来参加占领华尔街运动，能不能在布鲁克林住几天？
Daniel在霍巴特和威廉史密斯大学主修哲学，他曾经住在大学生联谊会的宿舍中，志愿为奥巴马竞选造势，并且建立了校园中第一个无党派的知情民主团体。毕业之后，他从事过多个薪水微薄，甚至无薪的工作，对奥巴马政府的一事无成越来越感到失望。9月份，他吃惊地发现推特和脸谱网站上对占领华尔街运动深入和广泛的讨论，终于决定参加到其中来。
当他到达祖科迪公园之后，直接前往问讯处。他对我说：“那里的人似乎表达能力有缺陷，根本不是我期望看到的场景。”他申请加入活动，被安排在情报小组中。他帮助组织召开成员大会、活动的每日进程汇报、参与讨论和决策。对我来说，这有点像一个公司管理层的行政人员岗位——唯一的区别是会议在户外举行，所有人都用古怪的手势表决。我对Daniel说，即使我是一个24岁的理想主义者，我对这样的程序也无法忍受。他说，他对“那些权力、愤怒和抱怨所引发的狂热也时时感到厌烦，但每个组织内部都有扯皮的现象，无论这个组织有多么‘纯洁’。”
三个星期之后，我的妻子和我把他赶出了家门，这个时间算是叔叔为侄子提供的最大程度的义务了，Daniel大部分时间都睡在公园里。11月露营行动最后一天的晚上大约1点，他在一个朋友的公寓中睡觉时，收到了一条短信——警察已经上路，即将驱逐抗议者。他飞快地前往市中心，但是警方的路障把他和其它抗议者隔在百老汇一个街区之外。他们被命令立即离开，大部分人都拒绝执行，于是警方开始喷洒辣椒水，并且宣布如果不离开人行道就将会被捕。Daniel被拘留了38个小时，罪名是拒捕、扰乱社会治安和妨碍政府公务。
我是通过电子邮件和脸谱网站他个人的状态了解到他被捕和释放的消息的，当时我正在开罗的塔利尔广场参加最大规模的一次反军阀抗议活动。我的翻译，一个年轻的约旦移民，很兴奋地得知占领华尔街运动。他说：“这必将波及到更多地方，我知道现在至少有80多个国家响应了。”
在美国几乎所有的大城市，各类人群都加入了抗议者的行列。60岁的Arthur Chen是一位家庭实习医生，他参加了占领奥克兰运动。对他来说，“愤怒是对我们当前经济状况和对99％的人所遭受的影响最恰当的表达方式，”尤其是他那些低收入、没有保障的病人来说。Chen记得，他第一天参加占领奥克兰运动时，“有一个人说：‘你将会听到一些你完全不能赞同的观点。’我笑了，但我又在想：‘这一代人真的具有包容和透明的宝贵品质。’这很令人感动。”
与此同时在开罗，31岁的牙医Ahmed Harara一月份在塔利尔广场被橡皮子弹打坏了一只眼睛。当他9月份重返抗议队伍时，又被橡皮子弹打瞎了另一只眼睛。在这恐怖而又奇迹般的一年中，他印象最深刻的是哪一天呢？他说：“实际上有两天尤为重要——1月28日的埃及和美国人占领华尔街的那一天。我们在埃及喊出了社会公平的口号，我看到美国人也有同样的诉求，并且采取了同样的行动。”
幸福啊，活在那个黎明之中，
年轻人更是如进天堂！
——威廉•华兹华斯（译者注：19世纪英国著名诗人）
起义的后果远不像起义本身那样辉煌。团结是短暂的，民主是肮脏而艰难的，投票结果或许并不是你曾经冒着生命危险去争取的。自由不会倏然从天而降。我们几个人在塔利尔广场附近发现一个涂鸦，内容是被军方逮捕的网络自由人士。当我们准备拍照时，一个怒气冲冲的便衣警察走过来，挥手让我们走开。我们是不受革命环境的游客。
全球化和迅速传播是网络化的21世纪的显著标志，但直到目前为止，前者主要表现为控制在大人物手中的全球化经济模式，后者大部分是那些不知名的人制造出来的顽皮动物视频和流行歌曲。今年，自助式民主政治展示出全球化的趋势，抗议活动迅速传播。但是，在它们让民主重新焕发青春并扩大其涵盖范围的同时，抗议者和我们这些旁观者都发现，民主是艰难的，甚至有时候是令人畏惧的，因为确定你不想要什么要比确定你究竟想要什么简单很多。一旦你有了发言权，所有人都有了发言权。没有人知道这些革命最终的结局是什么：一条通往稳定民主制度的坎坷道路，像两个世纪前的美国那样？像法国一样在“幸福的天堂”后彻底推翻政权？还是会像法国60天之后又被反革命篡权？去年冬天在突尼斯和埃及发起革命的那些自由、现实的年轻人，已经被纪律严明的政治组织所排挤，或者至少被忽视。他们承认这是自己的错误，对民主政治过于天真的信仰。
Mahmoud Adel Elhetta对我说：“穆巴拉克唯一的成就是把我们团结在一起。”30岁的Mahmoud Salem经常在网络上用“沙猴”的名字发表文章，他持有美国学士和MBA学位，从事商业拓展工作，客户包括可口可乐这样的企业。他说，他“有年轻人那种傲睨神明的性格，社会完全陷入混乱状态是不现实的。”两个星期之前，他代表开罗一个富有行政区竞选议会席位的努力失败了。外科医生革命者el-Ghazali Harb说：“我们失败了，取得革命成功的是年轻人，但我们把胜利果实拱手交给了年长的人们，因为我们不相信自己。”
无论在埃及还是突尼斯，自由选举产生的新议会将被伊斯兰教派掌控，那些都是细声细语的温和派，世俗论者认为他们不会永远如此。但是正如穆斯林兄弟会的Tantawy对我说的那样，“这不仅仅是自由派与兄弟会的斗争，伊斯兰教派内部也有不合。”在我看来，埃及和伊斯兰教派主流的宗教力量，甚至还比不上Pat Robertson这种福音教派在美国的力量。并且，他们与共和党强硬路线不同，他们似乎愿意把现实自由主义者包括在全国统一战线内。Abdelhamid Jlassi是一位突尼斯伊斯兰教领袖，他作为政治罪犯被囚禁了17年。他说：“民主是一个新事物，我们必须要尽快习惯它，也就是要习惯被别人丢鸡蛋。”
现实主义革命者依然希望他们不会被当作一场新革命的炮灰。Shadi Taha是一位在美国受过教育的民用建筑工程师，他作为自由埃及派的代表，与穆斯林兄弟会联合被列入议会席位的竞选名单。他对我说：“我不赞同穆斯林兄弟会的部分思想。但是在80年代他们进入政坛之前，他们就像Salafis一样疯狂。”他指的是曾经赢得当前议会四分之一席位的信奉正统派基督教的人。他认为民主政治固有一种慢化效应。突尼斯大学教授Dalenda Largueche是一位女权主义者，她在谈话时无法控制对伊斯兰教抬头的恐惧感。即使是她也依然抱有一丝希望：“他们希望用自己的观点改变突尼斯，但最终，突尼斯会改变他们。”现实主义者对自由和民主有一种令人激动的再生父母之感：国家不会回到暴君手中，这是肯定的。Wael Nawara说：“最终，一切都会变好的，因为人民和埃及独裁者的关系已经永久性地发生了变化。人民已经发现，他们可以随时停止独裁政权的荒唐行为，这样的发现改变了一切。他们知道自己可以更换统治者，这就是革命。”
然而，目前全世界的抗议者中都存在着一种自我设置的第二十二条军规。所有的抗议行为都是为了反对现存的体制，这是他们力量的源泉。Jlassi谈到突尼斯革命时说：“如果领导者是政客，那么革命永远不会成功。而无牵无挂的年轻人可以激起所有人的同理心。”但即使自由的政治制度也依然包含杂质，年轻人和自由人士还无法消化这样的苦果。他们还会继续高举道德大旗吗？这样考虑问题的确不够光彩。美国的占领者缺少占领白宫的勇气，他们对于与工会联合并不感兴趣，独立的一代对于全体观点一致的苛求或许会让抗议结果退化为无意义的“巴托白模式”——消极抵抗，畏首畏脚。
欧洲和阿拉伯国家的情形一样。Lina Ben Mhenni说，在突尼斯，“我们的革命并没有结束，独裁政府被推翻了，或许我们犯下的最大错误就是不愿投身于政治职业生涯。”失去了独裁政府作为革命的目标，理想主义的纯洁性就要背负上沉重的政治压力。如果你把这些枯燥乏味但又无比重要的国家管理工作丢给古板守旧的成年人，那么你等于输掉了革命。
