Radio Open Source: David Bromwich Channels Edmund Burke -- "America is out of itself"

Bromwich Channels Edmund Burke: "America is out of itself"
by Christopher Lydon
Radio Open Source (Watson Institute for International Studies)



David Bromwich is channeling the lost conservative voice of Edmund Burke, the missing wisdom on our mad Afghanistan misadventure. This is what Yale’s Sterling Professors of Literature are for, now and then: to recalibrate commentary to the cadences of immortality

In my long-ago Yale time, Burke was the voice of God for aspiring right-wingers in the school of Bill Buckley and the National Review; he was Buckley’s model of judgment, custom, continuity, restraint, “the wisdom of our ancestors” and the notion that “to make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.”

In his own Parliamentary time (1765-1794), Burke had preached conciliation, not war, with the rebel colonies in America. He wrote the book on France “out of itself” in the Jacobin riot of revolution. More instructive for us, Burke was the conscience of the British Empire who drove the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, the abusive, plundering chief of the East India Company, for “the great disgrace of the British character in India.”

Our Burke bumper-sticker today is that he “loved liberty and hated violence.” As Jedediah Purdy read Burke in his admirable post-911 reflection, Being America, “Enough violence always destroys liberty; mutual respect is the best stay against violence. Moreover, the two appeal to opposite parts of human nature: violence to self-righteousness and the taste for domination, liberty to forbearance and a love of everyday life.” For Professor Bromwich, a modern man of classic letters, Burke remains “the greatest political writer in the English language.”

Burke stands, in Bromwich’s estimate, for the exemplary role of government “in showing the self-government of the powerful themselves, which means the self-restraint of the powerful, which means the resort to violence only as a last resort, and the responsibility of those who rule not to try to break the human personality or character or texture of any of the societies they come into contact with.”

I am asking David Bromwich as he finishes an intellectual biography of Burke for an American version of the great man. Closest approximations: the late Reinhold Niebuhr, Andrew Bacevich of The Limits of Power or Chalmers Johnson of The Sorrows of Empire. I am pestering David Bromwich for a Burkean view of the American predator drone strikes on Afghanistan and Pakistan, for example. He is observing that President Obama, who grew up with a global perspective, has fallen short not least as a teacher in office. He dubs Barack Obama “the Establishment President” in the London Review of Books this spring. In our conversation he muses that Obama…

…is a kind of academic character that I feel I’m familiar with. The strongest, most formative environment that he grew up in was academic and professional. He’s been around vaguely left-liberal but also corporate moneyed types, people like his Chicago crowd in Hyde Park, but also like Michael Froman, Jason Furman, Geithner, Summers, etc. He’s been around people like this for much of his life. And somebody like that thinks that the good people, the thinking people have hold of a lot of power already, and the plan of good sense should just be to make them rule in the right way, and to begin by speaking in a moderate tone… His sense of power being in roughly the right hands—it needs calibration and adjustment but not too much change, and it needs a push with the right attitudes more than force or distinction of policy—that seems to me who he is from my academic acquaintance with people like that. Now, the great exception to this would seem to be what he’s done with health care, but I think the way he did it tells more about him than the actual contents of what he has done. Health care was the mainstream left-liberal Democratic Party domestic policy that people wanted to see something done with for the last 50 years, and he decided to make his mark with that at some risk. It was a very peculiar decision, but in one sense the decision of a very conventional mind…

[Barack Obama] is a very fatherly parent in charge of a family that he doesn’t come home to that often. He thinks that his word goes, but he doesn’t watch too closely what follows when he says, “This is what I demand.” So, for example, on the closing of Guantanamo, he made that the first big pitch of his administration. It was very important, but there was apparently no follow-up pushed by him within his administration. Time was given for his political opponents, which includes the whole Republican Party, to rally against him, and now here we are almost a year and a half later: Guantanamo is not only still open, but there is no sign of it being near closing. He spoke with a tone of command, but the command was not followed, and he himself didn’t back his command with action.

If you pursue that again and again and again in one policy after another, you gradually become a leader who talks rather than acts, and you are known for that.

To Listen to the Conversation

Evgeny Morozov: The Internet in Society -- Empowering or Censoring Citizens?

