TIME Person of the Year 2011: The Protester
time.com
time.com
The groups have spoken.
Kind of annoying that the massive 2010 student protests in the UK never get mentioned in articles like this. Tens of thousands of them occupied their universities for months, stormed and trashed the HQ of one of the governing parties, and attempted to burn down the treasury offices. Running battles with 14 year olds throwing lumps of concrete at police on horseback. It was chaos.
I am by no means condoning it, just pointing out how strange it is that these events never get mentioned in articles like this, because they predate the arab spring/OWS and therefore don't fit the media narrative.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/2010_UK_stude...
It seems the US Government keeps ignoring its citizens, too, heavily voting in favor of bills like SOPA or the NDAA. The OWS protesters have been mainly peaceful, but if they keep this up, the US Government might find itself with a real violent revolution, too. It's up to them to start respecting the Constitution again or keep violating it at every pace until the camel's back will break.
To be honest, I really think everyone who sponsored the NDAA bill should be immediately trialed for treason against the USA. It's such a blatant violation of the Constitution they've sworn to uphold. Bills that effectively remove or disable Amendments from the Constitution at the Congress' whim without consulting the people in a referendum should be illegal.
First, the Arab Spring protests were the culmination of long-standing movements that magazines like Time paid little attention to until the very end. When Time finally noticed them, Time wrote about the movements as though they were the product of American social networking sites. It always struck me as a very USA-centric thing for an American to look at the Arab Spring and say, "hey, look at what we did!"
Second, the Internet's impact on global freedom is ambiguous; as Evgeny Morozov points out in The Net Delusion, the Internet can be used to promote freedom but also can help oppressive regimes by making propaganda and surveillance easier.
Third, whether the Arab Spring actually promoted "freedom" and democracy remains to be seen; removing a dictator is certainly a step in the right direction, but it isn't the whole journey.
To those who say the TIME Person of the Year should be an actual person, I think what's happening is that sometimes there's a single person that does extraordinary things in a given year. But sometimes, people, in numbers, anonymous, make changes so much more radical than those a single person can, that it's almost foolish to try and pick a single person for the year, because any given individual's contribution to the year's changes is so very minuscule compared to the crowds that gathered from Σύνταγμα square to Tahrir square to Zucotti Park—some more effective than others, but all changing the way things around them were being discussed, and all fueling each other.