tvashtarkatena Posted January 27, 2011 Posted January 27, 2011 Has anyone else noticed that our invasion of Iraq was followed not by this kind of liberal revolution, often predicted by the war's cheerleaders, but by a hardening of reactionary, right wing policies throughout the middle east? Enter the students and women of Tunisia, armed with twitter accounts. Hopefully, our 'paternal' period is coming to an end, if for no other reason than we can simply no longer pay the bills. Quote
ivan Posted January 27, 2011 Posted January 27, 2011 i feel your title violates someone's trademark... Quote
G-spotter Posted January 27, 2011 Posted January 27, 2011 It's only a revolution if they can eat bacon and drink alcohol afterwards Quote
prole Posted January 27, 2011 Posted January 27, 2011 Should dovetail well with this summer's global food riots. Quote
G-spotter Posted January 27, 2011 Posted January 27, 2011 Solve global food crisis by expanding production of pork and alcohol. Next step: feed Taco Bell beef to starving Indians. Quote
j_b Posted January 27, 2011 Posted January 27, 2011 "When Egypt had parliamentary elections only two months ago, they were completely rigged. The party of President Hosni Mubarak left the opposition with only 3 percent of the seats. Imagine that. And the American government said that it was “dismayed.” Well, frankly, I was dismayed that all it could say is that it was dismayed. The word was hardly adequate to express the way the Egyptian people felt. Then, as protests built in the streets of Egypt following the overthrow of Tunisia’s dictator, I heard Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s assessment that the government in Egypt is “stable” and “looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people”. I was flabbergasted—and I was puzzled. What did she mean by stable, and at what price? Is it the stability of 29 years of “emergency” laws, a president with imperial power for 30 years, a parliament that is almost a mockery, a judiciary that is not independent? Is that what you call stability? I am sure not. And I am positive that it is not the standard you apply to other countries. What we see in Egypt is pseudo-stability, because real stability only comes with a democratically elected government. If you would like to know why the United States does not have credibility in the Middle East, that is precisely the answer. People were absolutely disappointed in the way you reacted to Egypt’s last election. You reaffirmed their belief that you are applying a double standard for your friends, and siding with an authoritarian regime just because you think it represents your interests. We are staring at social disintegration, economic stagnation, political repression, and we do not hear anything from you, the Americans, or for that matter from the Europeans." A Manifesto for Change in Egypt by Mohamed ElBaradei http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-01-26/mohamed-elbaradei-the-return-of-the-challenger/ Quote
billcoe Posted January 28, 2011 Posted January 28, 2011 Nice point jb. I don't know if you caught it, but Hosni Murbak has just recently sent all of his family to live in the US. Wife, kids...everyone. What does that tell anyone? All those many billions of foreign aid $ we send there to keep the authorities thumb on the little people aren't doing much except anger and alienate those folks. Murbak has been in charge for 30 years.....30 years, think that over. Say if Geo Bush was in charge for 30 years here: and everytime one of ya cracked a joke or bitched on the guy you were hauled off to jail. Ouch. Quote
JayB Posted January 28, 2011 Posted January 28, 2011 Has anyone else noticed that our invasion of Iraq was followed not by this kind of liberal revolution, often predicted by the war's cheerleaders, but by a hardening of reactionary, right wing policies throughout the middle east? Enter the students and women of Tunisia, armed with twitter accounts. Hopefully, our 'paternal' period is coming to an end, if for no other reason than we can simply no longer pay the bills. Hopefully it ends better for the students and women of Tunisia than it did for the students and women of Iran. My thoughts are with them, but if I had to bet I'm not sure which side I'd put my money on between those folks and the Islamists for the intermediate term. Quote
tvashtarkatena Posted January 28, 2011 Author Posted January 28, 2011 Tunisia's been liberal for a long time. They had abortion rights 8 years before we did. Women are treated as equals. They're highly educated. They'll do fine. And when they do, the rest of the Arab world will be watching. It's hard to set your prejudices aside and see people you consider your enemies as real and complex as you are. It's the conservative's curse. Quote
tvashtarkatena Posted January 28, 2011 Author Posted January 28, 2011 And yes, this may be the beginning of the end of American backed middle eastern dictators. Yeah, that's worked out so damn well so far. Quote
prole Posted January 28, 2011 Posted January 28, 2011 Hopefully it ends better for the students and women of Tunisia than it did for the students and women of Iran. Or Iraq, for that matter. My thoughts are with them, but if I had to bet I'm not sure which side I'd put my money on between those folks and the Islamists for the intermediate term. Quote
JayB Posted January 28, 2011 Posted January 28, 2011 Tunisia's been liberal for a long time. Iran wasn't? Quote
archenemy Posted February 11, 2011 Posted February 11, 2011 Just when you thought it couldn't get worse. That leader guy is a douche, eh? Quote
prole Posted February 11, 2011 Posted February 11, 2011 My thoughts are with them, but if I had to bet I'm not sure which side I'd put my money on between those folks and the Islamists for the intermediate term. For Egypt, This Is the Miracle of Tahrir Square Slavoj Zizek Guardian 2/10/11 One cannot but note the "miraculous" nature of the events in Egypt: something has happened that few predicted, violating the experts' opinions, as if the uprising was not simply the result of social causes but the intervention of a mysterious agency that we can call, in a Platonic way, the eternal idea of freedom, justice and dignity. The uprising was universal: it was immediately possible for all of us around the world to identify with it, to recognise what it was about, without any need for cultural analysis of the features of Egyptian society. In contrast to Iran's Khomeini revolution (where leftists had to smuggle their message into the predominantly Islamist frame), here the frame is clearly that of a universal secular call for freedom and justice, so that the Muslim Brotherhood had to adopt the language of secular demands. The most sublime moment occurred when