Regardless of any analysis, judgement or speculation concerning the Arab Uprising; regardless of all the tens of thousands of pages written on the matter, debating it, endorsing it, or doubting it; the common man’s reality remains intact. The common man unwarned, unprepared, sometimes unwillingly is being dragged from his regular daily job or routine and shoved into an unrehearsed, unimaginable condition transformed into a soldier, a sniper, a killer and a victim, without prior formulation, military training or psychological aptitude to face the horrific violence of such turbulences. We, the outside borders’ world, simply hear the news about the injured, the raped and the killed day after day… Until somehow we get accustomed to the numbers of the victims, who in turn and over time are transformed inside the mind of the masses into mere numbers, their individual lives lose their usual value, they die in the hundreds, then the thousands… They take less and less space in the world media. As time passes, and with this phenomenon of no tangible reaction from the world watching from a distance, no real interference to stop the bloodshed, the human nature gets accustomed to the unfairness, the brutality, the misery and the violence… And these men turned soldiers, start growing on their backs a fragile insect wing. A metamorphosis occurs, a slow mutation takes place and they become insignificant bug soldiers, with their numbers as their only strength.

 

Are we witnessing Kafka’s Metamorphosis, or Golding’s Lord of the Flies? Are we observing the frightening parody of man’s return to the state of darkness from which it took him thousands of years to emerge, or is it only a transitory moment of disintegration under the pressure of raw nature?