The future is in their hands
Friday 11 February 2011
There are decades when nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen.
The peoples of the Arab world, and therefore the rest of us, are now living through those weeks - described in words used by the Russian revolutionary Lenin a century ago.
Revolution is back on the agenda, on the front page of the New York Times even, at just the time when globalised capitalism is mired in its deepest economic crisis for generations and the seemingly almighty power of US imperialism is being demonstrated to be anything but.
The overthrow of the Ben Ali dictatorship in Tunisia last month, triggering the heroic and ongoing uprising of the people of Egypt, the most populous and strategically significant Arab country, was a real revolution. So is Egypt's.
There was a foolish and shortlived attempt to dub the revolutionary uprising in Egypt the "Lotus revolution," but no amount of cheap advertising copy can devalue the profound and welcome changes that millions of Egyptians are fighting for.
The fate of that movement lies in the balance this weekend, as people across the globe take to the streets today in response to a call from Cairo for international solidarity.
But the courage of the protesters in Tahrir Square, in Alexandria, in the great port city of Suez, and in every town and city in Egypt, has already settled some questions definitively.
How long have we been told in the West that the poor benighted people of the Arab Muslim worlds are incapable of taking their futures into their own hands?
All the lies deployed to justify the wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan took this great lie as their premise - that the West must bomb and blast the people of those countries into "democracy" because they are incapable of changing their societies themselves.
The fall of Ben Ali and the rise of the Egyptian masses has put paid to that essentially racist stereotype. The women in Egypt - young and old, with hijabs or not, university educated and from the slums - are showing that they do not need Laura Bush or Cheri Blair giving a faux-feminist gloss to F16s to liberate them. The sisters are doing it for themselves alongside men drawn from across the base of Egyptian society.
And the US State Department, British Foreign Office and French Quai d'Orsay don't like it one bit. It's not only their close personal connections with the torturing regimes of Ben Ali and Mubarak which now stand fully exposed. We know a little about Tony Blair, who still found Mubarak a force for good as the death toll from his clinging onto power climbed above 300.
More is at stake than these politicians' personal connections with Mubarak. The cornerstone of decades of US and Western policy of holding down the mass of the people in the region in the interests of oil, corporate control of trade and investment and Israel is shattering. Every Arab despot ruling the region almost without exception from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf knows it. Which is why the wind of change that is intoxicating their people is bringing a chill to each of those regimes.
And that's why the State Department and its counterparts, caught flat-footed over Christmas with the revolution against Ben Ali, have been bending might and mane to contain the revolution in Egypt. How could it be otherwise? Half the population of Egypt is on less than $2 a day, when the price of a kilo of tomatoes has increased fivefold in 12 months to exactly that daily wage.
The inspiring resurgence of the movement on the streets of Egypt has created further crisis for the regime and for its Western backers, who had to become more forthright in pushing Mubarak to go. They would prefer to have kept him. They would prefer to keep the regime without Mubarak, in the person of Suleiman. They are risking this revolution deepening and radicalising, so that when the regime's key figures do fall the great fountain of humanity in Egypt's streets will not be satisfied but will demand much more by way of political and social justice.
At the time of writing the heroes of Egypt were looking to do just that, with strikes spreading among government workers and calls for marches on government buildings on Friday.
For progressives in the West this is a historic development, and everyone must play their part to help ensure that progress wins in Egypt, not bloody repression in the name of the party of order.
We must ruthlessly expose the hypocrisy of our governments. When they express support for the Egyptian revolution it is as a rope supports a hanging man. They want the army to be the bedrock of any future regime. They do not mean the army of 1973, which bravely fought against Israel. They do not mean the army of soldiers fraternising with their brothers, sisters, fathers and mothers in the streets. They mean the army of the Egyptian high command, the generals, who have been bought and paid for by Washington and who will do its bidding.
When Cameron, Clinton, Hague or Obama talk of democracy in Egypt and the region what they mean, to paraphrase that great Algerian St Augustine, is god grant them democracy, but not yet.
Hillary Clinton spelt it out. Democracy, she said, is not only about process, it is about outcomes. Quite right. But the outcome they fear is that any remotely democratic government in Egypt or Jordan would not produce the outcome of supine adherence to Western interests and the state of Israel.
In Egypt, according to Pew researchers, 82 per cent of people have a negative view of the US, and just 17 per cent positive. It's no mystery why. And so we hear desperate warnings from neocons, liberal imperialists and even some on the social democratic left against the chaos that will result from "snap elections." Egyptians, they say, must wait. But as Martin Luther King reminded us half a century ago writing from a jailhouse in Alabama, wait nearly always means never.
The final bogeyman is the creature David Cameron chose to summon up in his bierkeller rant in Munich last week - fear of Islam, hatred of Muslims, Islamophobia.
We cannot have democracy because the wrong guys may win - in this case the Muslim Brotherhood. Leave aside that the Brotherhood is just one opposition force among many and that it aspires to the kind of government represented by the AK party in Turkey, moderate and efficient by any measure.
The argument in fact has little to do with the Muslim Brotherhood or any other Islamically inspired political organisation. It is about refusing to accept a change that would threaten Western interests, that might inspire a unified Arab world to use its immense natural resources for the good of all the people there and the good of humanity as a whole.
It is, in short, an argument with the simple purpose of demobilising forces pushing for revolutionary change and democracy in Egypt and beyond, and strengthening the fingernail extractors, electrocutors and assassins who Western hegemony relies on.
But I do not see it working, even though it will intensify the racist atmosphere against the 18 million Muslims and immigrants living in Europe, who may well feel that the direct fight for a better future in the Maghreb and other regions they hail from is a fairly good model for struggling for a better life for all within Europe itself.
The sands of time have run out for the pharaoh. He may yet unleash rivers of blood in a bid to hold on. But this wind of change that blew sweetly first through Tunis and now Cairo will not stop there.
With it comes the possibility of undoing the legacy left from the colonial era of Sykes and Picot, of Edwardian gentlemen carving out new states and spheres of influence on the back of a napkin.
And the biggest outstanding injustice of all is Palestine. If the Egyptian regime falls to this great wave, the gates of Rafah will fall too and with them the siege on Gaza. Already the breeze is blowing in the West Bank against those who have enriched themselves while selling every Palestinian aspiration in the sham negotiations with Israel.
What is unfolding now in Egypt is not simply an national revolution, or even just an Arab revolution - it is a moment that holds out the prospect of the most profound change in the way the world is ordered, an historic event in the global struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter.
Victory to the Egyptian revolution!
The peoples of the Arab world, and therefore the rest of us, are now living through those weeks - described in words used by the Russian revolutionary Lenin a century ago.
Revolution is back on the agenda, on the front page of the New York Times even, at just the time when globalised capitalism is mired in its deepest economic crisis for generations and the seemingly almighty power of US imperialism is being demonstrated to be anything but.
The overthrow of the Ben Ali dictatorship in Tunisia last month, triggering the heroic and ongoing uprising of the people of Egypt, the most populous and strategically significant Arab country, was a real revolution. So is Egypt's.
There was a foolish and shortlived attempt to dub the revolutionary uprising in Egypt the "Lotus revolution," but no amount of cheap advertising copy can devalue the profound and welcome changes that millions of Egyptians are fighting for.
The fate of that movement lies in the balance this weekend, as people across the globe take to the streets today in response to a call from Cairo for international solidarity.
But the courage of the protesters in Tahrir Square, in Alexandria, in the great port city of Suez, and in every town and city in Egypt, has already settled some questions definitively.
How long have we been told in the West that the poor benighted people of the Arab Muslim worlds are incapable of taking their futures into their own hands?
All the lies deployed to justify the wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan took this great lie as their premise - that the West must bomb and blast the people of those countries into "democracy" because they are incapable of changing their societies themselves.
The fall of Ben Ali and the rise of the Egyptian masses has put paid to that essentially racist stereotype. The women in Egypt - young and old, with hijabs or not, university educated and from the slums - are showing that they do not need Laura Bush or Cheri Blair giving a faux-feminist gloss to F16s to liberate them. The sisters are doing it for themselves alongside men drawn from across the base of Egyptian society.
And the US State Department, British Foreign Office and French Quai d'Orsay don't like it one bit. It's not only their close personal connections with the torturing regimes of Ben Ali and Mubarak which now stand fully exposed. We know a little about Tony Blair, who still found Mubarak a force for good as the death toll from his clinging onto power climbed above 300.
More is at stake than these politicians' personal connections with Mubarak. The cornerstone of decades of US and Western policy of holding down the mass of the people in the region in the interests of oil, corporate control of trade and investment and Israel is shattering. Every Arab despot ruling the region almost without exception from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf knows it. Which is why the wind of change that is intoxicating their people is bringing a chill to each of those regimes.
