Front Burner - Lessons from a decade of failed revolutions

Episode Date: January 2, 2024

From the Arab Spring that swept across the Middle East and North Africa to the fare increase protests in Brazil that snowballed into much more, the 2010s started off with a wave of mass protests all over the world. But why did so many of them end in ways the activists behind them didn’t intend? That’s what journalist Vincent Bevins tries to answer in his new book, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Damon Fairless. Between 2010 and 2020, there were a lot of protests around the world, all of them pushing for change. In Brazil, millions of people hit the streets in Sao Paulo and Rio to fight extreme inequality. In North Africa and the Middle East during the so-called Arab Spring, people rose up hoping to topple dictators.

Listen to that crowd. That's what they've been waiting for. Hosni Mubarak has gone. And while a lot of these movements started off full of optimism and promise, and sometimes resulted in major change, in the years that followed, a pattern emerged. The leadership in those countries often went in the very opposite direction from what protesters initially hoped for. The far-right candidate, Zaire Bolsonaro, has won Brazil's presidential race. Overnight, the high hopes of the youths who'd led the January 2011 revolution turned into frustration. Thousands were killed or arrested in a crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood protesters at Rabaa Square in Cairo.

What made the 2010s so ripe for mass protest movements? And why did almost none of them work out the way the people behind them intended? That's what journalist Vincent Bevins tries to answer in his new book. It's called If We Burn, The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. He joins me today. Hey, Vincent, thanks for coming on FrontBurner. Thank you so much for having me. Okay, so you write about protest movements across the world covering a whole decade, you know, 2010 to 20 roughly. So maybe we can start at the beginning of that decade,

just before these movements sprang up in late 2010. Can you remind me what the world looked like back then? Yeah, absolutely. Much of the world, the developed world and the global south, were reeling from the 2008 financial crisis. Not in generations has Wall Street absorbed the number of body blows it took today. The American financial system is rocked to its foundation as top Wall Street institutions topple under a mountain of debt. Many people believing that the governments in the U.S. and in Western Europe, the countries that were obviously most responsible for the crisis,

had not done enough to respond to it. And then you had in the global south a wide range of dictatorships that even if the U.S. might have, in theory, hoped for democracy in a given region, these dictatorships were often quite close with Washington. And they had been imposing quite severe economic hardship on their people in North Africa, specifically is where I'm thinking about. And then in Latin America, you have a very different scene where certain governments are putting together democracy for after the fall of dictatorships in the 80s and 90s, which were also backed by the United States during the Cold War. So let's get into how you began reporting and thinking about these movements. We'll come back to Arab Spring. But in 2013, you're in Sao Paulo, Brazil. You're reporting there for

the Los Angeles Times. And you're basically right at the center of this mass protest movement that springs up in June of 2013. And actually, you point out in your book, you were really at the heart of it. Some of this stuff is happening below your flat there. So you're reporting on it. But can you take me back to how this starts in Brazil? Yeah, absolutely. And you're right. this is my connection to this topic is really personal. It really explodes right around me. And very unexpectedly, I mean, really, nobody could have seen this coming one week, two weeks before it did explode in the middle of June 2013. Because at the beginning of June 2013, what you had was a very popular democratically

elected president who came up on the dissident left who fought against the dictatorship. Dilma Rousseff, right? Yeah, Dilma Rousseff, who took over for Lula, a former union leader and very popular politician in 2011. There was an emotional handover of power in Brazil from the country's most popular president to the country's first ever woman president. Tens of thousands braved the rain in the capital Brasilia to wave goodbye to Lula da Silva and welcome his protege Dilma Rousseff. And the mayor of Sao Paulo had been

just been elected from the same party. So what happens in June is that a small group of leftists and anarchists, and in the book, I describe their history, I describe who they are, they are really seriously committed, idealistic activists, they really want to make life better for working class Brazilians. And actually, I mean, it's worth mentioning, too, like, like, there's this really interesting connection to the punk scene there in Sao Paulo, right? So like, maybe you can talk a bit about that, too, because I found that really interesting. in Sao Paulo, right?

So like, maybe you can talk a bit about that too because I found that really interesting. Yeah, I mean, a lot of them came from punk bands. They came from a

strictly moral and selfless idea of what politics should be. They were never going to take any money from anybody else. They didn't believe in leadership.