另一方面，这些运动中所包含的一个具有明确时代特征的优势，是对互联网和社交媒体的充分利用。两年前，有两位学者Nicholas Christakis（哈佛大学）和James Fowler（加利福尼亚大学圣迭戈分校）发表了一篇文章《互联》，其中对社交网络进行了一些开创性的研究。他们对此的总结是“你朋友的朋友的朋友，是如何影响到你的感受、思维和行为的”。过去12个月以来发生的抗议活动，似乎从全球范围绝好地印证了这个发现。
把阿拉伯春天称作是脸谱、YouTube和推特的革命其实并不过分，也并不是一厢情愿的美国人的吹牛。无论在中东还是北非，无论在西班牙、希腊还是纽约，社交媒体和智能手机并没有取代面对面的社交活动和人们相互间直接的对抗，而是为这些行为插上了翅膀。它让抗议者更灵活地动员群众，更方便地与他人交流，更广泛地与世界连接。在那些互联网普及率比较高的军管国家——本•阿里的突尼斯、穆巴拉克的埃及、巴沙尔•阿萨德的叙利亚——一大群平民记者用手机加上YouTube、脸谱和推特，几乎形成了一个本土自由新闻机构。在中东和北非，新媒体和博客写手几乎就是抗议和抗议者的同义词。
其次，在阿拉伯之春里，一种不那么新鲜的媒体形式也起到了重要的推动作用，那就是独立的24小时电视新闻。当我问伊斯兰教徒Jlassi为什么突尼斯在十年前没有爆发革命时，他回答：“那时没有半岛电视台和互联网，尤其是半岛电视台，现在所有人都在看电视。”
所以，美国在21世纪煽动海外自由行动的最大贡献不是依靠武力，而是依靠科技，全球化发展仅仅是副作用。在这之后，全球化战略又让发展中国家的民主起义输出到发达国家。埃及总统候选人阿姆•穆萨对我说：“我们原来只是接受方，现在变成了输出方，我们为全球化运动做出了自己的贡献。这是一种崭新的精神，草根们纷纷揭竿而起，无论在华尔街还是欧洲。”
自从现代共和民主制度出现以来，令人瞠目结舌的抗议和造反运动都从未停止过，而且几乎每隔半个世纪就会出现一次：美国、法国和海地的解放运动、1848年的欧洲大革命、1910年的解放运动（俄罗斯、德国、爱尔兰、土耳其、埃及、墨西哥）、战后全球范围内的起义（反殖民地斗争，包括古巴、匈牙利、美国民权战斗、美国和欧洲的反文化战斗）。运动爆发的时间虽然如此精确，但每次人们都会遇到新的困惑，这就是我们要继续研究它的原因。历史不会告诉我们这次的革命会持续多久。1848年的革命爆发时声势浩大，但只持续了不到一年就被独裁和民主反革命扑灭。1960年出现的革命理念相对朦胧，但直到十年后依然具有强大的力量。
占领华尔街运动的领导人利用冬季成立了一个组织，为下一阶段募集新的抗议者。他们因此躲开了全国议论的焦点。据Politico网站的报道，Nexis新闻媒体数据库目前每周统计到500个提到“不公平”的文章，而在占领华尔街运动之前只有91篇文章。但是自此之后的几年时间里，怎样才能判定这场活动的成功与否呢？据《Adbusters》野心勃勃的编辑Kalle Lasn和Micah White说，这已经是“美国自民权运动时代以来最伟大的社会公平运动了”。然而，从蒙哥马利公共汽车抵制运动到联邦民权法案的通过，经过了十年时间。现在仅仅是一个开端罢了。
聪明的华尔街占领者明白现在依然处于运动的初期。只要华盛顿政府和欧洲政府依然不能正常运作，我认为占领者和“怒火”运动者就没有理由放弃，抗议行动依然会是政治运作模式的主流，它们也依然具有足够的吸引力。毕竟，茶叶党只有在2010年正式掌权，成为共和党谄媚的走狗之后，才让一些抗议活动平息掉。激进的平民主义运动必须要获取重大的胜利和关注，当他们满足的时候才会逐渐退出历史舞台。
如果埃及和突尼斯的民主和自由包含了太多的妥协，抗议者完全可以再一次掀起风浪。约旦和也门的抗议者尽管受到鼓舞，但目前还无法铲除当权者。在北约的协助下，利比亚血腥的起义运动让卡扎菲上校交出了把持42年的政权。叙利亚的革命行动依然在继续，已经有数千名抗议者被杀害。
在俄罗斯，2011年令人吃惊的抗议活动正在酝酿中，其中包含的因素我们再熟悉不过了——假民主政权的任意胡为、互联网使用的普及、强大的新型媒体和群情激奋的中产阶级年轻人。12月5日，普京的统一俄罗斯党在议会选举中落败，这还是在明目张胆地给投票箱作弊之后的结果。大约5000名莫斯科人集会，高呼“俄罗斯不需要普京”，并要求逮捕普京。这是俄罗斯在21世纪中最大规模的一次反zf示威，就像突尼斯、马德里和纽约一样，没有人能预见未来会发生什么。
这些俄罗斯抗议者属于新新人类，他们不是那些喜欢怀旧的共产主义老妈妈，也不是激进的民族主义打手，而是雅皮士和学生这一类社会精英人士。58岁的Oleg Orlov是俄罗斯最大人权组织的负责人，他在12月5日巡视Chistye Prudy广场时说：“这就是人群的组成，我从未见过这些人团结在一起，至少没有这样的规模。这真让人难以置信。”
网络写手Alexei Navalny给统一俄罗斯党起了一个新绰号——骗子和小偷的党派。他在面对抗议者讲话时说：“他们嘲笑我们只会写微博，说我们是网络老鼠。好的，我们就是网络老鼠，但我知道他们害怕我们。”群众欢呼起来。之后，包括Navalny在内的300人被捕。第二天晚上，抗议者回到胜利广场，又有600多人被捕。普京的一位发言人说：“未经批准的示威行走必须停止。”
第一次抗议之后5天，12月10日，数万人聚集在莫斯科，这是继俄罗斯共产主义垮台之后最大的一次示威活动。俄罗斯其它十几个城市中也同时爆发的了抗议活动。有人向群众朗读了Navalny在莫斯科监狱中写的一封信：“他们不可能打击、逮捕数十万和数百万人。我们不是牲口，也不是奴隶。我们有投票权，我们有话语权，我们有扶持和推翻他们的权力。”更大的一次抗议活动被安排在12月24日。
他们抗议的对象是腐败和缺少真正的自由，目标是实现民主。因为俄罗斯和其它国家一样，还没有完全走到历史的尽头。
原文：
Once upon a time, when major news events were chronicled strictly by professionals and printed on paper or transmitted through the air by the few for the masses, protesters were prime makers of history. Back then, when citizen multitudes took to the streets without weapons to declare themselves opposed, it was the very definition of news — vivid, important, often consequential. In the 1960s in America they marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War; in the '70s, they rose up in Iran and Portugal; in the '80s, they spoke out against nuclear weapons in the U.S. and Europe, against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, against communist tyranny in Tiananmen Square and Eastern Europe. Protest was the natural continuation of politics by other means.
