The Middle East is undergoing revolution. The established view tells us people are finally demanding their liberation from autocrats and tyrants, a collective movement towards the fine ideals of the West. After all, it’s no coincidence this shift towards democracy has followed on the coat tails of the gradual ‘globalisation’ of the Middle East: As nations become richer, they too become more free, just like us, right?

And the entire world stands behind the embattled Egyptian pro-democracy protestors.

But what sparked off the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere?

For three decades the Egyptian people lived under the rule of Mubarak and his human rights abuses, well aware of the gap between peasant and wealthy-elite. And for that amount of time, we - the west - propped up the regime and its inequality, to the extent that Mubarak has a personal fortune conservatively estimated at $40 Billion. The Egyptians maintained their subjugation, and the rest of the World didn’t give a shit.

So what changed?

In January, for the seventh month in a row, food prices have sky-rocketed. They are currently the highest they have ever been since records began in 1990, and are only set to be exacerbated by the current major environmental upheavals in Australia, America, Africa and Asia.

And the driving force behind this growth in food prices?

With the global economic downturn, there has been a massive shift from investing in money to tangible commodities: gold, silver, minerals - but especially food. Having extracted all of the wealth in the financial market, the vampire squid is now looking to suck our resources dry. 

 

The same system and behaviour responsible for placing 40% of the world’s collective wealth in the hands of just 1% of the population - pushing the impossible divide between rich and poor even further - is now focussing on encouraging mass starvation to satisfy its  addiction to money. Currently 925 million humans are starving to death, up from 870 million during the food price crisis of 2007/8. With peasants in developing nations spending anything between 50% to 80% of their income on food, Wall Street speculation performed by banking drones bred empathy-free, and the mounting pressure from a crashing climate, means we will soon see Food Wars as the emaciated dead pile up.

The icing on the vampire squid’s bloody cake is the impending but much predicted Peak Oil. As oil becomes scarce, infrastructure will break down, inflation will go interstellar, and the bankers will make an even greater fortune to hide in their fortresses as the world falls apart.

The truth is the Middle East may get its democracy, and the unacceptable human rights abuses might draw to a close (there are many acceptable human rights abuses perpetuated by the west which they might like to share, such as torture camps, rendition, invasion, etc), but the peasants will only get poorer and hungrier, even as they aspire to buy useless crap and vote for their favorite stooge peeking out of the pocket of colonial economics.

Viva la revolution?

We are not heading toward one world united in consumerism and democracy. Having the vote is incidental; we are all victims of the same insane global governance system, and the poor of the world might revolt first, as they already are, but at some point it will be our turn to live as the rest of the world does: impoverished and hungry.

Tell me: during our revolution, what political system will we demand?