people who have never had any experience with the process
"Any" experience seems a bit of a reach. Egypt had elections. Unfair ones, but they had 'em. And I suspect some Egyptians may have become familiar with democratic traditions. Somehow. Magically. Maybe from a book or travelling. A website, even.
You are invited to use this thread to chatter about Egypt.
What does that have to do with being Marxist?
I thought it was part of the Bush Doctrine.
Aww, jeez, where is that piece I read about democracy being eons older than Athens, some scholar finding examples in the East. Democracy ain't hard at the beginning, gather and talk, and don't let the slicksters dominate the conversation.
Third Worldism
...a little very old article I read today as an exercise in self-criticism.
Support for any national liberation struggle is always reactionary. It usually consists of:1) support for a client state of the state capitalist bloc, which amounts to defending state capitalist imperialism against Western imperialism;
2) support for despotic regimes which destroy, together with classic bourgeois property forms, any independent organisation of the working class and peasantry.
The crowd screams? Nah, it ain't so bad
In practice all that revolutionaries can currently do in the Third World is to avoid compromise on the cardinal issue: namely that working people have no 'fatherland' and that for socialists the main enemy is always in one's own country.
There you go.
The question in 3 could be directed at 90% of Fox News output, regardless of the topic under discussion.
I propose a rule: No person with a US Senator shall make pronouncements about functional democracy.
8: In the U.S. that would exclude everybody except residents of the District of Columbia.
10: You're mocking me, aren't you?
Well..........bye!
The opinion column at AJE is not so encouraging today. Lots of bourgeois blather about freedom and a new Pan-Arabism and very little about food, wages, workers, right to organize. People don't eat elections.
But back to revolution in one own's country. It would be nice to give the tentacle of the vampire squid (in the WH) reaching out to the upper midwest some resistance by helping the former "Conscience of the Senate." I pity Chicago if the pigs win.
I don't think we are capable, today, of fathoming the Egyptian experience with democratic traditions. They held elections. Yet this was not democracy. When they sat down, they sat down every day in the lap of Mubarak.
I wasn't much familiar with Michael Scheuer, so I went to his Wikipedia page, where his previous writing seems quite at odds with traditional FoxNews views on the Middle East.
14:I don't think we are capable, today, of fathoming the Egyptian experience with democratic traditions
They ain't Martians. What it takes to "fathom" them is to shake off our exceptionalism and patronizing neo-colonial attitudes and look at our own political processes and political economy. Honesty and humility will discover common ground.
I had to read surprisingly many words in 13 before I was totally sure it was bob and I could skip it.
Funny to find out that Donald Rumsfeld circa 2003 was a Marxist.
17:I will count that as a vote for Rahm, a vicious dissing of Carole Mosely Braun, and support for global mega-banks.
Since the dawn of time, despicable liberals have yearned to blot out the agency of the idealized orientalized Other.
Honesty and humility will discover common ground.
Honesty And Humility live together in perfect harmony
Side by side in my dictionary oh lord why dont we?
We all know that people are the same where ever you go
there is good and bad in everyone
we learn to live we learn to give each other what we need to survive together alive
Just FDL livefeed of the brief nothing Obama press briefing
But there were the jokes about the ties.
I hate what passes as prez humor & the fawning laughter among the 'press' corps it produces. I also have zero understanding of what the big is about ties. I know they're a phallic symbol, but still, men look like such a bunch of stepford dressed jerks with a little splash of color, gaaahhh....ecahnomics, good guy
Who the fuck wears suits and ties anymore? "stepford dressed jerks"
Uniforms, military, we have taken a step toward understanding Egypt
A thread that threatened to be about Egypt once again promises to be about bob. Alhumdulillah!
15: I wasn't much familiar with Michael Scheuer, so I went to his Wikipedia page, where his previous writing seems quite at odds with traditional FoxNews views on the Middle East.
He is a bit orthogo... of an odd duck on his positions. I think he thinks he is taking the Islamic "threat" more seriously than Bushco did--Iraq was the wrong move in a more serious long-term strategic war against crafty alien thought monsters. But he did write one of the worst Op-Ed pieces in the history of the WaPo (which is saying something):
In surprisingly good English, the captive quietly answers: 'Yes, all thanks to God, I do know when the mujaheddin will, with God's permission, detonate a nuclear weapon in the United States, and I also know how many and in which cities." Startled, the CIA interrogators quickly demand more detail. Smiling his trademark shy smile, the captive says nothing. Reporting the interrogation's results to the White House, the CIA director can only shrug when the president asks: "What can we do to make Osama bin Laden talk?"...