And then came the End of History, summed up by Francis Fukuyama's influential 1989 essay declaring that mankind had arrived at the "end point of ... ideological evolution" in globally triumphant "Western liberalism." The two decades beginning in 1991 witnessed the greatest rise in living standards that the world has ever known. Credit was easy, complacency and apathy were rife, and street protests looked like pointless emotional sideshows — obsolete, quaint, the equivalent of cavalry to mid-20th-century war. The rare large demonstrations in the rich world seemed ineffectual and irrelevant. (See the Battle of Seattle, 1999.)
There were a few exceptions, like the protests that, along with sanctions, helped end apartheid in South Africa in 1994. But for young people, radical critiques and protests against the system were mostly confined to pop-culture fantasy: "Fight the Power" was a song on a platinum-selling album, Rage Against the Machine was a platinum-selling band, and the beloved brave rebels fighting the all-encompassing global oppressors were just a bunch of characters in The Matrix.
"Massive and effective street protest" was a global oxymoron until — suddenly, shockingly — starting exactly a year ago, it became the defining trope of our times. And the protester once again became a maker of history.
Prelude to the Revolutions
It began in Tunisia, where the dictator's power grabbing and high living crossed a line of shamelessness, and a commonplace bit of government callousness against an ordinary citizen — a 26-year-old street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi — became the final straw. Bouazizi lived in the charmless Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, 125 miles south of Tunis. On a Friday morning almost exactly a year ago, he set out for work, selling produce from a cart. Police had hassled Bouazizi routinely for years, his family says, fining him, making him jump through bureaucratic hoops. On Dec. 17, 2010, a cop started giving him grief yet again. She confiscated his scale and allegedly slapped him. He walked straight to the provincial-capital building to complain and got no response. At the gate, he drenched himself in paint thinner and lit a match.
"My son set himself on fire for dignity," Mannoubia Bouazizi told me when I visited her.
"In Tunisia," added her 16-year-old daughter Basma, "dignity is more important than bread."
In Egypt the incitements were a preposterously fraudulent 2010 national election and, as in Tunisia, a not uncommon act of unforgivable brutality by security agents. In the U.S., three acute and overlapping money crises — tanked economy, systemic financial recklessness, gigantic public debt — along with ongoing revelations of double dealing by banks, new state laws making certain public-employee-union demands illegal and the refusal of Congress to consider even slightly higher taxes on the very highest incomes mobilized Occupy Wall Street and its millions of supporters. In Russia it was the realization that another six (or 12) years of Vladimir Putin might not lead to greater prosperity and democratic normality.
