severe weather and fiction coming up a closer look at what's ahead for them. and speaking of change the death of north korean leader kim jong il how to hold his young son to power but will the untested and inexperienced son open the door or keep it shut for the future of all north korea. it is monday december nineteenth seven pm in washington d.c. i'm christine you're watching r t. well it has been one year of revolution that started in tunisia so now that we've reached the one year anniversary of the start of the arab spring we want to talk about what has changed and also what the future may hold up before we look ahead let's take a look back and see how it all started. it was a single move made by a single man twenty six year old mohammad was easy set himself on fire after police

took his fruit and vegetable cart away from him because he refused to pay them on his actions a protest against a way of life he deemed unfair he died a few weeks later but his one action ignited what soon became the arab spring starting with the ouster of tunisia's own president. ben ali after twenty three years in power. was. next came protests and revolution in egypt with thousands in the streets demanding major change to the political and economic system there at times it was a violent uprising with more than eight hundred people killed but demonstrators refused to cane. and on february eleventh two thousand and eleven egyptian president hosni mubarak resigned after thirty years in power. next came a civil war in libya with those loyal to colonel moammar gadhafi and those who

wanted him gone u.s. and nato forces got involved providing training aid and weapons to those they deemed rebel fighters after much resistance gadhafi government was overthrown and a few weeks later he was captured in his hometown of sirte dragged into the street and brutally killed. on rust and protest also seen in syria yemen and bahrain even spread to jordan and kuwait the political landscape across the middle east and africa is forever altered time magazine named the protester its person of the year in two thousand and eleven. the act is that in himself on fire it may have been personal for both of these e but it sparked a year of protests of revolution and of change. so some leaders have fallen and more could be on the way but despite many of these revolutions being supported by the united states it's looking a lot more like the leaders who will work to replace those who have lost power are

actually going to be more religiously conservative not less both in egypt's parliamentary elections and in tunisia's islam ists have gotten the most support bringing in the most votes and will most likely be the rulers in these countries in the post arab spring world now earlier i spoke with lawrence davidson he's a history professor and middle east expert at west chester university in pennsylvania and you know there are a lot of western leaders who worry that the new leaders will come in and immediately impose sharia law and why i asked him if those concerns are justified here's what he had to say. well i don't think that. the united states the leadership in the united states is as concerned about this sort of thing as you would imagine. i think criteria for success as far as their concern is. country certain governments who want to cooperate with them but the economically

and in terms of foreign policy orientation and i think that's certainly kind of. being seems to be becoming the case in tunisia where there are relationships between the united states and the new tunisian government and so what that what these governments do domestically and in terms of their internal affairs is really not a concern of the u.s. state department or the intelligence operatives here it's more a their economic and the orientation in terms of foreign policy for instance will the tunisians continue even under islamised government to either have lation ships with these israel or are simply neutral which would be fine it's a little more private. problematic as to how things are going to work out in egypt but even there. the military is in a in

a position. to maintain a veto over any anything that the islamist government the alleged or pro or proposed islamic government might want to do and as long as the military has that veto the americans aren't going to worry too much let's talk a little bit more about egypt and in particular about what we saw over the weekend on this one year anniversary of boise's action. looked a lot like cairo ten months ago take a look at this video. of the clashes and the violence not going away you can see this photo here this is a woman being dragged through the street many demonstrators say things have not gotten better sense of step down and protesters are demanding that the military hand power over to civilians so professor davidson i mean what is the takeaway from this that revolution does not

a democracy make. well i think i think that it's annoying going sort of affair and the issue in egypt really is what the general population is going to do in its voting patterns in reaction to these continuing protests because the information that's coming out of egypt is that many many people are tired of the protests and the protests while numerous the protesters while numerous are not in any way you know sort of. a tipping point in terms of their their numbers and so my feeling in egypt is that unless the troops the army troops start deserve it but if the in other words if the army stays the troops stay loyal that is the the privates if you will stay loyal that the military is going to crush this let's move on to libya now mark it off is dead and after that happened

a lot of people were sort of waving victory flags but i think it's important to note clashes are still going on there and there's a lot that's unresolved on any idea where you think is happening in libya right now as we speak. well i think that the libyan the libyans in charge in theory in libya are simply not in control of all their armed forces and so you see you've got a fractured population many of them armed and having representative militias. and the central government is trying to bring that under control but without much success and so there's still. the possibility of sort of multiple civil wars in libya so we as you said i don't think at the final word has been said i want to emphasize that the united states. that

