The origin of the Arab Spring did not begin on December 17th, 2010 in Tunisia with the self-immolation Mohamed Bouazizi.

Bouazizi’s decision to douse himself with gasoline and light himself on fire was an outcome of an economic and social reality in Tunisia at a very specific moment in time – the origin for that event happened many years earlier in Europe.

Understanding the earlier origin helps to set the stage to understand Libya in 2011,  the rise of al-Qaeda, and Obama’s short-sighted folly leading NATO intervention.

A basic tenet of humanity is freedom, a natural yearning to be free.  To be able to move, decide, act and strive, is as natural as the flow of water through the path of least resistance.

When Europe formed a collective Union there were multiple political, social, and socio-economic factors which aligned to create an environment where the formation was constructed.

A tireless movement of Fabian Socialists with a history of long-term strategy were behind the rise of the EU as a collective union. 

The Fabian’s come in a variety of sub-forms: Globalists, Socialists, Communists, Keynesians, The Open Border Crowd, et al.  However, the central DNA which aligns them all is a general view of a Central Planning Authority with control over the individual.

Fabian’s generally support a principle that human activity is able to be controlled toward a “better outcome”.   They believe central planning by a central body can create a fundamentally better society than if individuals were left to their own decisions.

The formation of the EU was a time of “Hope and Change”, not too dissimilar to the U.S. version which came many years later in the form of President Barack Obama.

However, central planning requires essential ingredients in order to be successful.   One of the most important aspects is the removal of national identity in favor of a more collective view of the multi-nation construct.   Nationalism must be deconstructed and patriotic sentiment changed in favor of a larger sense of identity, a multi-cultural identity.

This was the general aim of the Fabian led EU immediately after they formed their collective association.

One aspect of the new larger identity needs to be a new acceptance of immigration.  A view of “One Collective People” helps to remove the national identity in favor of the collective.  Think of it like a European version of a melting pot.  However, the planners also need to construct a socio-economic underline to the new identity, this is a little more challenging.

The socio-economic aspects can be major roadblocks in the assimilation models of central planners, so strategies need to be developed to improve the acceptances of the nationalist minded individuals.   This is the general purpose of the “Rivkin Project“.

Rather than explain the Rivkin Project here I would suggest you read this link where we have previously outlined the purpose.    The short version/adjective is “forced assimilation”.

So long as the economics support assimilation, meaning the immigrants can find work and sustain themselves, then not too much attention is directed to the objectives.

However, once the economics of a situation change, and the immigrant can no longer support themselves, then the nationalists have cause for concern.   After all, it does not take long for an immigrant to appear as a demanding parasite upon a nationalist host.

This is exactly what happened in Europe.

Europe was accepting tens of millions of immigrants from the African Continent into the various countries of Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Greece, Portugal and Great Britain.  The flow of these immigrants followed a path of least resistance.

Morocco, Tunisia and Libya were the primary migration gateways – the secondary Gateway was Turkey.    However, when the EU economy could no longer afford the assimilation the EU national anxiety fomented as civil unrest.

After a few bad economic years you began to see visible strains inside the individual EU nations.

Eventually the collapse of various EU currencies began an irreversible situation where socio-economic stresses created real pressure and violence erupted.   Eventually leading to political leaders beginning to outline the broad failure of multi-culturalism.

Immigration had to be stopped – it was destroying the EU and worsening the civil unrest.

So the EU governing body made a strategic decision to payoff the gatekeepers to shut-down the immigration.   By himself, Libyan leader Gadaffi was paid €5,000,000,000 (yes, billion) to stop the now considered “undesirables” from leaving North Africa.

Gaddaffi and Ben Ali (Tunisia) did just that.  They shut the gates and stopped the immigrants from crossing the Mediterranean.

In North West Africa, Morocco, bowing to the demands of the EU, did the same.

But this created a serious bottleneck of African immigrants who were still flowing North from their initial homeland while escaping violence and bloodshed which had broken out throughout various countries in the African continent.

Tunisia and Libya began to fill with the now displaced immigrants who became viewed as parasites not only by the EU, but also now by the host countries which had been paid of to detain them.

The economies of the Gateway countries could not support the mass migration now bottlenecked in their geography.   The economics of the situation just exacerbated the sociological situation as various religious and political factions began to fight.

