مذكرات ثائرة. No good choices. Even a broken watch tells the right time twice a day. So a UN Security Council resolution authorising the use of force against Libya is not necessarily wrong just because it was a US, French and UK initiative. Unarmed rebels facing a reign of terror may have to seek the assistance of an international force; preoccupied with their own sufferings, they will not refuse help just because the force may be deaf to appeals from other sufferers (for example, in Palestine).
They may even forget that the alliance is better known for repression than aid. But reasons that make sense to Libyan rebels in extreme danger cannot justify yet another western war on Arab land. Intervention by Nato member states is not an acceptable way to topple Muammar Gaddafi. Going by past record, it is impossible to believe the generous motives for sending in western troops that are currently being claimed.
Gaddafi’s close friends No one questions the imperative of protecting civilians. Wilful silence. Is this 1848? The feeling of witnessing history as it unfolds before your eyes is one of those singular and uncanny things that really deserves its own word in German. It’s a feeling many of us have gotten used to over the past several months, thanks in large part to events in the Middle East that have appeared every bit as dramatic as anything we ever read in our high school textbooks. Processing the unrest in real time from half a world away has been humbling: The speed of events, and the fact that no one saw them coming, has made even short-term predictions seem like a fool’s errand.
Even so, as bombs fall over Libya and protesters clash with government forces in Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria, the impulse to understand what’s going on is extremely strong. To that end, people have reacted by doing what they often do when confronted with high-stakes uncertainty about the future: They’ve turned to the past. “You become the hammer that sees everything as the nail,” Andersen said. Pepe Escobar, Mummies and Models in the New Middle East. They can’t help themselves. Really, they can’t. Like children, the most monstrous of secret police outfits evidently come to believe themselves immortal. They lose all ability to imagine that they might ever go down and so keep records to the very moment of their collapse.
Those records, so copious, damning, and unbearably detailed (which doesn’t make them accurate), provide something like a composite snapshot of the rotting innards of oppressive and brutal regimes -- of their torture practices and their informers, of every citizen who knowingly or unknowingly crossed some line and many who didn’t, and of the corrupt doings of the leaders who gave the secret police free rein. And so it was bound to happen, as it did in East Germany and elsewhere in the former Soviet bloc after 1989, that the innards of the hated Egyptian state security agency Amn al Dawla (“Mubarak’s Gestapo,” as it’s now being called) would finally see the light of day. Twitterers of the World Revolution: The Digital New-New Left | FPJ. An enlightening article by Tony Cartalucci,[1] entitled “Google’s Revolution Factory – Alliance of Youth Movements: Color Revolution 2.0,” has been published by Global Research.[2] Here Cartalucci focuses on the Alliance of Youth Movements (AYM), a.k.a.
Movement.org. Cartalucci states that Movement.org was started in 2008 to co-ordinate “radical” youth movements of what he calls a “left-liberal” nature. Among the founding groups was the April 6 Youth Movement, which has been the vanguard of the revolt in Egypt. What the naïve, the ill-informed, and those who have the disadvantage of a University miseducation will find perplexing is that these young revolutionaries have been sponsored by corporations such as Pepsi, by sundry globalist think tanks and NGOs, and by the U.S. State Department. Cartalucci comments on this: Been There, Done That: The Old New Left A pseudo-revolutionary youth movement controlled by Establishment wire-pullers is not a new phenomenon. Organization and Funding. Revolution and the Muslim World. By George Friedman The Muslim world, from North Africa to Iran, has experienced a wave of instability in the last few weeks. No regimes have been overthrown yet, although as of this writing, Libya was teetering on the brink.
There have been moments in history where revolution spread in a region or around the world as if it were a wildfire. These moments do not come often. Each had a basic theme. Some of these revolutions had great impact. 1989 changed the global balance of power. 1848 ended in failure at the time -- France reverted to a monarchy within four years -- but set the stage for later political changes. 1968 produced little that was lasting. The Current Rising in Context In looking at the current rising, the geographic area is clear: The Muslim countries of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula have been the prime focus of these risings, and in particular North Africa where Egypt, Tunisia and now Libya have had profound crises. Why has it come together now? The Danger of Chaos.
