A new colonial conquest

The most important particularity of the Tunisian revolution is that nobody prepared it and nobody could guess it because it was not in any agenda. One could remember how the world wanted to establish democracy in Iraq or in Afghanistan and how it didn’t succeed. France and Great Britain are trying obstinately and blindly to achieve in Libya what the United States and its allies could not do in Iraq nor in Afghanistan on the name of what Alain Badiou denounces as a “...moral and humanitarian pretexts that have been used ever since the first colonial conquests” . Tunisian people showed how the uprising of a population can put a regime upside down. The youth refused to be manipulated from any force, not even the western world. The little body of Bouazizi will be the flame that put the fire of purification in the Tunisian society first, then the Egyptian and further to the whole region.
This is a very important moment in the History. It doesn’t concern only the region. The whole world system is based on the way one part of it looks at the other. There was a moment when some people were considered as beasts. The “civilized” world used them as slaves. Then came another moment when they were seen as human being but not civilized enough. They needed to be protected, colonized. After what was called “de-colonization”, they needed to be helped via a world process of development. All this was nothing else but different forms of perverse and vicious tutorship.
During all these phases of the human evolution, there was always a connection between the image we make of the other, and the way we despoil it. These where the two face of the same coin of the “Orientalism” would say Edward Saïd . The system consists of reducing the other to the situation of subaltern in order to control it: “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented”, dixit Karl Marx talking about Labour class in the 19th century.
What is happening now is that the snake is biting its tail. The western world provides internet and all kinds of technologies to its accomplices regimes. It provides them also with the necessary programs to control their populations and to spy at users. The same technology which was sophistically developed in order to control the subaltern is used by this one to put the system upside down. And this worked well mainly because it gave the populations the possibility to make its own image and not let it anymore made by others as was the case for a long time. The Tunisian/Egyptian revolution was made possible thanks to the democratization of the image.