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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Failure of Tahrir Square 2011
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Not a Revolution, Just a Useless Protest
Two years ago, when I was in the Occupy movement, my comrades and I argued about revolution. Was revolution necessary? What is it? The split that destroyed our movement — as it did the Left during the Sixties — pitted revolutionaries against reformists. The most frustrating part of the debate, however, wasn’t ideological. It was linguistic.
Even on the Left, few Americans know what revolution is: the violent overthrow of the ruling classes. In a revolution, everything — beginning with the power structure — changes.
The Tahrir Square encampments that led to the ouster of Egyptian autocrat Hosni Mubarak were a huge influence on Occupy. But we couldn’t agree about what they meant. Was Tahrir a “revolution”?
No doubt, the 2011 Arab Spring was a powerful mass movement. Everyone agreed about that. For reformists — people who want to fix the system rather than replace it — Tahrir Square was a perfect example to emulate: a peaceful people-power transition that changed things for the better without shedding blood. Cut-and-paste the same phenomenon from Cairo to the United States — convince millions of peaceful demonstrators to camp out in American cities to demand change — and you’d get similarly dramatic results, reformist Occupiers urged. “Egypt had a peaceful revolution,” they said.
Revolutionaries — people who want to get rid of the existing system and start from scratch — countered that the Arab Spring uprisings were not revolutions at all and were thus insufficent. “Tunisia and Egypt,” I said, “were merely personnel changes.” The system, the way society, politics and the economy are organized, remained unchanged.
As recent events prove, the resignation of a president does not a revolution make.
In all the ways that matter, post-Mubarak Egypt remains the same. Those who were rich before are still rich; the same-old poor are the brand-new poor. Egypt’s generals, awash in billions of barely-audited American taxdollars and high-tech military hardware, continue to call the shots.
Egypt’s military brass is a canny lot. Corrupt and autocratic, they tack left and right along with the winds on the dusty streets. When Tahrir got big, they called back their rapists of demonstrators and told Hosni it was time to take a powder. When Mohammed Morsi won the election, they golf-clapped — until Mo’s numbers fell. Then it was his turn to vanish into house arrest.
The crowds in Tahrir cheered as fighter jets streaked overhead. Applauding their own oppressors.
Fools.
The proles get their concession. The figurehead performer everyone thinks runs the show, the big star who plays Mr. President on TV, gets fired after he turns stale. Yet, no matter how chaotic the politics, regardless of how much blood flows (spilled by projectiles made in the U.S.A.), the real bosses — the military, their business cronies, the publishers and owners of state media outlets — remain in charge.
Which now is plain as day.
General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who overthrew Morsi in a coup that dare not speak its name (in Western countries, whose quaint 20th century human rights laws would otherwise require the severing of lucrative weapons contracts that benefit major campaign donors), has apparently gotten so caught up in the serious business of slaughtering members of the Muslim Brotherhood that he’s completely forgotten to pay lip service to restoring democracy.
In the ultimate symbol of restoration (or feeling so confident they feel free to tip their hand), the military’s old friend/employee Mubarak is out of prison and may soon be released.
As two visiting U.S. senators recently witnessed firsthand, power has gone to al-Sisi’s telegenic little head. This isn’t a crackdown, but rather an attempt to grind the Muslim Brotherhood into oblivion. Al-Sisi’s soldiers have arrested the Brotherhood’s spiritual leader, Mohamed Badie, on brazenly trumped-up charges. And his fellow coup leaders are gearing up for a fascist-style ban of the party — another return to the Mubarak era.
As usual, Western liberals are smart enough to foresee future blowback from the Egyptian junta’s brutal campaign. “Attempts to exclude a party with the level of support recently secured by the Muslim Brotherhood will simply prolong Egypt’s agony. That is a tragic lesson from the history of Algeria in the 1990s,” Douglas Alexander writes in The Guardian.
Also as usual, Western liberals are too stupid to push for a stronger remedy than wouldn’t-it-be-nice hoping things will magically feel guilty and stop mass murdering. “The Muslim Brotherhood needs the opportunity,” Alexander continues, “to ‘get out of the streets and into the voting booth.’ Yet to do so, its supporters must believe there is a viable democratic path.”
Which of course there isn’t.
Which brings us back to Tahrir Square 2011. What should Egypt’s proto-Occupiers have done instead?
If their goal was actual change rather than new window-dressing, the protesters at Tahrir shouldn’t have settled for a personnel change at the pseudo-top. Mubarak’s departure wasn’t enough.
