This morning some lowbrow punk named Eric Trager tweeted: “Arab Spring” was 6.5 yrs ago. It ultimately failed & sparked deadly power struggles. Yet some think tanks want US to encourage more of it.” Political analysis may not be Trager’s métier; tiddlywinks is more his intellectual speed.

Part of Islamophobia, even a central part, is disparaging the Arab Spring uprisings that began in 2011. So much rubbish has been written to discredit & scorn them or gloat over their defeat that it could be called an industry. In fact it is a propaganda industry & explains the scope & aggression of the Islamophobic counter-offensive.

Millions of working people in Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, with reverberations in Iraq & across North Africa rose up against military rule, feudal tyranny & dictatorship to demand human & democratic rights. The world hasn’t seen anything so monumental & tsunamic for generations. They were/are being thwarted only by the use of massive repression, violence & massacres in Bahrain & Egypt, carpet bombing & funding of terrorist groups in Yemen & Syria & the most hateful vilifying of Arabs & Muslims as too politically primitive for higher aspirations like democracy.

Those revolutions aren’t over & have only just begun despite devastating setbacks. One of the most important things they lacked was international solidarity that could stay the hand of US & European collusion to destroy them. That failure of solidarity signaled the moment of betrayal when the international left self-destructed & proved itself incapable–as incapable as the rightwing Eric Trager–of discerning a revolution against tyranny & instead joined the counter-revolution. It’s all over for that left except the requiems. Let their epitaph be written: Rot in Hell.