Al Jazeera: Anon the New Face of Cyber-War

Riz Khan: Tariq Ali and Zalmay Khalilzad -- As social revolutions sweep through the Arab world, how will they affect the role of the US in the region?

As social revolutions sweep through the Arab world, how will they affect the role of the US in the region?
Riz Khan (Al Jazeera)

Will the changes sweeping across the Middle East revolutionise the US' relationship with the region?

In 2009, Barack Obama, the US president, took the stage at Cairo University and spoke of a new beginning between Washington and the Arab world.

Yet, less than two years later, on February 18, 2011 the Obama administration used its first United Nations Security Council veto to strike down a resolution declaring Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem to be illegal.

This leads many to question whether the state of political flux in the Middle East will encourage the US to adopt changes in its foreign policy.

Riz Khan ... speak[s] with world-renowned author and historian Tariq Ali. Also on the show is Zalmay Khalilzad, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Abu Atris: A Revolution Against Neoliberalism?

[Thivai: Excellent short essay -- discusses neoliberalism here and abroad, through the lenses of David Harvey, Timothy Mitchell and Naomi Klein. Would be a great intro for people that are not familiar with neoliberalism or political economy or broader global interconnections or problems with free market/privatization in a real world setting.]

A revolution against neoliberalism? If rebellion results in a retrenchment of neoliberalism, millions will feel cheated.
by Abu Atris
Al Jazeera

...

Rhetoric vs. reality

Two observations about Egypt’s history as a neoliberal state are in order. First, Mubarak’s Egypt was considered to be at the forefront of instituting neoliberal policies in the Middle East (not un-coincidentally, so was Ben Ali’s Tunisia). Secondly, the reality of Egypt’s political economy during the Mubarak era was very different than the rhetoric, as was the case in every other neoliberal state from Chile to Indonesia. Political scientist Timothy Mitchell published a revealing essay about Egypt’s brand of neoliberalism in his book Rule of Experts (the chapter titled "Dreamland" — named after a housing development built by Ahmad Bahgat, one of the Mubarak cronies now discredited by the fall of the regime). The gist of Mitchell’s portrait of Egyptian neoliberalism was that while Egypt was lauded by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund as a beacon of free-market success, the standard tools for measuring economies gave a grossly inadequate picture of the Egyptian economy. In reality the unfettering of markets and agenda of privatization were applied unevenly at best.

The only people for whom Egyptian neoliberalism worked "by the book" were the most vulnerable members of society, and their experience with neoliberalism was not a pretty picture. Organised labor was fiercely suppressed. The public education and the health care systems were gutted by a combination of neglect and privatization. Much of the population suffered stagnant or falling wages relative to inflation. Official unemployment was estimated at approximately 9.4% last year (and much higher for the youth who spearheaded the January 25th Revolution), and about 20% of the population is said to live below a poverty line defined as $2 per day per person.

For the wealthy, the rules were very different. Egypt did not so much shrink its public sector, as neoliberal doctrine would have it, as it reallocated public resources for the benefit of a small and already affluent elite. Privatization provided windfalls for politically well-connected individuals who could purchase state-owned assets for much less than their market value, or monopolise rents from such diverse sources as tourism and foreign aid. Huge proportions of the profits made by companies that supplied basic construction materials like steel and cement came from government contracts, a proportion of which in turn were related to aid from foreign governments.

Most importantly, the very limited function for the state recommended by neoliberal doctrine in the abstract was turned on its head in reality. In Mubarak’s Egypt business and government were so tightly intertwined that it was often difficult for an outside observer to tease them apart. Since political connections were the surest route to astronomical profits, businessmen had powerful incentives to buy political office in the phony elections run by the ruling National Democratic Party. Whatever competition there was for seats in the Peoples’ Assembly and Consultative Council took place mainly within the NDP. Non-NDP representation in parliament by opposition parties was strictly a matter of the political calculations made for a given elections: let in a few independent candidates known to be affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood in 2005 (and set off tremors of fear in Washington); dictate total NDP domination in 2010 (and clear the path for an expected new round of distributing public assets to "private" investors).

