Could someone elaborate on why this term jasmine revolution keeps coming up? I’m genuinely unsure what it means. It is near invisible in the UK, or at least to me, but comrades in Europe have been using it with regularity.. It refers also to China then? That is completely off screen here in the UK right now. Bahrain too has disappeared off radar. Is it that the revolutions only appeal when they smell of jasmine, and when its British weapons used to kill protesters etc, suddenly its all swept off screen (pruned, mulched, thrown in the compost bin of media history).Appallingly, Stop the War coalition have only managed a statement on their website saying no to interference – the sort of calls for action, demonstrations, candle light vigils even that were held in the run up to the Iraq invasion are conspicuously absent for this one. Is it the smell of jasmine that makes this potential war sweet? A phony war if ever there was one – and with the ‘colonial machine’ (arms sales, oil, development agenda) ready to roll back into Egypt, Tunisia etc, all the more reason to take the stench of these rotting flowers to the doorsteps our own governments and television/journalists.
Comments welcome – these are questions, not answers.
Comments
got this via wikipedia (footnotes below)
“In Tunisia and the wider Arab world, the protests and change in government are called the Sidi Bouzid Revolt, derived from Sidi Bouzid, the city where the initial protests began.[20][21][22] In the media, these events have been dubbed the Jasmine Revolution[23][24] in keeping with the geopolitical nomenclature of “color revolutions”, although the comparison is disputed, notably by many Tunisians themselves.[25][26][27][28]”
20 – “Niet compatibele browser”. Facebook. Retrieved 2011-02-08.
21 – “The Sidi Bouzid Revolution: Ben Ali flees as protests spread in Tunisia”. libcom.org. Retrieved 2011-02-08.
22 – “Revolte Tunisie Sidi bouzid 3″. YouTube. 4 January 2011. Retrieved 2011-02-08.
23 – a b Par Frédéric Frangeul (19 January 2011). “D’où vient la “révolution du jasmin” ?”. Europe1.fr. Retrieved 2011-01-26.
24 – a b D’où vient la “révolution du jasmin” ? Europe1.fr International, 17 January 2011 (Google Translate version)
25 – “Google Translate” (in (French)). Translate.google.fr. 17 January 2011. Retrieved 2011-02-08.
26 – “Google Translate” (in (French)). Translate.google.fr. Retrieved 2011-02-08.
27 – “”Révolution du jasmin” : une expression qui ne fait pas l’unanimité”. Le Monde. Paris. 17 January 2011. Retrieved 2011-01-28.
28 – Olivier Malaponti (15 January 2011). “Révolution de jasmin ?”. Mediapart.fr. Retrieved 2011-01-28.
should have added, this was chosen by the western press both because jasmine is associated with ‘the orient’ and because the guy who set himself on fire sold jasmine along with other incense.
Is this true? Journalists made it up. Shock! :) Despite the oriental thematic, the entire flowers metaphor appeals to me. I have the the Rolling Stones song running through my head – ‘you can bring dead flowers to my wedding, but I won’t forget to put roses on your grave’… poppies and war also…
Thinking of dead flowers is not resignation or despair (cross me and I’ll make sure you get a funeral bouquet), but there are real concerns about the roll out of a neo-colonial restitution that make me wonder about calling this Jasmine. Yes, petals are fragile. But I recall the scene of the flower in the rifle from the 1960s, and that imagery is by now a wilted echo – what we are seeing across many countries just now has something more urgent and militant than than flower-power relevance, we can hope we can prune some Bush here (that would have worked better before Obama took over right).