So if the above worst-case scenario ever comes to pass, Americans will have at least two things from which to take solace, even after the loss of major cities and tens of thousands of countrymen. First, they will know that their president believes that those losses are a small price to pay for stopping interrogations and making foreign peoples like us more. And second, they will see Osama bin Laden's shy smile turn into a calm and beautiful God-is-Great grin.
they will see Osama bin Laden's shy smile turn into a calm and beautiful God-is-Great grin
Hottttest things I've read this week.
@24
As a near total lurker, I'm sort of fascinated by bob's consummate virtuosity at trolling this crowd. I mean, you guys are really good at ignoring all the other ones; why is bob so often successful at derailing things?
24:It doesn't have to be, it could be about essear. Let's look at 17 carefully, without prejudice or bias.
17:I had to read surprisingly many words in 13 before I was totally sure it was bob and I could skip it.
1) essear could have just silently skipped 13, but instead he obviously is trying to prevent other people from reading 13. 13 in particular, essear didn't do this with any other comment. He picked out 13.
2) What was the content of 13, via the link? The struggle of a progressive black woman (Carole Moseley Braun) against the Wall Street connected rich white male (Rahm Emmanuel). This is what essear did not want people to read.
Now we have decades of work on this, e.g., Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison excluded from college canons. The way it works is for the white patriarchy to not attack intelligent black women, which might draw attention to them, but to try to make them invisible by saying "they are not worth reading". Pretty much the exact words used by essear in 17. We are not fooled anymore.
Next step is to laugh off the criticism and say that isn't what was really meant.
Whatever. I still recommend people follow the link in 17 and see what Digby, an older white woman, is saying about Rahm Emmanuel, the rich white male, and Carole Moseley Braun, the progressive black woman. All I do is try to help people broaden their reading.
Or you can listen to essear and limit the discourse.
Yes, I'm trying to prevent people from reading the contents of the link I didn't click on, which I didn't know the contents of, because I'm a crypto-racist tool of the man. Sounds plausible, bob.
Interesting that the announcement was apparently made by Suleiman. Is he hoping to be the last one standing?
Mosley Braun was my senator for 6 years and she was no fucking progressive.
29:Okay, essear, for the sake of comity I will let it go. I can't prove you clicked on the link. And I don't want a fight.
31: I was just thinking the same thing. She did vote against DoMA, apparently.
31:I'd say it was arguable, and I think I would vote for her against Rahm, the Goldman-Sachs asset-stripping locust.
she was significantly more liberal than many of her fellow senators. She was strongly pro-choice, voting against the ban on partial-birth abortions and the restrictions on funding in military bases for abortions. She also voted against the death penalty and in favor of gun control measures. Moseley Braun was one of only sixteen senators to vote against the Communications Decency Act and one of only fourteen to vote against the Defense of Marriage Act....Wiki
Yeah, I read about the mixed economic record.
bob: shouldn't you be advocating for the people of Chicago to self-determine, free from the influence of meddling Texans?
She loved NAFTA, tort reform, and dictators who were paying her boyfriend. Among other things. No one on the left living there at the time thought she was on our side. In fact, she was someone we all believed to be much more liberal than she turned out to be once in office, leaving us all desperately disappointed. Doesn't that make her eeeevil?
Continuing to try to redeem the thread: how was the earlier suicide bombing of the Coptic church related to the anti-Mubarak movement?
27 merits study. I suspect that part of may be that bob wraps agreeable, or at least debatable, political propositions inside rhetorical tarbabies*. He's found the perfect ratio of trolling:content for a skeptical left-liberal crowd. The dogs humanize him.
*Is "tarbabies" real bad, or just pretend bad? I'm honestly not sure.
27: as the last thing from a lurker, I'm similarly fascinated, if also repelled. I'm half-convinced he's a plant of some kind.
27 to 29, I guess. My behavior is inexplicable, even to myself.
38.2: Not bad in itself at all, just a little tainted in popular imagination because of association with Disney's Song of the South. It's a real African-American folktale that Harris collected and a pretty straight retelling of a West-African folktale (I think the African version is something like "gum man", but can't remember for sure).
||
Greasemonkey scripts work natively in Chrome, I just figure out. This comes as a great relief to those of us who weren't missing Firefox at all except for pdf23ds's comment autolink function.
|>
27: Sometimes taking the bait is irresistible. Mea culpa.
42: ah! I wondered if that might be the case. Anybody Chrome users who feel particularly bothered by 27 (along the lines of 43) should feel welcome to contact me.
He's found the perfect ratio of trolling:content for a skeptical left-liberal crowd.
It's approximately 1.61803399.
That estimate seems incontestably accurate.