They believed in super democratic structures that like every single person had to agree in order for the group to decide on a given action. And they put together a set of protests in early June against a rise in the bus fare. Now, Brazilians pay too much for public transportation. Brazilians hate it when the bus fare goes up. But also they had just elected a mayor who had promised he was going

to rise the bus fare in order to deal with a budgetary problem and the first four protests go sort of the way you expect when a small group of punks and anarchists engage in raucous and direct action tactics they do shut down the city they do make disturbances to the government and to the police but mainstream opinion at least opinion in in the dominant media of brazil uh is very much unconvinced of the validity of their struggle mainstream media in brazil calls for a crackdown on the protesters and in a way which echoes many many other things that I discover when putting together this history of the 2010s, it is the police crackdown that comes which really ignites the explosion. Because the media that asked for the crackdown are shocked

when the military police crackdown hits members of their own ranks. When journalists like me, but more importantly, more famously, Brazilian journalists from the most storied and important publications in the country are hit by police repression. Right. It shocks them, right? Yeah, absolutely. They switch from the morning of June 13th saying the cops need to clear the streets of these punks and these anarchists.

These kids have no right to impose their will on society. To 12 hours later saying, actually, this is a patriotic uprising in defense of the right to rise up in defense of things. They're not quite sure yet why it's good, but they know that this is now a good thing. And in this next phase, as millions of people flood into the streets, there is this fight over what it means. A loosely knit movement is now growing to take on larger causes. I want change in politics in Brazil. It is not only about 20 cents raised in bus fare. This is one step Brazilians are taking to fight for their rights. I think the sooner we wake up and act, we will be better off. The future of our country is our

future. The original group, while they keep insisting, no, it's about transportation, it's about transportation, they also don't really believe in leadership. They believe that just sparking an insurrection will necessarily be good. But the insurrection has a particular shape. It's particular people that come to the streets. And often the people that come to the streets come with a different idea of what it should be about. They're often more conservative. They enter into initially verbal, but then ultimately violent conflicts with the original organizers. A lot happens between June 13th and June 20th. And I and a lot of other people spent a decade trying to figure out what exactly happened. But in those seven days, at the end of those seven days, the newer,

more right wing protesters, the newer group of people that has entered the streets actually violently expel the original leftists and the anarchists. And in that strange cauldron of political energy in that bizarre pressure cooker of June 2013. Groups are born, which ultimately create a new protest movement demanding the impeachment of democratically elected President Duma Rousseff, and that provide street mobilization for an anti-corruption campaign, which is secretly, but we now know, breaking the rules behind the scenes in collaboration with the United States government to put Lula in jail. And then these same groups of people that are born in the protest explosion started by leftists and anarchists helped to elect Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 and then take office themselves alongside him,

alongside probably the most right-wing leader in the democratic world. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you.

Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income. That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. We've got this protest in Brazil that starts, you know, this fairly focused,

it's a protest against a hike in bus fare. But then it quickly grows into something, I think, beyond anyone's prediction, beyond anyone's control. It becomes very chaotic. It's hard to see all of the players that are attracted to it. And then on the out, on the other side of it, it's been essentially co-opted. That's the process you're talking about. Yeah, and this is one you can generalize across many countries in the decade as well, is that there is an initial demand, which perhaps does not matter to that many people. um it is something that is motivates some section of the population but is not it is not something that most people are ready to carry out a revolution about then you have a crackdown which generates a huge amount of energy a huge amount of sympathy for the protest but in

that moment the protest is so big and so inchoate and so difficult to define that you can kind of show up with whatever idea you want of what the thing is but inevitably tragically brutally some kind of resolution is imposed upon the thing and usually it is the groups that were well well organized and prepared and ready to take action before the explosion that end up imposing meaning upon what happened. To the extent that a power vacuum is created, to the extent that opportunities are generated, it is not the punks and anarchists that take advantage of them. It is well-funded, already organized Brazilian elites that recognize, oh, the center-left president has weakened a little bit.

We can rush back in and insist on reimposing some of the privileges that we lost with the end of the dictatorship. Okay, so I want to talk about a certain component of these that are shared across the different protest movements, and that's social media. So obviously, it played a huge role in the Arab Spring. I remember people, you know, calling it the Facebook revolution, the Twitter revolution. A region was gripped with freedom fever, fueled by social media. Protests erupt in Algeria, then Yemen. The peaceful Egyptian revolution had a distinct goal, but no clear leader. Yet from the masses, a handful emerged, including Wael Ghanim. It's generally acknowledged that Ghanim's Facebook page first sparked the protests.