the notion of promotion of democracy by the united states is in many ways a poseidon ok i think that that they're not so much interested in democracy as in stability and in a matter where the governments of a stable governments cooperate with them but you cannot sort of sell that to the american people if you think that story right so you kind of you know sort of put the flag over it by saying what we're out to do is spread democracy but this is obviously not the case i wondering what you think of course it's only been one year since it was even started about her do you think it will stand to benefit the most when history looks back at the arab spring who will be considered winners and who we consider losers right i think this is stage one in a continuing process that what is important about the last year is the precedents

that set ok so now from now on. populations the masses know what's possible they know if they hit the streets with many many millions of protesters they can possibly overthrow governments and that is that's the important issue so even if in this round you don't get the kind of representative demat democracies or a representative government that you would expect. this is not last. year i was just going to say you know we sort of gone around the world just real quick one sentence or less i know it gets tricky when you talk about places like bahrain or syria you mentioned that the west has sort of been selling this as a democracy even though that might not be what it is what about their reaction to places like syria bahrain places where the stuff is still going on again the court for the government to build and. sort of course benefit

and there always is as to what might come in to replace these governments particularly in syria i think it's important i think it's important to note that this is still very much ongoing middle east expert and professor at west chester university lawrence davidson my pleasure this weekend also marks another anniversary in many ways directly related to the arab spring it's called by some the american autumn it looks surely to be headed into winter it's a movement that is also an outcry against economic injustice corruption and that growing gap between rich and poor and has come to be known as occupy wall street three months in and still going strong are to correspond on a stasi a church going to take a look at the movement itself what it stands for and how it's evolved. these are the images of america over the last three months that cops are must beat

themselves in the forehead because they've given such life to this movement not welcome by authorities a movement against wall street wealth inequality and government corruption exploded in new york and spread all across the us the nexus of all of our grievances was the the profit motive the fact that. the corporate sector dominated by the financial sector has our ostensibly democratic politics in gridlock and it owns it. occupy wall street has just marked its three month anniversary what we fall into on september seventeenth with this momentous moment of frustration and anger with the present system now i think that we've kind of injected the idea of economic inequality and see the public discourse more how come i want to treat castro that he would not last long enough to deliver any significant message but three months into the biggest nationwide movement here what's assuming here is it's clear that the protesters are feeling stronger and more united than to be one

critic said the protests would not survive until winter they have we can't fund education we can't fund health care but we could fund the police state and fund these wars until the cows come home at what point is it enough. when does the greed stop opponents said the demonstrations would never trucked tens of thousands they have i would love to see peaceful revolution were really what the media ridiculed them as a joke they just don't have a party in their lives and is it trying to have burning man are they right. but kidding they were not. as many believe the uprising has transformed the face of america it's totally changed the conversation in the united states on saturday the occupiers of new york facts rocks samplers after being evicted from zuccotti park. attempted to occupy a new public space to use as their base. but

confronted by police about fifty were arrested others kicked out with pretty resilient i think you know in a short amount of time and. surely the. demonstrators plan to keep going until they see a revamp of the financial and political system in the us the financial elite is still mourning it over everyone the economy is in trouble foreclosures are continuing to grow all the real reasons the protests and the movement will continue no matter the obstacles the goal of occupy wall street is to make history we're growing and we're going to be the transformative moment for social and economic justice in america. r.t. . so i want to talk about some really important points here about the movement's impact on public conversation and also in the spotlight now shined on police brutality in this country which has played a major role in drumming up more support unless we also can't forget that the

occupy movements are taking place all around the country despite police dismantling many of these occupations but i want to bring in christine again salis she's an organizer an activist for all my wall street she is in new york christina lots to talk about here first of all as part of one of the activists with occupy wall street in new york just talk to me a little bit about the significance of this weekend what happened and what it means to be three months in. wow this weekend was definitely amazing you know we all got together are we saying happy birthday to ourselves it was really kind of cute actually and there were just so many people mobilizing you know we were taking over spaces there was actually a big immigrant march that happened on sunday so it's a really big weekend for us you know and it's just about celebration of course the cops like to break a bunch of that up but we don't want them to terrorists so it was really just a time for celebration and i feel really good about it and it feels good that we

made it to this three month mark and even though the park has been torn down you know where we still have it going on and people see that and christine i see your raring the button that says stop and frisk i know you're part of a group that's really active and shedding light on something that really has had something to learn so much and that is police brutality occupy wall street has really. brought to the front lines and to everybody's t.v. screens some things that i think a lot of people in this country already knew which is that police might not be the one percent but they certainly seem to do a lot of protecting of the one percent talk to me about stop and frisk and about what this movement has really meant to the attention that you're trying to bring. so i've really been deeply involved with this movement to stop the stop and frisk so stop and frisk is a policy that the n.y.p.d. conducts and that's to stop people on the streets if they feel that they may have