In Sidi Bouzid and Tunis, in Alexandria and Cairo; in Arab cities and towns across the 6,000 miles from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean; in Madrid and Athens and London and Tel Aviv; in Mexico and India and Chile, where citizens mobilized against crime and corruption; in New York and Moscow and dozens of other U.S. and Russian cities, the loathing and anger at governments and their cronies became uncontainable and fed on itself.
The stakes are very different in different places. In North America and most of Europe, there are no dictators, and dissidents don't get tortured. Any day that Tunisians, Egyptians or Syrians occupy streets and squares, they know that some of them might be beaten or shot, not just pepper-sprayed or flex-cuffed. The protesters in the Middle East and North Africa are literally dying to get political systems that roughly resemble the ones that seem intolerably undemocratic to protesters in Madrid, Athens, London and New York City. "I think other parts of the world," says Frank Castro, 53, a Teamster who drives a cement mixer for a living and helped occupy Oakland, Calif., "have more balls than we do."
In Egypt and Tunisia, I talked with revolutionaries who were M.B.A.s, physicians and filmmakers as well as the young daughters of a provincial olive picker and a supergeeky 29-year-old Muslim Brotherhood member carrying a Tigger notebook. The Occupy movement in the U.S. was set in motion by a couple of magazine editors — a 69-year-old Canadian, a 29-year-old African American — and a 50-year-old anthropologist, but airline pilots and grandmas and shop clerks and dishwashers have been part of the throngs.
It's remarkable how much the protest vanguards share. Everywhere they are disproportionately young, middle class and educated. Almost all the protests this year began as independent affairs, without much encouragement from or endorsement by existing political parties or opposition bigwigs. All over the world, the protesters of 2011 share a belief that their countries' political systems and economies have grown dysfunctional and corrupt — sham democracies rigged to favor the rich and powerful and prevent significant change. They are fervent small-d democrats. Two decades after the final failure and abandonment of communism, they believe they're experiencing the failure of hell-bent megascaled crony hypercapitalism and pine for some third way, a new social contract.
During the bubble years, perhaps, there was enough money trickling down to keep them happyish, but now the unending financial crisis and economic stagnation make them feel like suckers. This year, instead of plugging in the headphones, entering an Internet-induced fugue state and quietly giving in to hopelessness, they used the Internet to find one another and take to the streets to insist on fairness and (in the Arab world) freedom.
All over the world they are criticized by old-schoolers for lacking prefab ideological consistency, which the protesters in turn see as a feature rather than a bug. Miral Brinjy, a 27-year-old blogger and TV-news producer who grew up in Saudi Arabia and arrived in Tahrir Square on the first day of protests 11 months ago, doesn't presume to have a precise picture of the new Egyptian government and society she envisions, but as she told me in Cairo last month, "I know what I don't want."
In each place, discontent that had been simmering for years got turned up to a boil. There were foreshadowings. In the U.S., the Obama campaign was in part a feel-good protest movement that galvanized young people, and then its shocking success and the Wall Street bailout produced an angry and shockingly successful populist protest movement in the Tea Party, which has far outlasted its expected shelf life. In 2009, after the regime in Tehran denied the antiregime election results, millions of Iranians, especially young ones, protested for weeks. The Web and social media were key tactical tools in all three instances. But they seemed at the time to be one-offs, not prefaces to an epochal turn of history's wheel.
The Iranian regime's suppression of the Green Revolution must have reassured the dictators and monarchs in the Arab Middle East and North Africa and, you'd think, dispirited would-be democratic freedom fighters in those countries. The global spread of liberty hit a plateau a dozen years earlier, according to the international monitoring organization Freedom House. And the Middle East and North Africa remained the world's tyranny belt: at the end of 2010, Freedom House declared three-fourths of the Arab countries "not free" — including Tunisia and Egypt. In Arab countries, the prosperity of the past decade — Egypt's economy grew by 5% and more, even during the recession — was not widely shared; rising expectations that go unfulfilled are sociology's classic explanation for protest. For a critical mass of people from Cairo to Madrid to Oakland, prospects for personal success — for the good life at the End of History that they'd been promised — suddenly looked very grim. They were fed up, and the frustration and anger exploded after the regimes overreached.
In short, 2011 was unlike any year since 1989 — but more extraordinary, more global, more democratic, since in '89 the regime disintegrations were all the result of a single disintegration at headquarters, one big switch pulled in Moscow that cut off the power throughout the system. So 2011 was unlike any year since 1968 — but more consequential because more protesters have more skin in the game. Their protests weren't part of a countercultural pageant, as in '68, and rapidly morphed into full-fledged rebellions, bringing down regimes and immediately changing the course of history. It was, in other words, unlike anything in any of our lifetimes, probably unlike any year since 1848, when one street protest in Paris blossomed into a three-day revolution that turned a monarchy into a republican democracy and then — within weeks, thanks in part to new technologies (telegraphy, railroads, rotary printing presses) — inspired an unstoppable cascade of protest and insurrection in Munich, Berlin, Vienna, Milan, Venice and dozens of other places across Europe, as well as a huge peaceful demonstration of democratic solidarity in New York that marched down Broadway and occupied a public park a few blocks north of Wall Street. How perfect that the German word Zeitgeist was transplanted into English in that unprecedented, uncanny year of insurrection.
During the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, just as the French colonialists were about to lose to the communist revolutionaries and leave Indochina, President Dwight Eisenhower held a news conference. "You have a row of dominoes set up," he said, positing Vietnam as the domino between fallen China and North Korea and the rest of Asia. "You knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly." But in 1975, after the communists won in Vietnam and Cambodia, no other countries followed, and the domino theory of contagious national-liberation movements was discredited forever.
Forever, until now. This is how the dominoes fell in 2011 — and these are some of the people who pushed them.
The Year of Protests
The fire didn't kill Mohamed Bouazizi right away. Passersby doused the flames and took him to the hospital. He was still alive, barely.
That afternoon, other produce sellers and townspeople joined the Bouazizis in protest outside the governorate. A cousin posted a video of the demonstration. Word spread thanks to al-Jazeera and the Internet — a third of all Tunisians use the Internet, and three-quarters of those have Facebook accounts — inspiring protests in other towns and cities. After Bouazizi died on Jan. 4, the protests reached a critical mass, and more than a dozen protesters around the country were killed by police. "I'd watch TV," Basma Bouazizi told me, "and say, 'God, the Tunisian people have woken up!' "
Spontaneous protests? In 2011? In an Arab police state? Heroic, hopeless, doomed. Three weeks in, the nearly universal presumption about the protests' implications was summed up in the Economist's first report: "Tunisia's troubles are unlikely to unseat the 74-year-old president or even to jolt his model of autocracy."