Algeria – widespread discontent had been building for years over a number of issues. In February 2008, United States Ambassador Robert Ford wrote in a leaked diplomatic cable that Algeria is ‘unhappy’ with long-standing political alienation; that social discontent persisted throughout the country, with food strikes occurring almost every week; that there were demonstrations every day somewhere in the country; and that the Algerian government was corrupt and fragile.

During 2010 there were as many as ‘9,700 riots and unrests’ throughout the country.  Many protests focused on issues such as education and health care, while others cited rampant corruption.

Western Saraha – The Gdeim Izik protest camp was erected 12 kilometers (7.5 mi) south-east of El Aaiún by a group of young Sahrawis on 9 October 2010.   Their intention was to demonstrate against labor discrimination, unemployment, looting of resources, and human rights abuses.   The camp contained between 12,000 and 20,000 inhabitants, but on 8 November 2010 it was destroyed and its inhabitants evicted by Moroccan security forces.

The security forces faced strong opposition from some young Sahrawi civilians, and rioting soon spread to El Aaiún and other towns within the territory, resulting in an unknown number of injuries and deaths. Violence against Sahrawis in the aftermath of the protests was cited as a reason for renewed protests months later, after the start of the Arab Spring.

Tunisia – Mohamed Bouazizi was an elderly Tunisian.   Frustrated by a dictator and a government fraught with corruption, and unable to find work he began to sell fruit at a roadside stand.   On 17 December 2010, a municipal tax inspector confiscated his wares.

An hour later he doused himself with gasoline and set himself afire.  His death on the 4th January 2011  brought together various groups dissatisfied with the existing system, including many unemployed, political and human rights activists, labor, trade unionists, students, professors, lawyers, and others to begin the Tunisian revolution.

[left to right]  Ben Ali (Tunisia),  Ali Abdullah Sulah (Yemen),  Maummar Gaddafi (Libya), and Hosni Mubarak (Egypt)

It was against this increasing frustration that various Islamist opportunists began to take advantage of the situation.

In Libya 2011 The campaign and character of the opposition was never clearly established.   No one actually knew who these “rebels” were, or what entailed their ideology.  It is still best described as a motley gathering of opposition forces vaguely referred to as ‘The Rebels’.

In contrast to the seeming failure of its military challenge, the public relations campaign of the rebels, and their advocates, worked brilliantly.  Most of all it mobilized the humanitarian lefty hawks inhabiting the Obama presidential bird nest.

Most prominently Samantha Power, who has long called upon the United States government to use its might wherever severe human rights abuses occur. And the media celebrants of this intervention have been led by the ever progressive NY Times stalwart, Nicholas Kristof.

The PR full court press also misleadingly convinced world public opinion and Western political leaders that the Quackdaffy regime was opposed and hated by the entire population of Libya, making him extremely vulnerable to intervention, which encouraged the belief that the only alternative to military intervention was for the world to sit back and bear witness to genocide against the Libyan people taking place on a massive scale.   This entire portrayal of the conflict and the choices available to the UN and the global community was manipulatively false in all its particulars;  But it helped the radical islamists.

This Peace Corps generation keeps leaving its mark on the minds of the youth MTV humanitarians and Bono-Brangelina peaceniks with wars of excellence such as Libya, where the no-fly zone was actually an intervention, where the “matter of days” timeframe turned into months, where the war is to be called only conflict and all to avoid a genocide that wasn’t; But supported radical Islamists.

[…]  For the politically correct academia and civil society the hallmark of sophistication is now “Responsibility to Protect” (or R2P for the t-shirt makers).

R2P is a humanitarian’s “limited sovereignty” doctrinal version. It draws on international humanitarian law—a field of law which is still in its early stages and being written based on principles instead of practicality or empiricism—to claim that states are obligated to protect their citizens and that whenever they fail in this mission, the international community gains the legal right to intervene.

In its light form, the territory is to simply be “civilized” by the missionaries of liberal democracy. In its worse form, military force is to be applied promoting forceful regime change.

Now that we have established the foundation of the Libyan uprising we can focus on the consequences.   In Part 4 of the Series we outline those consequences.