a weapon on them but we know that this policy is racist it happens mostly in low income neighborhoods to mostly young black and brown men and you know this thing really needs to stop and it's unfortunate that so many people in this country and around the world have no idea that this is going on and people are being harassed in the streets and it's it's you know it's not only is it unconstitutional it's humiliating you know it's destroying a generation of youth the youth that are supposed to be our leaders and they're being harassed in the streets by people you know the statistics are staggering that something like every out of every two thousand young men that they stop in the streets they find one weapon you know this year alone they stopped almost seven hundred thousand young men in new york city to see if they had weapons on them i mean it's really a racist policy we have to get rid of it and now the wall street movement is going on it's shedding light on the fact that police brutality happens all the time and it's happening to people who never expected it that it was going to happen to them

and we've been able to mobilize them to come and join us and to stop this thing so we've been in neighborhoods like harlem we've been in brownsville in brooklyn we've been in jamaica queens and we're going to different cities throughout new york to make this thing stop certainly i think it is just becoming so much more of the part of the everyday conversation when we see what we've seen over the last three months which is massive amounts of tear gas being fired on people rubber bullets we saw. scott olsen in oakland be critically injured because the tear gas canister hit him in the head not to mention the police baton and the really really interesting treatment that's taken place in these clashes and i want to switch gears a little bit christine i know that you in addition to being very active in occupy wall street i know that you were also in egypt just a couple days before the revolution there began we're also today marking the one year anniversary of the arab spring talk to me a little bit about your experience in egypt what you saw from the perspective of

being there right before everything started. you know i guess we should have known something was growing because at that time in tunisia is when everything began over there so as we were in egypt you know the revolution was going on in tunisia what shocked me see me and some of the john jay students we went out there to go talk to students at a high school and you know explain to them about how you can stand up for your government and you know we don't have to believe what they're telling us that you know corruptions going on how do we start a revolution and to our surprise we got there and these sixteen about fifteen to eighteen year old students. were teaching us about how to start a revolution were teaching us how to be involved and you know they had so much information not only what's going on inside their politics in egypt but what's going on in america world politics so it was kind of like we went there to learn from them and it was just it was it was so it's such an amazing feeling to know that they're involved in what's going on that i'm looking for that in the young

people in this country i want to turn off the reality t.v. i want to stop shopping and i want us to learn and to educate each other so that this way we can make this thing happen here because you know the movement's growing but there are still people who are not focused there are still people who are letting the mainstream media mislead them and think that you know this is a group of ragtag hippies who have no idea what they're talking about and we really need to focus on the youth at this point that's my thing we need to focus on saving the youth that are being harassed by cops we need to focus on the youth that aren't getting education in the school system we need to focus on the youth that are being targeted by corporations and by reality television shows and by music and corrupting their minds that's what we need to focus on but i think it's happening in my video games as well those are all topics that are. that are directly related especially when you talk about the education system here in this country i know that this is one of the major things that a lot of occupiers fight for talk to me about occupy wall street though i mean where is the movement three months in. i mean i think that we're at

the best time ever you know because right now we have a lot of organizing going on and you know people people are naive to think that because they don't see us in the streets because it's cold out ok that the movement is dead and they're just so wrong because just because it doesn't you don't see it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist and we're all in line and we're networking ok we have people you know it's too cold so we're not able to occupy outside space right now you know maybe for a short time we can but we're occupying inside space and we're really working on that and we have a lot of campaigns going on right now and the internet has been such a great tool for us and that's how we're really making this thing happen so you know over the winter time we're all going to be organizing and getting things together and once the nice weather comes out and the flowers are blooming so will the movement and i think it's really important because there are critics of this movement and even people that aren't necessarily critics but that see for example

where you are they see that tents are no longer allowed in zuccotti park they see what's happened in seattle and denver and l.a. that a lot of the occupations have been dismantled the whole camping overnight aspect is no longer a part of this i will say that just down the street from our studios in d.c. . occupied macpherson square just keeps getting bigger with more and more tense but christina what do you say to those people that say you know the tents are down that means the movement's almost over. i say open up your eyes say you haven't been paying attention already and that's why our country's in the crisis that it's in right now open your eyes you know turn off the mainstream media and pick up a newspaper you know that's more progressive pick up a news or newspaper that's going to tell you the truth that they're not going to be biased you know i ask people please open your minds and open your hearts and understand that this is something that needs to happen and because you don't see it don't doubt us don't doubt us because we're becoming stronger than ever right now and i just ask them to respect the movement understand like you know people like to