Lina Ben Mhenni, 28, a linguistics teacher at Tunis University, had been blogging for a few years about Tunisian censorship and election rigging under the name "A Tunisian Girl." She went to the town of Regueb, 25 miles from Sidi Bouzid, to photograph a young protester who had been shot dead and uploaded the image. "On that day I lost my fear completely," she says. "I was ready for anything, even death." By the end of the week, she was back in Tunis, protesting outside the old white stucco casbah that served as the seat of government. So was Hilme al-Manahe, 23, an unemployed baker. His mother, Sayda al-Manahe, says Bouazizi's self-immolation had galvanized Hilme. "He used to say, 'This poor man — I can understand why he did that. He just wanted to earn a living. His story is like my story, which is like my friend's story.'"
"I would tell him," Sayda says, "Be quiet, sit down, and don't even think about getting involved in this." But on Jan. 13 he went to the demonstration in Tunis. He had just recorded a friend with his cell phone when a bullet, presumably fired by a police sniper, pierced his heart.
The next morning, Majdi Calboussi, a middle-class 29-year-old software developer and antiregime blogger, was there recording the protests and the police with his BlackBerry. "People started to say, 'Ben Ali, dégage' " ("Get out, Ben Ali"). He uploaded his video to Twitter, and it got half a million views in a day. Hours later, President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali flew to exile in Saudi Arabia. After just four weeks, the protesters had won. And the next domino was struck.
Among all the Egyptians I met, there is absolute agreement about one thing: Tunisia was the spark of their revolution. "It wouldn't have happened without them," says Shady el-Ghazali Harb, a 32-year-old surgeon who was one of 13 main leaders in Tahrir Square. The lessons of Tunisia weren't just inspirational; they were practical. "This was like a user's manual in how to topple a regime peacefully," says Wael Nawara, 50, a Web entrepreneur and longtime opposition political activist. In January, Tunisians "sent us a lot of information," says Ahmed Maher, a Cairo civil engineer and one of Egypt's most prominent activists, "like use vinegar and onion" — near one's face, for the tear gas — "and how to stop a tank. They sent us this advice, and we used it."
The Egyptians had their own Mohamed Bouazizi: an underemployed middle-class 28-year-old named Khaled Said. One day last year, after apparently hacking a police officer's cell phone and lifting a video of officers displaying drugs and stacks of cash, he was arrested and beaten to death. Wael Ghonim, then a 29-year-old Google executive, created a Facebook page called We Are All Khaled Said to memorialize him. It went viral, and in January, Ghonim returned from Dubai to Egypt to help plan a protest set for Jan. 25: a "day of rage" in Tahrir Square. Maher and other activists were invited to collaborate. They met online and face to face to work out the details. Brinjy told me she "was terrified. I thought we'd try but run away if necessary. Then we ran into huge crowds heading to Tahrir, and I knew it was going to be big."
"From the start I thought it would succeed," 29-year-old filmmaker Mohammed Ramadan says. "In my whole life I'd never seen protests like that. Girls! Some wore hijabs, some didn't, Christians, Muslims — I'd never seen that." The Muslim Brotherhood hadn't endorsed the protest, but Khaled Tantawy, a 34-year-old Brotherhood apparatchik, came anyway. He also was struck by the diversity. "I saw all these different and surprising kinds of people protesting and thought, Wow, this can happen."
That night it happened. "The surprise," according to Mohamed el-Beltagy, a member of the Brotherhood who went to Tahrir unofficially, "was that there was a new generation who could break the fear barrier. At midnight, when the violent clearing of the square happened and the protesters didn't run away and go home, I knew it was a revolution."
The regime's violent response surprised no one. As in Tunisia, when the crackdown escalated — from tear gas to rubber bullets to real bullets, to Ghonim's detention for the duration, to a nationwide shutdown of Internet connections, to armed camel riders rampaging through Tahrir — so did the number of protesters in Cairo and all over the country. At least 4.5 million Egyptians protested during those three weeks — in other words, 8% of the population over 14.
Hisham Kassem, a prominent 52-year-old independent journalist and publisher, had never been part of a street protest before. He is bracingly clear-eyed, a stiff-necked curmudgeon. On Jan. 28 he was teargassed and, he told me, still sounding amazed 10 months later, threw rocks at police. "I saw people shot next to me." When he returned on "the day of the camel attack, it was war — I almost got mauled to death by the thugs." And another day when he arrived at Tahrir, "This kid asked for my ID: 'Whose side are you on?' I said, 'What the hell do you mean?' " But then and there on the edge of Liberation Square, he had an epiphany: he may have been a longtime pro-democracy VIP, but this was now democracy. "I felt a strange acceptance," he says. "I didn't begrudge them."
By then the army had announced, "Your armed forces, who are aware of the legitimacy of your demands ... will not resort to use of force." President Hosni Mubarak was finished — "Please go," a Tahrir protest sign urged, "because I want to take a shower" — but it took 11 more days for Mubarak to pass through denial, anger, bargaining and presumably depression to arrive at the acceptance stage. "The day Mubarak stepped down," says Abdo Kassem, 25, an unemployed Cairene who'd never been politically active until he followed the Facebook protest instructions last January, "I was crying. For me, that was like bringing down a fake god."
Millions protest. Armies stand down. Dictators leave. Impossible fantasies two months earlier — now they were coming true. The "days of rage" meme and democratic dream had achieved breathtaking momentum, spreading not just to the softer monarchical dictatorships — Jordan, Bahrain, Morocco — but also to Yemen, Algeria and the hardcore police states Syria and Libya.
In the spring, they spread to Europe. On May 15, tens of thousands marched to Madrid's Puerta del Sol plaza, along with tens of thousands more in dozens of other cities, united by slogans like "We are not goods in the hands of politicians and bankers." They were frustrated by unemployment, a lack of opportunity and politics headed nowhere. They called themselves Los Indignados, the Outraged.