Parallels with America

The political economy of the Mubarak regime was shaped by many currents in Egypt’s own history, but its broad outlines were by no means unique. Similar stories can be told throughout the rest of the Middle East, Latin America, Asia, Europe and Africa. Everywhere neoliberalism has been tried, the results are similar: living up to the utopian ideal is impossible; formal measures of economic activity mask huge disparities in the fortunes of the rich and poor; elites become "masters of the universe," using force to defend their prerogatives, and manipulating the economy to their advantage, but never living in anything resembling the heavily marketised worlds that are imposed on the poor.


Unemployment was a major grievance for millions of Egyptian protesters [EPA]

The story should sound familiar to Americans as well. For example, the vast fortunes of Bush era cabinet members Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, through their involvement with companies like Halliburton and Gilead Sciences, are the product of a political system that allows them — more or less legally — to have one foot planted in "business" and another in "government" to the point that the distinction between them becomes blurred. Politicians move from the office to the boardroom to the lobbying organization and back again.

As neoliberal dogma disallows any legitimate role for government other than guarding the sanctity of free markets, recent American history has been marked by the steady privatization of services and resources formerly supplied or controlled by the government. But it is inevitably those with closest access to the government who are best positioned to profit from government campaigns to sell off the functions it formerly performed. It is not just Republicans who are implicated in this systemic corruption. Clinton-era Secretary of Treasury Robert Rubin’s involvement with Citigroup does not bear close scrutiny. Lawrence Summers gave crucial support for the deregulation of financial derivatives contracts while Secretary of Treasury under Clinton, and profited handsomely from companies involved in the same practices while working for Obama (and of course deregulated derivatives were a key element in the financial crisis that led to a massive Federal bailout of the entire banking industry).

So in Egyptian terms, when General Secretary of the NDP Ahmad Ezz cornered the market on steel and was given contracts to build public-private construction projects, or when former Minister of Parliament Talaat Mustafa purchased vast tracts of land for the upscale Madinaty housing development without having to engage in a competitive bidding process (but with the benefit of state-provided road and utility infrastructure), they may have been practicing corruption logically and morally. But what they were doing was also as American as apple pie, at least within the scope of the past two decades.

However, in the current climate the most important thing is not the depredations of deposed Mubarak regime cronies. It is rather the role of the military in the political system. It is the army that now rules the country, albeit as a transitional power, or so most Egyptians hope. No representatives of the upper echelons of the Egyptian military appear on the various lists of old-regime allies who need to be called to account. For example, the headline of the February 17th edition of Ahrar, the press organ of the Liberal party, was emblazoned with the headline "Financial Reserves of the Corrupt Total 700 Billion Pounds [about $118 billion] in 18 Countries."

A vast economic powerhouse

But the article did not say a single word about the place of the military in this epic theft. The military were nonetheless part of the crony capitalism of the Mubarak era. After relatively short careers in the military high-ranking officers are rewarded with such perks as highly remunerative positions on the management boards of housing projects and shopping malls. Some of these are essentially public-sector companies transferred to the military sector when IMF-mandated structural adjustment programs required reductions in the civilian public sector.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Juan Cole: Popular Army to March on Tripoli, as Qaddafi Massacres Protesters

Popular Army to March on Tripoli, as Qaddafi Massacres Protesters
by Juan Cole
Informed Comment

...

Aljazeeera Arabic is reporting that Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi has lost control of much of Tripoli and really only dominates the area of the capital immediately around his palace. Certainly, his security forces are having to fight for control.

Time reports that 100,000 Libyan soldiers in the east who have joined the popular forces are preparing to march on the capital, Tripoli.

The Saudi newspaper Al-Watan Online reports in Arabic that that the noose seemed to tighten Friday around the neck of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets in the capital of Tripoli after Friday prayers. Qaddafi himself gave a defiant speech at the central Green Square in which he threatened to open arms depots so that his civilian and tribal supporters could arm themselves and take on the protesters. (He doesn’t seem to have considered that the dissidents might raid the depots as well, but likely his officer corps isn’t as addled as he).

There were reports from several cities of mutinies in the ranks of the military, with military personnel going over to the protesters in disgust at the brutal repression Qaddafi had ordered against them. More high officials, including ambassadors, announced their resignations, after which they joined the rebellion. These included the attorney general, Abd al-Rahman al-Abbar, and the ambassadors to France, Russia, the Arab League, and the Human Rights Council at the Hague.