If you want to eliminate oppression, you must eliminate the oppressors. In Egypt, that would have meant rounding up every major official in the military as well as the government, and seizing control of the nation’s economy. Everyone who was anyone, rich and/or powerful, should have been imprisoned.
This would, of course, have required violence.
Revolution isn’t pretty. But as we’re seeing now in Egypt, neither is the alternative.
(Ted Rall’s website is tedrall.com. Go there to join the Ted Rall Subscription Service and receive all of Ted’s cartoons and columns by email.)
COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL
University of Maryland Buys Bulletproof Whiteboard
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As long as as the shooters aim for the board, all is well.
Details here.
Top Democrat Rejects Winners of Egyptian Election as “Not a Choice”
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So now they’re admitting it: the US won’t accept the Muslim Brotherhood to rule Egypt – even though they won the elections:
Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., said he supports the president’s approach.
“These are very, very difficult choices,” said Engel, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “I’m very unhappy, obviously, with the crackdown. But we essentially have two choices in Egypt. And that’s a military government, which hopefully will transition as quickly as possible to civilian government, or the Muslim Brotherhood. I don’t think the Muslim Brotherhood is a choice.”
Terrible Cartoons: Egyptian Bloodbath Edition
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The crackdown by Egypt’s military junta against members of the Muslim Brotherhood, who were protesting the coup that deposed Mohammed Morsi, has led America’s editorial cartoons to release a spate of particularly stupid cartoons this weekend. Let’s take a look:
Clay Bennett joins a familiar refrain that we’ve seen by other artists, the implication that Egyptians are too stupid/confused to figure out a way out of the current political crisis. Which, aside from being offensive, is also ridiculous considering that the same cartoon could be labeled “United States.”
Steve Benson kicks off early for the late August holidays by turning in this…what? As far as I can gather, it’s that Egypt is just falling apart. Because the pyramid, in the lexicon of American editorial cartoonists, is Egypt. (Which would be as though foreign cartoonists depicted America as a cowboy, or some other hoary historical relic.) It’s just an illustration — no opinion expressed — and anyway, it reminds me that the opposite is true. Those pyramids, and Egypt, have survived thousands of years of war and turmoil, much of which was worse than what we’re seeing now.
Walt Handelsman is saying…what? That’s bloody crackdowns are bloody? Thanks. We knew that.
I like this one by Matt Davies, who here is not afraid to take an anti-coup, anti-junta stand.
And finally, the worst of the bunch. Glenn McCoy blames the victim:
Clearly
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I love the euphemism “clear” as it relates to the practice of Egyptian military junta goons massacring nonviolent demonstrators. It was also used, of course, by US state-controlled media when the Occupy Wall Street encampments were “cleared” by US government police hooligans.
HARRISBURG PATRIOT-NEWS CARTOON: The Decline and Fall of Great Powers
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This cartoon is for The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Experts say there’s absolutely no way anyone can scrape up the $1 billion it would cost to fix the endemic congestion of traffic on Interstate 83 outside Harrisburg. Yet there’s always money for wars.
1984 Came on Time
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Courtesy of long-time reader Barbara Dale:
“In the actual year 1984 I was home alone one day in Bedford, Iowa (population 1600) when the doorbell rang. The man seeking entry flashed his FBI badge. Sitting in our living room he asked me if I knew that our daughter was corresponding with a KGB agent. I told him that our daughter was 18 years old and that she was engaged with a statewide church committee in exploring the possibility of a peaceful exchange with youth in the (then) Soviet Union. One name she had obtained and written to was a diplomat in the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC. At my rather scornful tone he defensively stated, “This is not Big Brother. We just thought you would want to know what your child is doing.” Ha! So I inquired how he came upon the information. He claimed the letter had not been read; they were simply acting upon the address and return address on the outside of the envelope!
So you thought mail just started to be photographed after 9/11/01??”
SYNDICATED COLUMN: Right-Wing Liberals
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Learning the Lessons of Egypt
I’m not much for sports analogies, but any athlete knows about the home field advantage. It’s easier to win if you play your game, not your opponent’s.
This is even more true in politics. Playing by your enemy’s rules is a mug’s game.
For whatever reason, conservatives and right-wing activists — the latter distinguishable from the former because they want to push past stodgy establishmentarianism into radical reactionism (e.g., fascism and its close relatives) — understand that he who makes the rules usually wins the fight. Whether it’s the aggressive redistricting of Texas voting districts engineered by Karl Rove on behalf of Republicans, or the brutalist media activism of FoxNews and other Murdoch properties like The Wall Street Journal, or hiring goons to beat up election officials during the 2000 Florida recount, right-wingers get that politics is war, no Queensbury rules. Only victory matters.