Spain's one-day march turned into a months-long self-governing encampment — one of the new defining characteristics of 2011's brand of communal resistance. Throughout the country, about 6 million out of a population of 46 million participated in Indignados protests. Among those in Madrid was Olmo Gálvez, 31, an Internet entrepreneur just back from three years working in China and new to politics. He'd helped set up social-media networks for the protest. "It was marvelous to see people become the actors in their own lives," he says. "You could watch them breaking out of their passivity."
Ten days after the Madrid protests began, the contagion spread to Greece. George Anastasopoulos, 36, has a Ph.D. in sociology but earns his living as a DJ. "That first Sunday when we saw 100,000 people show up, we were overwhelmed," he says of the Athenians' camp in Syntagma Square, in sight of Parliament. "And then the second Sunday, 500,000 people showed up. That enthused us so much, and we started dreaming really big."
"Our protests," says Christina Lardikou, a 31-year-old Athenian who works in fashion, "all started from the Indignados." But they drew from other inspirations too. Among the chants in the birthplace of democracy last spring were "Yes we can!" And Anastasopoulos has kept a banner reading "Let freedom ring" — that is, a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. quoting "My Country 'Tis of Thee."
The Greek protests continued for more than a month, until just about the time 150 young Israeli protesters started pitching tents in the median of Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv. The grievance package was familiar: good jobs too scarce, cost of living too high, politicians corrupt, only the well-connected rich getting richer. Soon there were 100 such encampments all over Israel, in working-class towns as well as yuppievilles. For a finale in early September, an estimated 400,000 of the country's 7.7 million citizens marched, chanting, "The people demand social justice!" When the Egyptian revolutionary leader el-Ghazali Harb told me how pleased he was that Tahrir Square had inspired copycat protests all over the world, I asked if his pride extended to Israel. He laughed and said, "I will say we were happy about that as well."
In early August, after police in London shot and killed a young black man they were arresting, riots broke out all over England. Naturally, the rioters' instantly resorting to violence attracted little sympathy. Yet a new, three-month study by the Guardian and the London School of Economics concluded that these rioters were also protesters, motivated by anger about poverty, unemployment and inequality as well as overaggressive policing.
Back in Madrid, the protesters recognized the diminishing returns of this protest phase and started to decamp. By July, Gálvez says, they heard that Occupy Wall Street was going to happen. Online, the Indignados started explaining to the Americans how it's done.
Since 1989 the earnest, zany little bimonthly Adbusters — "an ad-free international magazine for activists fighting to change the way information flows and meaning is produced in our society" — had been preaching to its choir. In July the editors ran a full-page photo-illustration of a barefoot ballerina posed atop Wall Street's Charging Bull statue — in the background were gas-masked insurgents in a tear-gas fog — along with four lines of copy: "What is our one demand? #occupywallstreet September 17th. Bring tent." Adbusters also sent out an e-mail — "America needs its own Tahrir" — and on Independence Day urged on its smallish cadre of Twitter followers: "Dear Americans, this July 4th dream of insurrection against corporate rule."
If you tweet it, they will come.
At the end of July, in an office in New York's financial district, the proto-Occupiers met with some veterans of the protests in Spain, Greece and North Africa. To figure out what "Occupy Wall Street" might mean, they reconvened two days later at a come-one-come-all meeting — outdoors, for hours, in a park near that charging bronze bull, amid the thousands of unwitting passersby on an ordinary Wall Street workday.
David Graeber, 50, a prominent anthropology scholar and soft-spoken pro-anarchism activist, showed up. Some standard leftists were pushing for a standard rally making a standard demand — no cutbacks in government social spending. Slowly but surely, Graeber and a pal, 32-year-old Greek émigré artist Georgia Sagri, nudged the group to a fresh vision: a long-term encampment in a public space, an improvised democratic protest village without preappointed leaders, committed to a general critique — the U.S. economy is broken, politics is corrupted by big money — but with no immediate call for specific legislative or executive action. It was also Graeber, a lifelong hater of corporate smoke and mirrors, who coined the movement's ingenious slogan, "We are the 99%."
Until late September, 99% of New Yorkers had never heard of Zuccotti Park, a privately owned public plaza tucked between the Federal Reserve Bank and the World Trade Center site. On the last Saturday of the summer — sunny, mid-60s, perfect — a couple thousand people showed up, a hundred slept overnight, and the occupation was on. It seemed as though the world would little note nor long remember it. On the third day, the first arrests — of protesters wearing Guy Fawkes masks in violation of an antique New York anti-insurrection statute — got scant attention.
It was through my Twitter feed that I started noticing that something was going on in my city. The following weekend, I watched the YouTube video of a New York police deputy inspector casually pepper-spraying some random female protesters. A few days later, my 24-year-old nephew, Daniel Thorson, e-mailed from his small town in western New York: he was coming down to occupy Wall Street, and could he stay with us in Brooklyn?
At Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Daniel was a philosophy major, lived in a frat house, volunteered for the Obama campaign and co-founded his campus's chapter of the nonpartisan Americans for Informed Democracy. Since graduating, he's held various minimum-wage and unpaid jobs and has grown deeply disappointed by how little the Obama Administration has been able to accomplish. In September he was stunned by the breadth and depth of the chatter on his Twitter and Facebook feeds about Occupy Wall Street and decided he wanted to be part of it.
As soon as he arrived at Zuccotti Park, he went to the information desk. "It was staffed by someone who wasn't very articulate," he told me, "who wasn't the face of what I thought this should be." He offered to pitch in and thus became a member of the information working group. He helped guide the general assemblies, OWS's daily town meetings, reveling in the process of debating and deciding. To me it sounded like being a facilitator at a corporate management retreat — except outdoors, with everyone voting by means of kooky hand signals and making sure the anarchists are heard. Even if I were a 24-year-old idealist, I told Daniel, I would have zero patience for the process. He'd get annoyed from time to time by "craziness, by a sense of entitlement, anger, resentment," he said. "But there are jerks in every organization, no matter how 'pure' the organization."
After my wife and I kicked him out of our house — three weeks seemed like a fulfillment of avuncular duty — Daniel slept at the park most nights. At around 1 a.m. on the final night of the encampment in November, he was at a friend's apartment when he got a text message — police en route, eviction imminent. He rushed downtown, but new police barricades kept him and other protesters a block away up Broadway. They were ordered to scram, most of them refused, the pepper spray came out, and the police announced they'd be arrested if they didn't leave the sidewalk. Daniel spent 38 hours in custody, charged with resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and obstructing governmental administration.