Revolution U - Otpor, CANVAS, Burma, and the Egypt Revolution - By Tina Rosenberg. Early in 2008, workers at a government-owned textile factory in the Egyptian mill town of El-Mahalla el-Kubra announced that they were going on strike on the first Sunday in April to protest high food prices and low wages. They caught the attention of a group of tech-savvy young people an hour's drive to the south in the capital city of Cairo, who started a Facebook group to organize protests and strikes on April 6 throughout Egypt in solidarity with the mill workers.
To their shock, the page quickly acquired some 70,000 followers. But what worked so smoothly online proved much more difficult on the street. Police occupied the factory in Mahalla and headed off the strike. The botched April 6 protests, the leaders realized in their aftermath, had been an object lesson in the limits of social networking as a tool of democratic revolution. In Belgrade, Adel took a week-long course in the strategies of nonviolent revolution. The students christened themselves Otpor! A lot, it turned out. Samir Amin Speaking About the Egyptian Revolution | Egypt. By Samir Amin. Translated for Axis of Logic by Siv O'Neall Samir Amin is a Franco-Egyptian economist, a member of the International Council of the World Social Forum and chairman of the World Forum for Alternatives. Samir Amin analyzes the political and economic crisis in Egypt.
This interview was conducted for the World Social Forum in Dakar by Rosa Moussaoui, special journalist / correspondent for 'L'Humanité'. Question - Are the events that shook Tunisia and Egypt merely "popular uprisings" or are they a sign of the entry of these countries into the revolutionary process? Samir Amin – These are social revolts which can potentially lead to a crystallization of alternatives, which in the long run may become part of a socialist perspective. Question - These upheavals are predominantly the result of unemployed young people and college graduates who have not been able to find jobs. Question – Why is the Muslim Brotherhood now trying to present themselves as "moderates"?
Michael Schwartz, Weapons of Mass Disruption. [Note for TomDispatch Readers: Here’s a book recommendation for this Egyptian moment. Get your hands on Jonathan Schell’s The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People. You won’t find a word about the events of the last few weeks. Little wonder, since it was published in 2003, at the height of American hubris over the use of force in Iraq, and just happened to be about eight years ahead of its time. Nonetheless, its look at the history of violence in the context of the great nonviolent uprisings of the twentieth century remains eye-opening and, better yet, Schell got it right. The Obama administration should have ditched all its intelligence and read his book! And by the way, keep in mind that if you use a TomDispatch link or book-cover image to go to Amazon and buy this book or anything else whatsoever, TD gets a modest cut of your purchase. In other words, next time around, President Obama, remember that the U.S.
As a start, Mr. As for stability? The Next Step for Egypt’s Opposition. WHEN I was a young man in Cairo, we voiced our political views in whispers, if at all, and only to friends we could trust. We lived in an atmosphere of fear and repression. As far back as I can remember, I felt outrage as I witnessed the misery of Egyptians struggling to put food on the table, keep a roof over their heads and get medical care.
I saw firsthand how poverty and repression can destroy values and crush dignity, self-worth and hope. Half a century later, the freedoms of the Egyptian people remain largely denied. Under the three decades of Hosni Mubarak’s rule, Egyptian society has lived under a draconian “emergency law” that strips people of their most basic rights, including freedom of association and of assembly, and has imprisoned tens of thousands of political dissidents. But one aspect of Egyptian society has changed in recent years. The tipping point came with the Tunisian revolution, which sent a powerful psychological message: “Yes, we can.”
Egypt's joy as Mubarak quits | Tariq Ali. A joyous night in Cairo. What bliss to be alive, to be an Egyptian and an Arab. In Tahrir Square they're chanting, "Egypt is free" and "We won! " The removal of Mubarak alone (and getting the bulk of his $40bn loot back for the national treasury), without any other reforms, would itself be experienced in the region and in Egypt as a huge political triumph. It will set new forces into motion. A nation that has witnessed miracles of mass mobilisations and a huge rise in popular political consciousness will not be easy to crush, as Tunisia demonstrates. Arab history, despite appearances, is not static. How happy he would have been to seen his prophecy being fulfilled. This dependence on global public opinion is moving, but is also a sign of weakness. The show of popular strength was enough to get rid of the current dictator.