In the capital of Tripoli, demonstrations broke out after Friday prayers in the Fashloum, Jumhuria, Ashur, Suq al-Jum`ah and Tahira quarters and at Algeria Square, demanding the fall of the Qaddafi regime. They were, however, confronted with gunfire by members of the security forces and of Qaddafi’s popular committees. Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that for the first time dissident, armed militias took on the pro-regime security forces in running firefights that left 7 dead.

Al-Watan says that eyewitnesses reported that dozens of protesters were shot. Some observers asserted that 9,000 members of the Khamis Brigade (the Qaddafi family’s personal guard, which includes mercenaries) had spread out through the capital. In addition, the regime deployed tanks, jets and heavy artillery, according to an unconfirmed report relayed by an Egyptian guest worker from the capital who reached al-Bayda in the east. The same source asserted that there were significant defections in Tripoli from the regular army on Friday.

Aljazeera reports that some congregants stormed out of mosques in Tripoli in disgust at the conservative and pro-regime themes of the sermons.

In contrast, Aljazeera says, a cleric in the town of Mselata (80 km east of the capital) whipped up his congregation and called on them to fight back against the regime. Some 2,000 of them then set out for Tripoli with weapons they had taken off defeated security forces. At the city of Tajoura they ran into opposition from French-speaking mercenaries in Qaddafi’s employ, and got into a gunfight with them. The protesters were prevented from advancing on Tripoli, and suffered an unspecified number of casualties. Refugees from Tajoura brought the story with them as they fled to Tunisia, Aljazeera said.

In Benghazi, al-Watan says, tens of thousands of people came out in front of the court building, which has been turned into a center of popular governance, for a big celebration in which children joined. Patrols were mounted by citizen committees and by troops who had joined the rebellion. Other troops were putting their weapons up for sale. One security source estimated that 500 protesters had been killed in Benghazi before it fell to the opposition.

To Read the Rest of the Report

Anti-terrorism and uprisings: North African leaders have worked with the West against Islamists and migrants - becoming more repressive as a result.

Anti-terrorism and uprisings: North African leaders have worked with the West against Islamists and migrants - becoming more repressive as a result.
by Yasmine Ryan
Al Jazeera

The string of uprisings in North Africa have laid bare Western governments' relationships with regimes in the region, which pro-democracy activists argue have long been fixated on anti-terrorism, immigration and oil.

Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, appears to be on the brink of joining Tunisia's Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak - both ousted by their own people. In Algeria, meanwhile, Abdelaziz Bouteflika's government is holding firm, clamping down on protests and carrying out limited reforms in a bid to lull anti-regime rage.

The four men have co-operated to varying degrees with the West in the post 9/11 era, offering their services against the perceived twin menaces of political Islam and migration from the African continent to Europe.

Salima Ghezali, a well-known Algerian journalist and rights activist, says that politicians have used these supposed threats to justify state violence. Elites in the West, she argues, have attempted to distract voters by playing up threats to security, whilst sidestepping debate on their economies. Their counterparts in the developing world have used the same arguments to draw attention away from "institutional chaos".

"It is this chaos which is provoking and fuelling the anger of the people," she says.

By focusing on security, leaders have found a means to legitimise state violence, withhold rights and freedoms and neglect political and social management, Ghezali says. "Violence has even become a means of social and political advancement. Murderers have become heroes and hold power in public institutions."

Jeremy Keenan, a professorial research associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, agrees that the uprisings are, in some way, related to the prevalence of anti-terrorist policy.

"I think that whole 'war on terror' syndrome has had a potentially significant role in what we're seeing today," Keenan says. "These states have become more repressive in the knowledge that they have the backing of the West."

Demographic disconnect

Many youthful protesters are no longer willing to swallow their leaders’ use of anti-colonialist ideology to justify their political power.

Far from fighting imperialism, these leaders, their opponents say, have been complicit with the West: Acting as its torturers, buying its arms and patrolling the Mediterranean Sea to stem the tides of young people desperate to flee their homelands. All were partners in the CIA's controversial 'extraordinary rendition programme' and Libya has been a pro-active partner in a secretive Rome-Tripoli deal, signed in 2009, to intercept boats carrying migrants. In return for the sea patrols, Italy pledged to pay Libya $7bn over 20 years.

"The young generation of Algerians, and the not-so-young, don’t have any illusions about the convictions of their leaders," Ghezali explains.

