Bardawil, Fadi
Sunken Mythologies
»The popular uprisings we are witnessing today in the Arab world are erodeing the culturalist mythologies propagated by the likes of al-Akhdar, along with the authoritarian regimes inherited from the national liberation struggles of the mid-twentieth century. Those thinkers and journalists have moved from an idealization of the revolutionary potential of the masses in their youth to a diametrically opposite view in their old age, locating the inherent ‘problems’ plaguing the region in the culture of these same masses. What remained a constant in this interpretive and political inversion is the distance separating the militant then, intellectual now, from the masses adulated then and despised now.«