And so it ended badly for Mubarak and his old henchman. The age of political reason is returning to the Arab world. For Egypt, this is the miracle of Tahrir Square | Slavoj Žižek. 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! " Whither the Muslim Brotherhood? Egypt's Berlin Wall moment. Egypt, Israel and a Strategic Reconsideration. By George Friedman The events in Egypt have sent shock waves through Israel. The 1978 Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel have been the bedrock of Israeli national security. In three of the four wars Israel fought before the accords, a catastrophic outcome for Israel was conceivable.
In 1948, 1967 and 1973, credible scenarios existed in which the Israelis were defeated and the state of Israel ceased to exist. In 1973, it appeared for several days that one of those scenarios was unfolding. The survival of Israel was no longer at stake after 1978. The agreement with Jordan in 1994, which formalized a long-standing relationship, secured the longest and most vulnerable border along the Jordan River. The Historic Egyptian Threat to Israel The center of gravity of Israel's strategic challenge was always Egypt. The solution for the Israelis was to initiate combat at a time and place of their own choosing, preferably with surprise, as they did in 1956 and 1967. Mubarak and the Military. Engelhardt, Goodbye to All That. Pox Americana Driving Through the Gates of Hell and Other American Pastimes in the Greater Middle East By Tom Engelhardt As we've watched the dramatic events in the Middle East, you would hardly know that we had a thing to do with them.
Oh yes, in the name of its War on Terror, Washington had for years backed most of the thuggish governments now under siege or anxious that they may be next in line to hear from their people. When it came to Egypt in particular, there was initially much polite (and hypocritical) discussion in the media about how our "interests" and our "values" were in conflict, about how far the U.S. should back off its support for the Mubarak regime, and about what a “tightrope” the Obama administration was walking. With popular cries for “democracy” and “freedom” sweeping through the Middle East, it’s curious to note that the Bush-era’s now-infamous “democracy agenda” has been nowhere in sight. Abroads, Near and Far It was an invigorating time.
Second-Wave Unilateralism. The Mideast Burns by Eric Margolis. The Mideast Burns by Eric Margolis by Eric Margolis Recently by Eric Margolis: Baby Doc Is Back! When I wrote my latest book on the way America dominates the Mideast, I chose the title, American Raj, because this modern US imperium so closely resembled the famed Indian Raj – the way the British Empire ruled India. As I predicted in this book, and in a column last April, Egypt was headed for a major explosion. America’s Mideast Raj is now on fire. Whether it survives or not remains to be seen.
One cannot escape a sense that we may be looking at a Mideast version of the 1989 uprisings across Eastern Europe that brought down its Communist regimes and then the Soviet Union. There are indeed certainly strong similarities between the old Soviet East Bloc and the spreading intifada across the police states of America’s Mideast Raj.
But there is also a big difference. In Tunisia, where the current Arab uprising began, the army has so far stayed admirably neutral. January 31, 2011. Mohamed ElBaradei: The Return of the Challenger to Egypt. The Lone Star State has led a surprisingly progressive overhaul of its incarceration system. The story behind the bipartisan push that GOP contenders may be extolling come 2016. It appears Rick Perry is going to run for president again in 2016. Perry, 65, will leave the governor’s office next January after serving for 14 years, beginning in 2000, when George W. Bush resigned to prepare for the presidency. In recent months, Perry has appeared in both Iowa and South Carolina.
As he creeps back onto the national stage, Perry—who has overseen the executions of 268 people—more executions than any other governor in United States history—has brought with him an unlikely Lone Star State success story: prison reform. The conservative movement to reform prisons is not new. That very well might be changing now that it appears it could be a series of talking points for a mainstream Republican presidential prospect. “You can’t go into the state legislatures and say ‘Hey, they did this in Vermont!’ International Socialist Review -- Egypt, Israel, and the U.S. Hosni Mubarak's speech: full text | World news. Milestones: Mubarak’s Presidency - Interactive Feature.
This is so much more than a ‘webolution’ Freedom makes you giddy. The roots of Egypt's uprising. Vijay Prashad: The Empire's Bagman. Top Ten Accomplishments of Egypt Demonstrators. "The Arab World Is on Fire" Victory to the Egyptian people! Why fear the Arab revolutionary spirit? | Slavoj Žižek. Here's your ticket @HosniMobarak - special deal, one way.