make fun of it please don't take that approach because i think that with time eventually people who you know the doubted us they're going to jump on to and you know will be here and will be waiting but just because you don't see it on the news because you know they're doing dancing with the stars or you know snooki had some type of situation her boyfriend doesn't mean that it's not going on seriously you know when we did a fox news clip in our report that we played just before having you come on you know some of the fox news hosts like to say in addition to calling you guys you know dirty hippies this one woman said oh they're just trying to recreate burning man in the streets of new york but certainly i think that you are one of many examples that we've had here on r t that show that that is just not true occupy wall street organizer and activist christina gonzales. thank you so much for having me. still ahead here on our team keeping it in the family that's exactly what north korea is doing following the death of its leader kim jong il when we come back

we'll take a closer look at the young successor who is now to help. the world.

welcome to the capital account i'm lauren lyster. well north korea's dear leader kim jong il is dead according to reports out of north korea he died of exhaustion while riding on a train the world is waiting to see what's next and it's becoming clear that even some of our most senior officials here in the u.s. have no idea we've also got japan voicing fears of a pop possible military escalation in the korean peninsula and a state of emergency and military alert declared by south korea or kim jong il's you. youngest son kim jong un is expected to assume power many now wonder how he will lead and to what extent her follow in his father's footsteps are to correspond

to the now a report on the man who personified north korea's communist state at least a little that we did know about him. a mystery to the world what now for north korea with its leader kim jong il dong this massive military great was held in two thousand and eight to mark north korea's sixtieth anniversary general can john wasn't there to greet the crowd the court suggested he suffered a stroke in two thousand and three reports claimed kim jong il died of diabetes and had been replaced in public by stand ins hired previously as a security measure he never spoke to the media had a profound fear of flying and ate with special chopsticks which could detect poison rumors have surrounded the so-called supreme leader throughout his life beginning with birth according to one source he was born in the soviet union in one nine hundred forty one during his father's exile all kim jong il's official biography claims his birth was heralded by the appearance of

a double rainbow. our people take pride in the fact that they are blessed with great leaders from generation to generation. the leader of the democratic people's republic of korea since one nine hundred ninety four he succeeded his father kim il sung keeping korea close to the world kim jong il was also named supreme commander of the people's army one of the largest in the world with one million active troops and over four million reservist it's believed enormous funds allocated to its military might ate up north korea's resources needed to fight famine and other social problems but kim jong il and his regime tried to put on a different show when allowing the globe a glimpse inside for their own you know in our thoughts or at the general. thank you so much others you know after the korean war the demilitarized zone was drawn up sending north and south korea into very different directions. decades on the

north remains a closed communist state the south a modern democracy an innovative success story north korea has caused global outrage in recent years has two patients by carrying out an underground nuclear test and short range missile launches leading to us in un financial and military sanctions it is now not a matter of the united states and north korea it is really a matter of the region saying to north korea that it has to change its behavior russia has tried to be a mediator for peace on the peninsula by pushing for negotiations or in the asia pacific region this serious potential for conflict and there's no alternative but to set up dialogue an improved understanding between the sawyer in twenty ten new blew up around the north with talk of the possible next leader that's when kim john on became a four star general and first moved into my mind to take over for his father that

oversaw tensions reach its highest point in decades after the north launched an artillery strike that left four dead south korea continues to hold large scale war games with the u.s. and japan and want to conflict would break out if another attack was launched now came john on a young and inexperienced leader is up to helm who either open the door or continue to keep it shot this roadway station was built in two thousand and two with hopes of connecting seoul and palin yang but the north korean regime backed out at the last minute making this the last stop train heading back into the south now with kim jong il that there is new hope that perhaps soon we would see a train heading in that. setting light on the most secretive and reply in the world and he's now r.t. korea. and that will do it for now but for more on the stories we covered go to r.t. dot com slash usa or check our youtube page youtube dot com slash r t america you

should also follow me on twitter i'm christine for al and i will be back here and a half hour. here in bygone days dogsleds were vital to get around. but today they're more leisure than lifeline. what drives people to quit their modern lives and settle in remote woods. one finds them up to survive in the freezing cold. a new beginning in russia's new discover the arctic circle on r.t.e. . download the official altie uplink ation to your i phone on pod touch.