Despite being sceptical of their leaders' ideological leanings, Ghezali says the youth do still respect authentic symbols of the Algerian War of Independence. Anti-government protesters in Libya have taken to waving the pre-Gaddafi, post-independence flag - a reference to the country's struggle against colonial rule.

With the exception of Ben Ali, all of these leaders have been in government since before most of their people were born. Bouteflika, for example, first became a minister in 1962, yet rules over a country where the average age is 27, according to the CIA World Factbook. Gaddafi took power in 1969, while the average Libyan is just 24.

Playing the 'Islamist card'

The region's leaders have repeatedly tried to portray the current wave of uprisings as somehow terrorist-related.

In a recently released report, Martin Scheinin, the UN special rapporteur on the protection of human rights while countering terrorism, details how Tunisia's counterterrorism laws and policies played a central part in the former government's crushing of political opposition.

And, as Scheinin notes in an interview with Al Jazeera, this was the very language Ben Ali turned to when he responded to the Tunisian uprising.

"I think it is important that when the people started to revolt in Tunisia, the initial reaction by the president and by the government was to say this is terrorists," the UN Rapporteur says.

Ben Ali accused demonstrators in the centre of the country of "unpardonable terrorist acts" on January 10, two days after Tunisian security forces had begun deliberately killing protesters in the centre of the country. The Libyan leader's son, Saadi Gaddafi, told the Financial Times on Wednesday that bombing in the east of Libya was necessary because "thousands" of al-Qaeda fighters were taking control of the region. His father elaborated on these allegations in a speech on Thursday night, accusing Osama bin Laden of brainwashing, and even drugging, the country's youth.

Ghezali points to Gaddafi's most recent threats to end his co-operation on immigration, as well as his attempts to blame protests on al-Qaeda, as a particularly "ludicrous" example of what has become a standard form of blackmail.

Tunisian activists interviewed by Al Jazeera cited ending corruption and tyranny and the right to employment, democracy and freedom of expression as the motivations that drove their uprising, while Libyans likewise dismissed Gaddafi's assertion that Osama bin Laden was working to incite dissent against his rule.

Keenan says that the absence of Islamist ideology in the protest movements has underlined the extent to which the "Islamist card" has been overplayed by politicians and the media. "These revolts have nothing much to do with Islamism, they are to do with young people fighting for their rights.

"All of these countries, to varying degrees, have exaggerated the menace of terrorism," says the author of The Dark Sahara: America's War on Terror in Africa.

To Read the Rest of the Article

Jacob Weisberg: Tech Revolutionaries -- The Arab Revolt shows that Google's and Twitter's corporate values are better than Facebook's

Tech Revolutionaries: The Arab Revolt shows that Google's and Twitter's corporate values are better than Facebook's.
By Jacob Weisberg
Slate

American technology companies have often faced tricky issues about how they operate in relation to authoritarian regimes in China, Russia, and elsewhere. But as revolution sweeps through the Middle East, three companies have found themselves central to the action in an unprecedented way. Google, Facebook, and Twitter are all confronting the kind of moral and political dilemmas that global corporations usually hope to avoid. Their differing reactions tell us a lot about their corporate values—in a deeper sense than that issue is usually talked about.

Google's response has been the most exemplary. From its earliest days, Google has asserted an unusual claim to ethical behavior—its slogan is "Don't Be Evil." The company has, on occasion, shown itself willing to forgo profits and take risks that others wouldn't to avoid violating its own principles. The best previous example was China, where Google pulled out of the search engine market instead of continuing to accede to government demands for censorship of results. There's a biographical explanation for this kind of corporate policy decision. The company's co-founder Sergey Brin's experience as a child of Jewish refuseniks living under Soviet tyranny has influenced the company's behavior.

In Egypt, Google went even further than it did in China by directly opposing an oppressive government. There has been no suggestion that Google authorized or encouraged Wael Ghonim to foster a revolution there. But, amazingly, Google did not distance itself from one of its executives trying to overthrow the Mubarak regime in his spare time. Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, said recently that he was "very proud" of Ghonim, and the company has made clear that it would welcome him back to his old job. This was not all Google did. When Mubarak cut off Internet access, the company developed a workaround that allowed users to send Twitter messages over phone lines. YouTube, which Google owns, also created a hub to promote videos from protestors in Tahrir Square. This sort of activism has provoked Glenn Beck—and the Russian government—to charge Google with being in league with the Obama administration in supporting Egyptian revolution. In fact, Google has walked a fine line on this point, providing tools to help undermine tyranny without directly embracing any particular group of revolutionaries.