It's best to think of Bob's trolling as a kind of seasoning, a little bit of crazy sauce that brings out the flavor of a thread. It tastes bad when there's too much of it, though.
31: Mosley Braun was my senator for like twenty years.
37:I don't understand the question. It isn't as if anti-Copt violence started then and there.
I spent some time googling around threads at Tasbeha.org and American Copts. There was a lot of jubilation and some actual pleasure in the expansion of discourse to politics "Copts fighting Copts, Muslims fight Muslims, everybody fighting MB." But I didn't really learn much.
My expectancy would be that although there is a lot of claimed secularism in Egypt, when the conflicts rise over e.g. Coptic Rights the seculars will not fight as long and as hard as the faithful and Copts will have a hard road.
This is based in part or for instance on the pro-choice battle in another semi-secular supposedly freedom of religion society I know about. Cultural residuals can weaken resolve.
Iraq and Lebanon had some very specific circumstances and history that led to the horrors and expulsions and fighting. Egypt, AFAIK, is infinitely far from that kind of thing.
One thing that was said this week was that Jordan and Yemen might see uprisings, but not Syria, because Syria has too much religious diversity and internal conflicts.
It will very often come down to families or tribes or factions fighting over control in a village, town, city and a national politics may not be able to do much about it.
Look at Chicago. Rahm vs Braun.
I finally went ahead and read Greenwald's post in full. (He is...frequently wordy.) It made me want to be a criminal. A depressed, nihilistic criminal. At first this seemed irredeemably tragic, but then I realized that all I'd need are a few ferrets, and to avoid bowlers.
Actually, nope. Still utterly depressing.
And this is entirely the wrong thread.
There's an Egyptian woman at my office who is generally a very grumpy and unpleasant person.
Today she was absolutly beaming. It was nice to see some humanity in someone I usually can't stand.
Steal her purse to return things to the status quo.
||
Meanwhile government in action closer to home. I spent 40 minutes being simultaneously entertained and appalled by this bit of action in a Congressional committee on the odious "The Protect Life Act" (33 minutes to 1:16 is the good stuff). Anthony Weiner and Frank Pallone having a bit of fun with the fact that the assclown Repubs failed miserably in adhering to their own grandstanding requirement that the Constitutional authority for all bills be specified when they are filed. Probably not for all tastes, must have patience for parliamentary nonsense and an unhealthy curiosity about the actual workings of the sausage factory. And unfortunately the video does not include an Schakowsky's statement. Before that the contempt with which she seems to be treated is infuriating and revealing as the men all talk about this hideous abortion bill.
|>
Scheuer helped set up rendition program in Egypt. Not a neocon/Bush doctrine supporter, but a bad guy.
51: I think Syria is not a likely candidate. Better economic growth, more pervasive surveillance. (Egypt's mukhabarat was no less brutal, but there was more civil society). I don't really know what I'm talking about though.
On Egypt, been following on twitter--as as I said there don't know if it foments revolutions but it sure gets you emotionally involved in others'. Especially when revolutionaries are as appealing as Egypt's. (see e.g. twitter.com/monasosh )
Have others noticed a contrast between the way pundits talk about the lack of experience with democracy in Egypt and South Sudan. The South Sudanese are much much farther away from modern civil society, but people are saying that independence is great and we need to help them take all the steps they need to take to build a democratic culture. But when people say "Egypt is not ready for democracy" they go on to say "So they need a firm hand to keep them in line." There's nothing constructive about it. "Not ready for democracy" is meant to describe a permanent condition.
"Not ready for democracy" is meant to describe a permanent condition.
Code for, "It would be inconvenient if they disagreed with us."
60
Have others noticed a contrast between the way pundits talk about the lack of experience with democracy in Egypt and South Sudan. The South Sudanese are much much farther away from modern civil society, but people are saying that independence is great and we need to help them take all the steps they need to take to build a democratic culture. But when people say "Egypt is not ready for democracy" they go on to say "So they need a firm hand to keep them in line." There's nothing constructive about it. "Not ready for democracy" is meant to describe a permanent condition.
Isn't that in part because the South Sudan is more of an anti-colonial situation where the South Sudanese are overthrowing alien and malevolent rule from afar? Also they have less to lose but it is easy to imagine things in Egypt getting a lot worse.
56: Oh, that's fun to watch. Nothing real accomplished, but fun.
the South Sudanese are overthrowing alien and malevolent rule from afar?
Unlike Egypt where (apparently former) Vice-President Omar Suleiman seems to have been a CIA agent in good standing.
But your point holds, provided we understand it as framed within an entirely western perspective. I think you identify the reason for the disjuncture in approaches to the two situations.