Leftists — not soft, smooshy liberals but real, honest-to-a-nonexistent-God socialists and communists — get it too. Not that you could tell from recent history, at least in the United States. They’re dispirited and disorganized. Nevertheless, they remember enough Marx and Mao to remember that might makes right.
Liberals, on the other hand, can’t manage to internalize this depressing, historically proven fact.
Columnist’s Note: At this point, if you’re a seasoned reader of opinion essays, you no doubt expect me to list examples of liberal wimpiness. Al Gore giving up in 2000. Obama not getting anything done with a Democratic Congress a few years after Bush rammed through a raft of right-wing legislation through…a Democratic Congress. Next should follow the usual exhortation to grow a pair.
A reasonable assumption, but I’m taking a different tack this time: liberals don’t understand why others refuse to get suckered.
On the morning of Thursday, August 15th, NPR interviewed a “liberal intellectual” in Egypt, where the ruling military junta had ordered soldiers to slaughter hundreds of nonviolent demonstrators staging sit-ins to protest the coup d’état that toppled the democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist party. As is typical in these pieces, we were given no explanation as to why this man was picked to represent the reaction of the Egyptian public to the crackdown. Fluency in English? Friend of the reporter? Well-connected publicist? They didn’t say. Regardless of the reason, the effect was to anoint this “liberal” as a reasonable, albeit extraordinarily well-educated, Average Joe. Whether or not NPR producers intended it, Mr. Egyptian Liberal Voice of Reason served as the voice of NPR and thus, by extension, of American liberalism.
NPR’s pet Egyptian liberal Thursday was “novelist Alaa al-Aswany, who protested against the Mubarak regime and criticized ousted president Mohammed Morsi during his time in office.”
Al-Aswany wasted no time discrediting himself — “No, there is no military rule in Egypt, and there will never be a military rule in Egypt. And what happened is that we are living in a transition period” — before an observation I found unintentionally illuminating: “We must have the constitution first, of course. And then after that, the election. And I believe that there would be civil elected president and elected parliament who will take over.”
What about the Muslim Brotherhood? They should participate in the democratic process, he said.
But why?
On the same network, on the same show, Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations was pointing out that “it’s hard to make a credible claim if you’re an Egyptian liberal” because they supported the military coup.
“There is something called the Repression Radicalization Dynamic,” said Cook. “And one can imagine Muslim Brothers saying that they tried to play by the rules of the political game. They were shut out, shut down and now being hunted and they have no recourse but to take up arms against the state. We’ve seen that before, in fact, in Egypt, in the mid-1990s. There was a low-level insurgency which killed anywhere between 1,500 and 2,000 people. Throughout the Arab world we’ve seen it in places like Algeria.” In 1992 the Front Islamique de Salut (FIS) was expected to win Algeria’s elections. The military, acting with the backing of the U.S., canceled the election, prompting the coining of the term the “American Veto.” The Americans also effectively vetoed Hamas’ win of fair elections in Gaza in 2006.
From Algeria to Gaza to Egypt, the message to Islamists is clear: don’t follow the West’s rules. Electoral democracy is for them, not for you. If you play the West’s game, if you work within their system, they’ll do whatever it takes, including cheating, to prevent you from winning. If you win anyway, they’ll overthrow you in a coup. And if you demonstrate — peacefully, nonviolently, just the way they tell you you’re supposed to, they’ll shoot you like dogs.
I’m pretty sure Islamists — and other radicals who seek political power — have learned their lesson. Goodbye ballot boxes, hello guns.
Liberals, on the other hand, clearly haven’t. Not only do they themselves insist on accepting the rhetorical framework of the right, they expect everyone else to do so as well.
Of course, there may well be a simple if unpleasant explanation for that. Stylistic differences (e.g., George W. Bush vs. Barack Obama) aside, when push comes to shove, liberals side with authoritarianism — even though the autocrats in question plan to get rid of them sooner or later — over their leftist “allies.” We’ve seen it over and over, from Germany in 1848 to Washington in 2013, where a liberal president presides over an empire of torture camps, fleets of killer robot planes, and a police state that makes East Germany’s Stasi look penny ante.
Liberals are right-wing.
(Ted Rall’s website is tedrall.com. Go there to join the Ted Rall Subscription Service and receive all of Ted’s cartoons and columns by email.)
COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL
