Reading the BBC reports, Tunisia is not a bunch of blog- and tweet-happy néo-démocrates. In fact, things French in Tunisia are being targeted in today’s riots. Prisons are burning, as well. We don’t yet know who the real president of Tunisia is – two different claimants to that role have yet to resolve the situation. If they’re able to come to a peaceful arrangement, whoever becomes the undisputed president will have a tall order in trying to restore calm and security.

And all this in a nation that Western leaders didn’t have on their lists of evil nations. Ben Ali was our dictator, after all. We could do business with him. We weren’t deliberately trying to undermine his regime, as far as I know…

But down it went. Obama and Hilary Clinton are quick to condemn Tunisia now, after its West-friendly dictator has fallen, but where was their stern disapproval before all this? Are they going to now step up their criticisms of other dictators that the US has helped prop up over the years?

More to the point, are those dictators going to wait for the US to start criticizing them? If I were in charge of a US-friendly nation, I’d be on the phone to Iran, China, and Russia right now to find out how to better oppress my people. I’d have to assume I’d need to do things to keep the domestic situation in order right now that my buddies in Brussels and Washington are going to strongly disapprove of.

I know whoever has the backing of Tunisia’s army will embark on a program of busting heads that get in the way of law and order. He’ll have to, or he won’t be able to rule. People are not going to like what will happen next in Tunisia, and Twitter and Facebook won’t forestall the bloodshed.

I see questions of “will this happen again?” Probably. The world’s in a mess. But what happens in the West when we start to feel like we’re being spammed with images, videos, and status updates from hordes of rebelling masses?

I’m reading the book, The Net Delusion, in which the author casts serious doubts on the ability of Twitter to actually overthrow a regime. I come home today to see that very event being proclaimed on ABC News. Are they right and my book wrong, or is there more to the story?

There’s more to the story.

A month ago, a protester set himself on fire because of injustices he was suffering. That is not a tweet on Twitter. That is an act of protest that is much more significant in its scope and demanding in its implementation. That sacrifice, which set into motion the protests against the regime, was infinitely more involved than a Facebook group or a 140-character tweet.

All the same, Twitter and Facebook did come into play as protesters warned each other of sniper locations and arranged protests. Fair enough. The Tunisian government went after those people, as well, launching DDoS attacks on protest websites and arresting the people that matched the email addresses and online profiles. The government didn’t fall for lack of blocking websites. But it did fall. Was it the online flow of information that did it?

No. It wasn’t.

Go back to the guy that set himself on fire. That is a huge statement, on the same plane as the self-immolating monks in Vietnam in the 1960s, to protest the restrictions on their ability to worship. The people began to pour out into the streets as a spontaneous reaction to that sacrifice, like the spontaneous uprising in Algiers in December 1960. The online aspect of this revolution was a side concern, not a driving point. Yes, there was information about the corruption of the president from WikiLeaks. But what more did the starving, desperate people need to convince them that their lives were greatly troubled beyond their own conditions? Can people tolerate massive unemployment and extremely high food prices if they are ignorant of the way their leaders fly in ice cream from overseas?

The real key here is that the outgoing president had already lost the will to continue. The biggest protests didn’t begin until after he said he would relax restrictions on free speech and that he would step aside. Like the East German implosion, the crowds in the streets faced a government with a tail between its legs.

I would dare say it was also a government that didn’t know how to properly handle its people. I read of how heavily censored Tunisian media was. Well, there’s the problem right there. People with access to pornography and entertainment news and online games don’t get politically involved. That’s why the Russian government runs both a state-sponsored porn site and a state-sponsored online game community. If Tunisia’s government was too busy scrubbing eyeballs, the people got bored and had nothing else to do but turn to politics.

And what of old media? As events increased in tempo and intensity, a government-run newscaster openly criticized the president. The show came to an abrupt end, but the words went out over the airwaves. Clearly, everything was coming apart for the regime, and the fundamentals were the same as in other popular movements: massively bad conditions, a sparking incident, and then a loss of will to fight on the part of the ruling powers. It’s the same as the French Revolution. Twitter and Facebook? Not necessary to the conditions and could, in fact, have been used very effectively to round up leaders of the movements if the rulers had kept their will to power.

And what about the looters? Did they coordinate activities with Twitter and Facebook? Possibly. If it’s plausible that tweets could alert about the presence of police snipers, they could also indicate shops that were unguarded. This tweeting business cuts both ways, you know. Now that the president is out, what factions will be forming? Will someone use Twitter to plan a bloody coup? Will there be a faction that calls for revolution in other nations, triggering more bloodshed? Will we necessarily like the people that emerge as Tunisia’s new rulers?

There are more questions. Will this mean authoritarian regimes in the world will have to step up their game in terms of dealing with dissent? One look at Algeria, and I’m not at all satisfied this Tunisian thing is over with a happy ending. Like the French Revolution, this may very well launch a long series of bloody days, weeks, months, and years.