I found out about his arrest and release — via e-mail and a Facebook status update — in Cairo, as I walked through Tahrir Square during the first of the recent, huge anti-junta protests. My interpreter, a young Jordanian immigrant to Egypt, was excited about Occupy Wall Street. "It's going viral," he said. "I know it's now like in 80 countries."
And in cities all over the U.S., of course, with all kinds of people protesting. Among the thousands occupying Oakland was Arthur Chen, 60, a family-practice physician. For him, "the expression of outrage was very on target with our current economic crisis and the way it's impacting the 99%," especially his low-income and uninsured patients. During his first day occupying Oakland, Chen remembers, "one of the announcers said, 'You're going to hear some things that you may totally disagree with.' I chuckled, and then I thought, 'This generation really is about inclusiveness and transparency.' It was very moving."
In Cairo, meanwhile, there was Ahmed Harara, 31, a dentist who lost sight in both eyes to rubber bullets in Tahrir on two separate occasions — in January and November, when he returned for the anti-junta protests. What was the most memorable day of his whole annus mirabilis cum horribilis? "Actually," he said, "there are two days — the 28th of January here in Egypt and the day when Americans occupied Wall Street. Because here in Egypt, we raised the slogan of social justice, and I see that Americans need it and did that too."
The Beginning of History
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!—Oh!
times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding
ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!
—William Wordsworth, "The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement"
Aftermaths are never as splendid as uprisings. Solidarity has a short half-life. Democracy is messy and hard, and votes may not go your way. Freedom doesn't appear all at once. Just off Tahrir, when a couple of us were taking pictures of a graffiti about a blogger the army had imprisoned, a scowling secret policeman appeared and waved us away. We were unwanted tourists at the revolution.
Globalization and going viral have been the catchphrases of the networked 21st century. But until now the former has mainly referred to a fluid worldwide economy managed by important people, and the latter has mostly meant cute-animal videos and songs by nobodies. This year, do-it-yourself democratic politics became globalized, and real live protest went massively viral. But as they've rejuvenated and enlarged the idea of democracy, the protesters, and the rest of us, are discovering that democracy is difficult and sometimes a little scary. Because deciding what you don't want is a lot easier than deciding and implementing what you do want, and once everybody has a say, everybody has a say. No one knows how the revolutions will play out: A bumpy road to stable democracy, as in America two centuries ago? Radicals' taking over, as in France just after the bliss and very heaven? Or quick counterrevolution, as in France 60 years later? The mostly liberal, secular young people who made the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt last winter have been subordinated, if not sidelined, by better-disciplined political organizations. And they all agree it's partly their own fault, a function of naiveté about the realities of democratic politics.
"The only good thing Mubarak did," activist Mahmoud Adel Elhetta told me, "was unite us." Mahmoud Salem, 30, who blogs and tweets under the name Sandmonkey — and who has an American B.A. and M.B.A. and works in business development for clients like Coca-Cola — told me he "had the hubris of youth. It was utopia that immediately descended into chaos." He lost his election for a parliamentary seat representing a wealthy Cairo district two weeks ago. "We failed," says el-Ghazali Harb, the surgeon-revolutionary. "What made the revolution happen is the youth. We handed it back to the seniors. We didn't trust ourselves."
In both Egypt and Tunisia, the freely elected new parliaments will be dominated by Islamists — sweet-talking moderates who secularists worry won't stay that way. But as Tantawy of the Muslim Brotherhood told me, "It's not just liberals vs. the Brotherhood now. The Islamists disagree among themselves." To me, the mainstream Islamist parties in Egypt and Tunisia don't appear much more fanatically religious than, say, Pat Robertson–esque Evangelicals in the U.S., and unlike the Republican hard-liners, they sound committed to a national consensus that includes secular liberals. "Democracy is a new culture, and we have to get used to it," says Abdelhamid Jlassi, a Tunisian Islamist leader who spent 17 years as a political prisoner. "Now we have to get used to being hit by eggs."
And the secular revolutionaries remain hopeful that they will not turn out to have been useful idiots to new oppressors. Shadi Taha is a U.S.-educated civil engineer and major liberal Egyptian party official who's running for parliament on a coalition slate with Muslim Brothers. "I don't agree with some of their things," he told me, "but in the 1980s, before they got into politics, they were as crazy as the Salafis" — the fundamentalists who are winning a quarter of the current parliamentary vote. He thinks democratic politics has an inherently moderating effect. Even Tunis University professor Dalenda Largueche, a feminist who could barely contain her horror at ascendant Islamism when we spoke, can eke out some hope. "They want to change Tunisia according to their vision," she says, "but Tunisia will change them." The secularists have a founding-fathers-and-mothers faith in freedom and democracy that is stirring: there's no going back to tyranny, they're sure. "In the end," Wael Nawara says, "things will turn out all right, because the relationship between people and authority in Egypt has changed forever. People discovered that they can change and stop authority from going too far. That self-discovery changes everything. They learned they can replace a ruler. That's the revolution."
Yet there is, for now, a self-sabotaging catch-22 operating among protesters all over the world. All the protests have been against systemic status quos. That has been their great strength. "If it was politicians who had led the movement," Jlassi says of the Tunisian revolution, "it wouldn't have succeeded, whereas the youths, who were unaffiliated, could appeal to everyone." But because even free politics can be inherently unclean, the youth and other liberals don't yet have the stomach for democratic hardball. Will the moral high ground keep working for them? It would be pretty to think so. U.S. Occupiers lack faith in the occupant of the Oval Office and aren't entirely thrilled with their labor-union allies, and the indie generations' need for absolute consensus can devolve into a feckless Bartlebyism — passive resistance, preferring not to.
Ditto in Europe and the Arab countries. In Tunisia, says Lina Ben Mhenni, "we didn't complete the revolution. We got rid of the dictator. Maybe the mistake that we made was that most of us rejected the idea of entering political life." Absent dictatorships to overthrow, idealistic purity can carry a high political price, and if you leave the dull but essential business of governing to the squares and grownups, you lose.