Muslims and Coptic Christians engaged in common prayer on Cairo's Tahrir Square, chanting "We are one!" – providing the best answer to the sectarian religious violence. Those neocons who criticise multiculturalism on behalf of the universal values of freedom and democracy are now confronting their moment of truth: you want universal freedom and democracy? This is what people demand in Egypt, so why are the neocons uneasy? Is it because the protesters in Egypt mention freedom and dignity in the same breath as social and economic justice? From the start, the violence of the protesters has been purely symbolic, an act of radical and collective civil disobedience. They suspended the authority of the state – it was not just an inner liberation, but a social act of breaking chains of servitude. The physical violence was done by the hired Mubarak thugs entering Tahrir Square on horses and camels and beating people; the most protesters did was defend themselves. Although combative, the message of the protesters has not been one of killing. The demand was for Mubarak to go, and thus open up the space for freedom in Egypt, a freedom from which no one is excluded – the protesters' call to the army, and even the hated police, was not "Death to you!", but "We are brothers! Join us!". This feature clearly distinguishes an emancipatory demonstration from a rightwing populist one: although the right's mobilisation proclaims the organic unity of the people, it is a unity sustained by a call to annihilate the designated enemy (Jews, traitors). So where are we now? When an authoritarian regime approaches the final crisis, its dissolution tends to follow two steps. Before its actual collapse, a rupture takes place: all of a sudden people know that the game is over, they are simply no longer afraid. It is not only that the regime loses its legitimacy; its exercise of power itself is perceived as an impotent panic reaction. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice but goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. When it loses its authority, the regime is like a cat above the precipice: in order to fall, it only has to be reminded to look down … In Shah of Shahs, a classic account of the Khomeini revolution, Ryszard Kapuscinski located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroads, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman withdrew; within hours, all Tehran knew about this incident, and although street fights went on for weeks, everyone somehow knew the game was over. Is something similar going on in Egypt? For a couple of days at the beginning, it looked like Mubarak was already in the situation of the proverbial cat. Then we saw a well-planned operation to kidnap the revolution. The obscenity of this was breathtaking: the new vice-president, Omar Suleiman, a former secret police chief responsible for mass tortures, presented himself as the "human face" of the regime, the person to oversee the transition to democracy. Egypt's struggle of endurance is not a conflict of visions, it is the conflict between a vision of freedom and a blind clinging to power that uses all means possible – terror, lack of food, simple tiredness, bribery with raised salaries – to squash the will to freedom. When President Obama welcomed the uprising as a legitimate expression of opinion that needs to be acknowledged by the government, the confusion was total: the crowds in Cairo and Alexandria did not want their demands to be acknowledged by the government, they denied the very legitimacy of the government. They didn't want the Mubarak regime as a partner in a dialogue, they wanted Mubarak to go. They didn't simply want a new government that would listen to their opinion, they wanted to reshape the entire state. They don't have an opinion, they are the truth of the situation in Egypt. Mubarak understands this much better than Obama: there is no room for compromise here, as there was none when the Communist regimes were challenged in the late 1980s. Either the entire Mubarak power edifice falls down, or the uprising is co-opted and betrayed. And what about the fear that, after the fall of Mubarak, the new government will be hostile towards Israel? If the new government is genuinely the expression of a people that proudly enjoys its freedom, then there is nothing to fear: antisemitism can only grow in conditions of despair and oppression. (A CNN report from an Egyptian province showed how the government is spreading rumours there that the organisers of the protests and foreign journalists were sent by the Jews to weaken Egypt – so much for Mubarak as a friend of the Jews.) One of the cruellest ironies of the current situation is the west's concern that the transition should proceed in a "lawful" way – as if Egypt had the rule of law until now. Are we already forgetting that, for many long years, Egypt was in a permanent state of emergency? Mubarak suspended the rule of law, keeping the entire country in a state of political immobility, stifling genuine political life. It makes sense that so many people on the streets of Cairo claim that they now feel alive for the first time in their lives. Whatever happens next, what is crucial is that this sense of "feeling alive" is not buried by cynical realpolitik. Quote
ivan Posted February 11, 2011 Posted February 11, 2011 sounds like homeboy just resigned - egyptians are pissing themselves w/ pleasure anyway - best wishes for them, but i imagine, as w/ any huge party, they'll wake up w/ big hangovers tomorrow and realize they actually need to get their shit together now Quote
ivan Posted February 11, 2011 Posted February 11, 2011 You tell 'em how it's done Ivan! okay: - make up some rules - might be nice to include some basic civil rights, checks n' balances, n' a military under civilian control - hey, maybe write 'em down? - see if you can't stick to them for a year or two before going back to the strongman? - jobs would be nice how's that sound? Quote
tvashtarkatena Posted February 11, 2011 Author Posted February 11, 2011 They'll probably need to dump Sulieman and their existing parliament and start fresh. Quote
ZimZam Posted February 11, 2011 Posted February 11, 2011 Free at last! Free at last! Inshallah, free at last! Quote
ivan Posted February 11, 2011 Posted February 11, 2011 No, I meant in person... but i only speak american Quote
Kimmo Posted February 11, 2011 Posted February 11, 2011 This democratic revolution proves Bush Jr.'s prescience. Who woulda thunk? Quote
j_b Posted February 11, 2011 Posted February 11, 2011 really? that is a problem for Hosni considering all the assets he has in Paris and London. Although a temporary problem considering his advanced age. Quote
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