Here in Washington and around the world, everyone watched what they are calling the Twitter uprising, an extraordinary act of daring in the country of Tunisia. And this was like a non-ironic, totally earnest, like rose-colored glasses way, right? And you write about this, how we viewed things that came from the internet at that time through those rose- colored glasses. It's obviously really different than how we perceive social media these days. So can you take me back there? Like how did people perceive internet born activism at the time? Yeah. And this is something that is hard to remember for those of us that lived through it. I find nearly impossible to get like Gen Z to believe. And when I tell them that in, say, 2009 or 2010, almost everyone,

almost everyone from left to right, but certainly mainstream media in North America, you know, the types of outlets that I always worked for, really believed that if something happened because of the internet, more specifically, if something happened because of social media, it was necessarily good. It was going to push his humanity forward. And now we believe almost the exact inverse. I mean, if you think about a hypothetical, quote unquote, Facebook revolution now, if you think about a large group of largely young men storming the capital of some country because of a post they saw on the internet, our first reaction in 2023 would probably be red flags rather than this is going to usher in global democracy.

And so this is something that we discovered over the 2010s, that the internet is a tool that anyone can use, number one, left, right, center, reactionary, communist, atheist, Islamist. And two, we didn't get the internet in general. We get a particular type of internet that was shaped by powerful men in California, my home state, that re-engineered a lot of the online experience to maximize their profits. And I think that really matters. Okay. So you've talked about Egypt and I want to go there for a second. So Tunisia was the first uprising in the Arab Spring, but Egypt really seemed to confirm that something big was happening and that something big could happen, right? So people probably remember the scenes from 2011, like just mass gatherings in Tahrir Square in Cairo, calling for the end of Mubarak's 30-year rule.

Egyptians filled Tahrir Square in the center of Cairo, calling for the end of Mubarak's 30-year rule. Egyptians filled Tahrir Square in the center of Cairo, protesting for weeks. These protests have gone on all day long. It's now almost five o'clock in the afternoon. It's two hours after curfew has begun, but still the square is packed with people, and these protests will likely go well into the night. And, you know, it worked, right? It led to him stepping down. But then if you follow that further out, and this is kind of the thesis of your book, right? You follow it further out, it sort of turns into the upside down, right? How did that pan out after Mubarak is ousted? The organizers and activists that put together the protests of January 25th, 2011, had no expectation that they were going to be in a position to even ask for the fall of Mubarak. They believed that they were going to do a protest against police brutality. Hopefully some activists would come out.

Hopefully the same group of people that usually come out to the streets would show up and they wouldn't get repressed too violently. They knew that the example of Tunisia should matter a little bit. Anger erupted onto the streets today. Quiet police rushing a crowd carrying banners reading, Yes, we can, using tear gas and then live rounds to disperse them. It was enough to bring down the government and force the nation's president to flee. They hoped that people had been paying attention to this, by Egyptian standards, relatively small and sparsely populated nation in North Africa. You know, Tunisia is not a big reference point for Egyptians,

by far the most populous Arab nation. But way more people come than they expect. And then on January 28th, way more people come than they expect, and they end up going to battle with the police and they end up winning. Egyptians young and old, men and women, pouring into the streets. Their numbers growing exponentially. It's a revolution in Egypt now. It's just easy enough.

We hate these people. We hate all this government. We hate it. We want a complete change. The people on the streets now convinced they're on the cusp of a revolution. The people on the streets now convinced they're on the cusp of a revolution. Now, at this moment, a lot of people now look back and say, oh, we could have done anything. We could have taken anything.

We could have taken over the centers of power. We could have taken over the television station and broadcast out some kind of a revolutionary message. We were prepared for that. We wouldn't even have known how to decide who would do it. So what they did is they took the square, Tahrir Square. And those images are incredibly inspiring. And if you look back on them now, even knowing how it all ends, it's very easy to understand why so many people around the world found this to be such a powerful movement of Egyptians from different classes, different religions, rich, poor, old, young, coming together to ask for the end of a dictatorship. The way in which it actually ends,

the actual concrete resolution that is imposed upon this explosion where everything is possible ends up mattering quite a lot. And what really happens is the military seizes power and promises to put on elections. The generals say their rule is temporary and will only last until democratic elections are held. But with civil rights groups claiming scores of protesters have been detained by the army and some are being tortured, the question now is whether the military will keep their word. And as the military starts to commit abuses over the next year, the Egyptian revolutionaries only really have one tactic.