On the other hand, one of the unequivocal generational virtues of these movements has been their use of the Internet and social media. Two years ago, scholars Nicholas Christakis (Harvard) and James Fowler (University of California, San Diego) published Connected, a groundbreaking study of social networks, which they summarize as "how your friends' friends' friends affect everything you feel, think and do." The protests of the past 12 months look like a spectacular worldwide confirmation of those findings.
Calling the Arab uprisings Facebook and YouTube and Twitter revolutions is not, it turns out, just glib, wishful American overstatement. In the Middle East and North Africa, in Spain and Greece and New York, social media and smart phones did not replace face-to-face social bonds and confrontation but helped enable and turbocharge them, allowing protesters to mobilize more nimbly and communicate with one another and the wider world more effectively than ever before. And in police states with high Internet penetration — Ben Ali's Tunisia, Mubarak's Egypt, Bashar Assad's Syria — a critical mass of cell-phone video recorders plus YouTube plus Facebook plus Twitter really did become an indigenous free press. Throughout the Middle East and North Africa, new media and blogger are now quasi synonyms for protest and protester.
And then there was the Arab Spring's other essential, not-quite-as-new media form — independent 24-hour TV news. When I asked the Islamist Jlassi why the revolution had not happened a decade earlier in Tunisia, he instantly answered, "Al-Jazeera and the Internet were the differences, especially al-Jazeera — everybody watches TV."
So America's great 21st century contribution to fomenting freedom abroad was not imposing it militarily but enabling it technologically, as an epiphenomenon of globalization. And for a second act, globalization returned the favor, turning democratic uprisings in developing countries into inspirational exports for the rich world. "We were on the receiving side," Egyptian presidential candidate Amr Moussa told me, "and now we are on the sending side. We have contributed to this global movement for change. There's a new spirit. The grassroots are revolting — young people on Wall Street and young people in Europe."
Ever since modern republican democracy was invented, astonishing protests and uprisings have spiked and spread once every half-century or so: the revolutions in America and France and Haiti; the revolutions of 1848; the revolutions of the 1910s (Russia, Germany, Ireland, Turkey, Egypt, Mexico); the postwar wave of worldwide revolt (the movements toward decolonization, Cuba, Hungary, American civil rights, countercultural militancy in America and Europe). It happens almost like clockwork, yet each time people are freshly shocked and bedoozled. So here we are again. History isn't a very precise guide to how long it might persist this time. In 1848 the revolutionary moment was explosive but lasted only a year, extinguished by both dictatorial and democratic counterrevolutions. The revolutionary dream hatched around 1960, however, was still powerfully contagious a decade later.
The nonleader leaders of Occupy are using the winter to build an organization and enlist new protesters for the next phase. They have shifted the national conversation. As Politico recently reported, the Nexis news-media database now registers almost 500 mentions of "inequality" each week; the week before Occupy Wall Street started, there were only 91. But what would count, a few years hence, as success? According to gung-ho Adbusters editors Kalle Lasn and Micah White, it's already "the greatest social-justice movement to emerge in the United States since the civil rights era." Yet it took a decade to get from the Montgomery bus boycott to the federal civil rights acts, which were just the end of the beginning.
The wisest Occupiers understand that these are very early days. But as long as government in Washington — like government in Europe — remains paralyzed, I don't see the Occupiers and Indignados giving up or losing traction or protest ceasing to be the defining political mode. After all, the Tea Party protests subsided only after Tea Partyers achieved real power in 2010 by becoming the tail wagging the Republican Party dog. When radical populist movements achieve big-time momentum and attention, they don't tend to stand down until they get some satisfaction.
Protesters are ready to rumble in Egypt and Tunisia if democracy and freedom seem too compromised. Emboldened protesters may yet sweep away regimes in places like Jordan and Yemen. In Libya, a bloody revolution, assisted by NATO, brought down the 42-year-old regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. The protorevolution is still under way in Syria, where thousands of protesters have been killed.
And in Russia, the recipe for surprising protest circa 2011 — pseudodemocratic-regime overreach, high Internet use, robust new media and suddenly galvanized middle-class youth — is being baked and served. On Dec. 5, after Putin's party, United Russia, did badly in parliamentary elections despite apparent ballot-box stuffing, more than 5,000 Muscovites gathered to chant, "Russia without Putin!" and called for his arrest. It was the largest Russian antiregime protest of the 21st century — and just as in Tunis and Madrid and New York City, nobody saw it coming.
These Russian protesters are a new breed, not just nostalgic old communist grandmas or bullyboy nationalists but yuppies, students, the best and brightest. "So this is what they look like," said Oleg Orlov, the 58-year-old head of Russia's main human-rights organization, as he scanned the square at Chistye Prudy the night of Dec. 5. "I've never seen them at rallies before, at least not in such enormous numbers. It's incredible."
Alexei Navalny, the blogger who coined a new United Russia moniker — "the party of crooks and thieves" — addressed the protesters. "They can laugh and call us microbloggers. They can call us the hamsters of the Internet. Fine. I am an Internet hamster. But I know they are afraid of us." The protesters cheered. And then 300 of them and Navalny were arrested. The next night in Triumfalnaya Square, protesters returned, and 600 were arrested. A Putin spokesman declared that "unsanctioned demonstrations must be stopped."
On Dec. 10, five days after the first protest, tens of thousands gathered in Moscow in the largest demonstration since just after the fall of communism. There were simultaneous protests in dozens of other cities all over Russia. A letter written by Navalny from his Moscow jail cell was read to the crowd. "It's impossible to beat and arrest hundreds of thousands, millions. We are not cattle or slaves. We have voices and votes, and we have the power to uphold them." An even bigger protest is scheduled for Dec. 24.
They are protesting corruption and the lack of real freedom and true democracy. Because Russia, like most of the world, has not quite totally arrived at the end of history.
8月初，伦敦警方射杀了一名被捕的年轻黑人，一些暴徒在英格兰全境引发了混乱。当然，暴徒们诉诸武力的行为并没有博得全世界的同情。
真会说话啊。。。。。。 西方媒体就是这样公开造谣。四月网也好奇怪，如果你们是为了揭露谣言的话，发这种帖子无可厚非，否则就是为虎作伥。 不都被镇压了？
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