I think 62 gets it right. Say what you will about the tenets of Omar Suleiman, he's part of the same society as the people trying to overthrow him. And in Sudan there's the obvious cultural and historical differences between the two regions.
Now we have decades of work on this, e.g., Maya
Angelou and Toni Morrison excluded from college
canons.
Yes, it is scandalous how right-wing zealots have maintained a stranglehold over the nation's university English departments. It's nothing but Shakespeare and Chaucer from start to finish. Most undergraduates have never even heard of Toni Morrison, let alone been assigned any of her works.
On the positive side, the yellow skies and pink vegetation on that planet are pleasing to the eye.
60: Yeah. I was about to point that out.
If you want to pick someone out specifically as an example of a writer "excluded from college canons", Toni Morrison is a particularly poor choice.
You can click my name for the Harrowell/Weman/Kenny take on Egypt if you're curious.
Naaah, 62 is completely right in describing the differences between Egypt and Sudan and completely irrelevant.
We fret about Egypt getting too democratic because it has been our faithful ally keeping the Middle East in its place since Sadat kicked out the Soviets and we know that all the things we want from it are not very popular with the Egyptian population. Being nice to Israel and complicit in the oppression of Gaza for instance
Sudan on the other hand has been ruled by people hostile to US and European interests as well as regional allies and by splitting off South Sudan from it, it's weakened. There's also the oil, for most part conveniently located in the one province claimed by both states; for us it doesn't really matter who gets it, as long as either state is too weak and mistrustful of the other to not protect its interest against us too much.
There are no principles at stake here, just national interests.
60 is a bit off, I think. There's zero chance of southern Sudan becoming a democracy, and no one's fretting about that.
Hi, Katherine!
Feb 12, 3arabawy, blog by journalist in Cairo. English, but surrounded by Arabic. Start:
Since yesterday, and actually earlier, middle class activists have been urging Egyptians to suspend the protests and return to work, in the name of patriotism, singing some of the most ridiculous lullabies about "let's build new EgyptThe workers in the plants are still striking, even if the twitterers in Tahrir Square are cleaning up after Woodstock
He links to John Rees Socialist and Democratic Revolution 1999, GB
Apparently the Algerians got shut down.
Steve Clemons ...writing for Yahoo, for contrast
Will the protesters leave Tahrir Square?Tahrir Square probably will remain a heavily populated site for weeks to come, not because of protesters but because of celebrations that the people there on that site changed their history peacefully and powerfully.
Juan Cole ...has come through this retaining my respect.
Apparently New York Times columnists have no better resources to fall back on when making travel plans than asking for help via Twitter.
Algeria Guardian article by Karima Bennoune
1:25 AM Gov't shuts down Internet and Facebook
I suppose y'all can find al Jazeera yourselves, but I log all my reading and watching anyway.
If anyone happens to have good reading suggestions about the politics of Morocco, I'd be interested. Which is to say: if a revolution breaks out, I want to have a sense of what's up. I'll be there in two weeks, for a week or so. Already got Geertz's Morocco/Indonesia book (I know, old and not explicitly political, but a classic, right?), Lise Storm's 'Democratization in Morocco', and James Satar's Civil Society & Political Change in Morocco.
How many hours since any comment by anybody on Unfogged?
New words today:"ruck" and "delation"
Reading about Osugi Sakae motivated me to refresh my Sorel
"everything may be saved if the proletariat, by their use of violence sex!, manage to re-establish the division into classes and so restore to the bourgeoisie something of its energy" ...Georges Sorel, RoV, p.85
The dialectic has led to a new synthesis! Usugi's free love + Sorel's class differentiation = a fifty year old movie by Yoshida. Oh well. I wonder how much fucking there was under the tents in Tahrir Square. Not enough, I'll bet. Kids today don't have the commitment we had in the 60s.
If anyone is feeling like they haven't gotten their daily dose of rage and/or indignation, check this out: turns out the Egyptian revolution was all thanks to Elizabeth Cheney. Christ. It would be funny if it weren't so contemptible.
My mother forwarded that to me. My reply was a bit sharp.
Well, Bob, that's why the Arabs aren't ready for democracy: not enough fucking during revolutionary moments.
In the current situation, it is often the small businessmen and middle class professionals (like the Google marketing head Wael Ghonim, currently in a meeting with the higher council of the armed forces) who are in a hurry to call an end to hostilities. They want to get back to earning money. The accent is shifting far more clearly to the organised working class. Perhaps more serious than today's arrests, then, is the attempted banning of labour activism. This is where a new front of struggle is going to be opened up.