And Twitter? As soon as another celebrity dies or has a bad cosmetic surgery, the West will be sure to forget about the dead and dying in some dusty, faraway land.

I’ve just finished watching Robert Fisk’s “Lies, Misreporting, and Catastrophe in the Middle East.” I truly enjoy Fisk’s reporting and comments on how others report. He is refreshingly honest and does his best to avoid using the language of power that propagates oppression and violence. He refuses to call problems “issues” or a breakdown in talks a “peace process.”

So here’s the short version of his speech and discussion: There is no peace for Israel. There will be no Palestinian state, and unless Israel actually engages in a wholesale genocide on the level of the Turkish genocide of Armenia in 1915, the Palestinians will remain in the area to antagonize Israel. Israeli soldiers will never be sure which Palestinians are violent and which ones are not, so the violence against civilians will continue. Likewise, Palestinian bombers will take lives of soldiers as well as children: it will be a tragedy, a catastrophe on both sides, with innocents of all stripes caught in between.

Will the Israelis subject the Palestinians to a full-on genocide? I think that’s a likely event, given that he USA supports Israel without question or hesitation. The USA already turns a blind eye to Israel’s nuclear weapons. The USA already does not press Israel to be specific about where its eastern border actually is. The USA already has a reporting network that refuses to be honest about the suffering there, not allowing photos and eyewitness reporter evidence to appear without Israel’s official denial of said evidence, as blatant as a Turk saying there never was an Armenian genocide.

Here’s where I’ll make a departure from Mr. Fisk and extend a prediction of events in Israel. The genocide there will not be of the hurried, Nazi variety. The Nazis knew they were running out of time after they failed to take down Russia in 1941. The Israelis know that time is against them, but in a matter of decades, not years. They can afford either the Russian or Republica Srpska approach. They can squeeze out the Palestinians, demand a blockade against them while they continue to receive arms, and drive them from their lands. There are 6 million Palestinians outside of Israel and the Occupied Territories. There are also 6 million Armenians outside of Turkey, so there’s a parallel for you.

Palestinian violence will continue as long as Israeli violence is directed against them. If the Palestinians ever looked set to take Israel by storm, Israeli nuclear weapons are likely buried underneath their cities, ready to detonate and deny the Palestinians those targets, just as the Apartheid South African government was prepared to do the same in the event of an ANC military victory. If Israel ever became the victim of a nuclear attack itself, it would make other people in Syria, Iran, and Lebanon victims as well.

There is no good guys vs. bad guys in this case. I am of the belief that the wicked destroy the wicked and, being wicked, see nothing wrong in slaughtering innocents caught in the crossfire. I don’t see any way out of this unless the USA unilaterally abandons Israel as an ally, which is not going to happen. The USA made a mistake in creating the state of Israel and, as an empire, can not withdraw that support without losing its power. Therefore, the USA’s will to empire has entrapped it in a violent snare from which it refuses to escape.

In Tarkovsky’s film “Stalker,” the main character says that weakness and flexibility are signs of life – the weak ask for help and the flexible bend in the face of forces that would otherwise destroy them. The character then said that strength and inflexibility always go with death. The strong and inflexible stand firm, sure that they can face down the very thing that is guaranteed to destroy them. Their strength and inflexibility blinds them to the dangers in their face. Sadly, both the USA and Israel are strong and inflexible.

In India, banks often use organized crime to help collect on delinquent accounts. Given the massive wave of defaults on loans and that American organized crime has close ties with the finance system, is it possible for that sort of thing to start happening here if banks don’t get their way with Congress over bailouts? Just a thought…

Arun Gandhi recommends using an anger journal to help control anger. I knew I needed one when I caught a story of the people that were stranded on the cruise ship. They had been without electricity for 24 hours and couldn’t flush their toilets. They had plenty to eat, but it was of rescue rations quality. And they complained about that.

What made me mad was that Haiti’s been without electricity for way longer than that, ditto for any sort of toilets, and they’re eating sand when they can’t get the rescue rations. There’s a nation that’s been adrift, thanks in large part to the 19th-Century prejudices of France, England, and the USA, and thanks even more to 20th-Century US support of horrendous dictators, and the news ignores them. When there’s a slow news cycle, do we revisit Haiti? Or the Ninth Ward of New Orleans? Or Darfur? No. We do not. We get shark attack stories. We get them because they help sell ads.

The love of money is the root of all evil, and there’s the reason behind the terrible way mainstream media reports news. If it doesn’t attract sponsors, they don’t run the story. That’s why there won’t be any huge investigative report into the financial collapse: the criminals that brought it down on us are major commercial sponsors. It’s exactly parallel to the way a drug dealer will spread his money around town, so the locals lose sight of the fact that every dollar is stained in murderous blood.

That makes me angry, and I have to find a way to manage that anger or it will destroy me.

Mount Sinabung is erupting, right after I have a Geography lesson about the “Ring of Fire” in which I mentioned the most remarkable area for volcanoes has been the western part of Indonesia. Now this. I think I’ll skip a discussion of major earthquakes in light of my new-found powers.