They try to take the square again, but they can't reproduce the numbers that puts effective pressure on the military. They return to Tahrir Square, thousands of Egyptians, to chant the same chant of the revolution. People want the downfall of the regime. They fear the revolution is not only incomplete, but under threat. So you get the group that has been organized for a long time, the group that has been organized for longer

than the Egyptian Republic has actually existed, the Muslim Brotherhood winning the elections that the Egyptian military does put on in 2012. Mohamed Morsi is the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood. He's the first Islamist head of state to be elected out of these Arab Spring revolutions. You get a movement in 2013 in Egypt, which pretends to be the same kind of deal as 2011. It pretends to be a grassroots group of young people that are organizing to fight

autocracy. And then a protest movement builds out of this. But what happens is this protest movement is used as a pretext for a real military coup, not this provisional kind of 2011 coup. Fireworks and jubilation erupted in Tahrir Square tonight as the military announced it dissolved Egypt's constitution and deposed President Mohamed Morsi after just one year in office. It turns out that this apparently grassroots movement had been funded the whole time by reactionary Gulf states, most importantly, the UAE. And then Sisi, when he takes power.

The shooting started at 7 a.m. The snipers fired from surrounding apartments. Panic started. Oversees the massacre of supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, who, as imperfect as they are, as much as I don't sympathize at all with Islamism as a political project, as much as they had committed errors during Morsi's one year in power, were the only movement to ever win a democratic election in Egyptian history.

And Sisi just kills a thousand of them in another square. And nothing happens. So if you look at Egypt right now, in Egyptian history, and Sisi just kills a thousand of them in another square, and nothing happens. So if you look at Egypt right now, you're looking at 10 years later, essentially the long consequences of the 2013 Sisi coup. I want to talk about what we've learned in retrospect. So you, you know, you talk to a lot of the movements leaders after, but I guess before we get into that, I want to understand why at the time this, this leaderless horizontalist approach that kind of underwrote all of these protests, why that was so popular back then. Yeah. And I think that, yeah, so I think there's a mix of both ideas and material factors. So you do have a pre-existing ideological current on the anti-authoritarian left, which emerges out of, in some ways, the 1960s in the United States and France, that is very anti-hierarchical, that really believes in reshaping power rather than taking

power. This is a trend that has existed, especially since the fall of the Soviet Union, seems to cast even further or a longer shadow on the legacy of tightly organized and bloody-minded organizational attempts at changing the world. But in places like Egypt, a lot of the people that put together January 25th and January 28th really would have loved to have a revolutionary party, a large labor union that could go on strike and enforce the government to give concessions, civil society organizations that could throw their weight behind the movement, or a set of organizations that would help to carry out a true revolution. They just didn't. And it wasn't because they didn't believe in them. It was because they had

been destroyed by the Mubarak government. And so you had a particular response that became very easy to do. And you had actors on the streets and in the media seeing structurelessness, spontaneity, leaderlessness, horizontality as good things when maybe they aren't always good things. So you've talked to the organizers, a lot of them, in retrospect, what kind of advice do they have for today's generation of young activists? Trying to summarize 200 and 250 interviews is a little bit difficult. But one way that I can attempt to do so is to say many activists, revolutionaries, failed revolutionaries or revolutionaries that have failed so far came to the conclusion that they wished that they had been more organized before the explosion came. They never expected

that it was going to come so quickly and come when it did. And when it did, it came too quickly for them to put together an organization at that moment. They said, essentially, you have to build in the off season. You need to come together with other human beings that share your vision for a better world and create the ways that you can act collectively and democratically, no matter what comes. Because what's coming is not what you expect is going to come. You need to create the kind of bonds with other people that allow you to be nimble, but also firm. But a lot of them came to this conclusion that proper collective action means building power with other people. And proper collective action might mean delegation.

It might mean some kind of a structure. But that's okay as long as you keep it democratic. You can keep your movement democratic and win if you're prepared for anything that comes. Vincent, thanks so much for chatting with me. It's been really interesting. Thank you so much for chatting with me. It's been really interesting. Thank you so much. That's all for today. I'm Damon Fairless. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.