Richard Estes mostly quoting Hossam el-Hamalawy
From Reuters:The Higher Military Council will also ban meetings by labour unions or professional syndicates, effectively forbidding strikes, and tell all Egyptians to get back to work after the unrest that toppled Hosni Mubarak.
"Saudi anger at US is intense."
79:"Arabs" are ready, although we will see if they are ready to take on the opportunists, jackals, and vultures who wish to finish the revolution so they can feed on its corpse.
Real simple:the Egyptian Army opened up Twitter, Facebook, and the Internet and shut down the Unions.
That should tell you who they think they have to fear, and who will be cooperative in keeping the poor and labor down.
the Egyptian Army opened up Twitter, Facebook
The Egyptian army fears semi-literate 20-something kegstanders?
Other way around is what I think he is saying.
81 is making me suspect that Pauly Shore has started replacing comments with Parody Bob. Don't worry, bob, I think the fascist octopus has sung its swan song and ridden off into the sunset.
I'm actually fully in agreement with the sentiments in 80-82.
Obama really should make freedom of association, especially that of labor organizations &c, a hard line condition for continued aid, but obviously won't. Sigh.
SF Chronicle says The Egyptian Military
It owns companies that sell everything from fire extinguishers and medical equipment to laptops, televisions, sewing machines, refrigerators, pots and pans, butane gas bottles, bottled water and olive oil.Its holdings include vast tracts of land, including the Sharm el-Sheikh resort, where ex-President Hosni Mubarak now resides in one of his seaside palaces. Bread from its bakeries has helped head off food riots.
"It's a business conglomerate, like General Electric," said Robert Springborg, professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, referring to the Egyptian military. "It's represented in virtually every sector of the economy."
1) So we have a military that hasn't, doesn't and probably won't (Sudan?) be used in war. Is it still really a military? I am very much reminded of the Japanese industrial management system (as it used to be), with its stringent entrance requirements, its in-house training, its emphasis on teamwork and social skills, its guaranteed career path.
And somebody said the Egyptian Military was the ruling class.
Just as no-one makes decisions or has power unless they went to Tokyo U (and a few others) and is part of the network...and yet almost all decisions are widely based and consensual. For the Japanese the diffusion of power (while remaining in a larger oligarchy) is almost cultural, based on the hatred of the bakufu (Shogun's court) and the specific circumstances of the Meiji Restoration (shared power of two competitive (warring, actually) prefectures at great distance from the Edo structures).
(Since the US is now a managed democracy, an oligarchy maintaining forms, I am trying to understand stable oligarchies)
I forgot. Mubarek was too well paid to be merely a figurehead, but I can't see him, and his reaction to being deposed (It's so unfair), as being a dictator like Saddam. But I don't see many successful dictators or kings as being above a dynamic oligarch. A CEO?
As for the civilian government's privatization initiatives - headed by Mubarak's son Gamal before he was ousted from his party post - they were viewed "as a threat to (the military's) economic position, (which) therefore generally opposes economic reforms*," according to the cable."It's [military] been steadfastly opposed to liberalization and got rid of everybody in Mubarak's government who supported it," he said.
Return of Friedrich List.
*For "economic reforms" read Goldman-Sachs owns your ass.
Read last night that external trade in manufactured commodities has never been (very) important for industrialized (-ing) nations, but as they say, "Capital Moves" Foreign Direct Investment and Loans are the game.
The Pharaoh and the Commanding Heights at Cowen's was the original post. He already has some good comments and links.
The same thing that happened in transitions from oligarchies to capitalist states everywhere: give the entrenched oligarchs formal rights to the property they command, so they don't resist the process. Instead of trying to force military chiefs to give up all that wealth and focus on the military, separate them from military command so that they focus on being capitalists.
Next comment references Poland.
This is my point. Japan deliberately tries to stay pre-capitalist or neo-feudal for the sake of several kinds of stability. Part of that is by controlling accumulation and concentration, competition.
But global neo-liberal capital wants everything, and doesn't care about stability. Gotta grow, gotta move.
That's why the military didn't fire: "Don't kill your customers in a way that can get pinned on you". I think that's a Jack Welch quote.
I gots your fucking Democratic Freedom right here, Egypt.
What Makes a Revolution Succeed ...Dr Roxane Farmanfarmaian at AJE
Is anybody following these links? At this point it is the best of the best
Zeynep Tufekci (she) ...Exploring the interactions between technology and society. I'm an assistant professor of sociology at University of Maryland, Baltimore County
"Can "Leaderless Revolutions" Stay Leaderless: Preferential Attachment, Iron Laws and Networks"
h/t Digby