And that's why the State Department and its counterparts, caught flat-footed over Christmas with the revolution against Ben Ali, have been bending might and mane to contain the revolution in Egypt. How could it be otherwise? Half the population of Egypt is on less than $2 a day, when the price of a kilo of tomatoes has increased fivefold in 12 months to exactly that daily wage.
The inspiring resurgence of the movement on the streets of Egypt has created further crisis for the regime and for its Western backers, who had to become more forthright in pushing Mubarak to go. They would prefer to have kept him. They would prefer to keep the regime without Mubarak, in the person of Suleiman. They are risking this revolution deepening and radicalising, so that when the regime's key figures do fall the great fountain of humanity in Egypt's streets will not be satisfied but will demand much more by way of political and social justice.
At the time of writing the heroes of Egypt were looking to do just that, with strikes spreading among government workers and calls for marches on government buildings on Friday.
For progressives in the West this is a historic development, and everyone must play their part to help ensure that progress wins in Egypt, not bloody repression in the name of the party of order.
We must ruthlessly expose the hypocrisy of our governments. When they express support for the Egyptian revolution it is as a rope supports a hanging man. They want the army to be the bedrock of any future regime. They do not mean the army of 1973, which bravely fought against Israel. They do not mean the army of soldiers fraternising with their brothers, sisters, fathers and mothers in the streets. They mean the army of the Egyptian high command, the generals, who have been bought and paid for by Washington and who will do its bidding.
When Cameron, Clinton, Hague or Obama talk of democracy in Egypt and the region what they mean, to paraphrase that great Algerian St Augustine, is god grant them democracy, but not yet.
Hillary Clinton spelt it out. Democracy, she said, is not only about process, it is about outcomes. Quite right. But the outcome they fear is that any remotely democratic government in Egypt or Jordan would not produce the outcome of supine adherence to Western interests and the state of Israel.
In Egypt, according to Pew researchers, 82 per cent of people have a negative view of the US, and just 17 per cent positive. It's no mystery why. And so we hear desperate warnings from neocons, liberal imperialists and even some on the social democratic left against the chaos that will result from "snap elections." Egyptians, they say, must wait. But as Martin Luther King reminded us half a century ago writing from a jailhouse in Alabama, wait nearly always means never.
The final bogeyman is the creature David Cameron chose to summon up in his bierkeller rant in Munich last week - fear of Islam, hatred of Muslims, Islamophobia.
We cannot have democracy because the wrong guys may win - in this case the Muslim Brotherhood. Leave aside that the Brotherhood is just one opposition force among many and that it aspires to the kind of government represented by the AK party in Turkey, moderate and efficient by any measure.
The argument in fact has little to do with the Muslim Brotherhood or any other Islamically inspired political organisation. It is about refusing to accept a change that would threaten Western interests, that might inspire a unified Arab world to use its immense natural resources for the good of all the people there and the good of humanity as a whole.
It is, in short, an argument with the simple purpose of demobilising forces pushing for revolutionary change and democracy in Egypt and beyond, and strengthening the fingernail extractors, electrocutors and assassins who Western hegemony relies on.
But I do not see it working, even though it will intensify the racist atmosphere against the 18 million Muslims and immigrants living in Europe, who may well feel that the direct fight for a better future in the Maghreb and other regions they hail from is a fairly good model for struggling for a better life for all within Europe itself.
The sands of time have run out for the pharaoh. He may yet unleash rivers of blood in a bid to hold on. But this wind of change that blew sweetly first through Tunis and now Cairo will not stop there.
With it comes the possibility of undoing the legacy left from the colonial era of Sykes and Picot, of Edwardian gentlemen carving out new states and spheres of influence on the back of a napkin.
And the biggest outstanding injustice of all is Palestine. If the Egyptian regime falls to this great wave, the gates of Rafah will fall too and with them the siege on Gaza. Already the breeze is blowing in the West Bank against those who have enriched themselves while selling every Palestinian aspiration in the sham negotiations with Israel.
What is unfolding now in Egypt is not simply an national revolution, or even just an Arab revolution - it is a moment that holds out the prospect of the most profound change in the way the world is ordered, an historic event in the global struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter.
Victory to the Egyptian revolution!
No comments:
Post a Comment