It’s always astonishing to see how little respect the Arab Spring uprisings receive. Not just lack of respect but contempt. As if millions of people in several countries were fools for trying to take their destinies into their own hands away from brutal autocrats to forge democratic societies. You can only hold such contempt if you have never actually been part of building social movements, if you have no idea what it takes or the complexities & conflicts involved in hammering out strategy & a leadership. Changing the world is immensely difficult. Possible but difficult. It takes a lot of chutzpah to turn up your nose at millions of people who tried to do that & who put forward the most advanced ideas of our times. It takes a lot of political inexperience & nerve to turn up your nose when so many people can only envision militarism, bombers & special forces, as the solution for revolution & counterrevolution & have no concept of the role of working people in making the world a suitable place for human beings to live in. To my mind, the Arab Spring uprisings were among the most monumental struggles of the last 100 years. The peoples of Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Tunisia, Syria, Libya, with reverberations in Jordan, Iraq, Morocco, should be honored for what they tried to do, not considered fools or failures. The fools are those who look to Syrian, Russian. or US bombers.