You can contrast this response with that of Facebook. Facebook's platform played the bigger role in Hosni Mubarak's downfall. It was the "We Are All Khaled Said" page Ghonim set up in June to memorialize a businessman who died in police custody that became the cradle of the revolution. But Facebook the company, unlike Google, has hardly embraced the honor. Last fall, it removed the crucial page rather than allowing the administrator to protect his identity. Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois sent Facebook a letter requesting that it amend to its no-anonymity policy to protect democratic activists in the Middle East. Facebook said no. When the Tunisian government used a virus to obtain passwords of activists, Facebook couched its response in terms of protecting user privacy, not challenging a vile regime.

Facebook is such a powerful organizing tool that the question of its attitude toward those who use its product is in some ways irrelevant. But it is worth pointing that the company has never shown any sign of having the kind of core commitment to liberty that Google does. Where Google voluntary pulled out of China, Facebook—which is blocked there—is desperate to get in. This, too, reflects the background and worldview of its founder. Mark Zuckerberg, a child of privilege, has never known a lack of political freedom. He has no obvious ideological leanings and his big outside investors include a radical libertarian and a junior oligarch. It is difficult to imagine Facebook—or most other technology companies, for that matter—passing up a major business opportunity because of concerns about human rights. Facebook's overriding objective is the much more typical one of expanding its market while avoiding bad PR and staying out of trouble with governments that set the rules.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

"Everywhere There is Graffiti Saying, 'Welcome to the New Free Libya'": Democracy Now! Correspondent Anjali Kamat Reports

"Everywhere There is Graffiti Saying, 'Welcome to the New Free Libya'": Democracy Now! Correspondent Anjali Kamat Reports
Democracy Now

Anti-government protesters have taken control of large swaths of Libya in the uprising against Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. It remains unclear how many people have been killed in Gaddafi’s brutal crackdown, but estimates have topped 1,000. Democracy Now! correspondent Anjali Kamat reports from the Libyan city of Tobruk.

To Watch/Listen/Read

Guardian: Libya in crisis - live updates

Libya in crisis - live updates
• Two Libyan fighter land in Malta seeking political asylum
• Libya denies reports Gaddafi is on way to Venezuela
• Ambassadors resign in China, India, Indonesia and Poland
• UN sec gen Ban Ki Moon says violence 'must stop immediately'

To Access the Guardian Live Reports Page

Empire: Social networks, social revolution -- Youtube, Facebook and Twitter have become the new weapons of mass mobilisation

Social networks, social revolution: Youtube, Facebook and Twitter have become the new weapons of mass mobilisation.
Empire (Al Jazeera)

Information is power, but 21st century technology has unleashed an information revolution, and now the genie is out of the bottle.

Youtube, Facebook and Twitter have become the new weapons of mass mobilisation; geeks have taken on dictators; bloggers are dissidents; and social networks have become rallying forces for social justice.

As people around the world challenge authorities, from Iran to Tunisia, Egypt to Yemen, entire societies are being transformed as ordinary citizens see the difference, imagine the alternative, and come together to organise for a better future.

So, are social networks triggering social revolution? And where will the next domino fall?

Empire finds out.

Joining Marwan Bishara to discuss these issues are: Carl Bernstein, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist; Amy Goodman, the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!; Professor Emily Bell, the director of digital journalism at Columbia University; Evgeny Morozov, the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom; Professor Clay Shirky, the author of Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.



Link to more resources

Brian Becker: Saluting the Egyptian people -- A true victory is secured, revolution still unfolding

Saluting the Egyptian people: A true victory is secured, revolution still unfolding
by Brian Becker
ANSWER

...

Yesterday, Mubarak defiantly insisted that he would not leave, which the people had expected when they gathered in the hundreds of thousands.

Today, Egypt erupted. Protesters in the North Sinai town of El-Arish exchanged gunfire with police and hurled Molotov cocktails at police stations. (AFP, Feb. 11)

“Downtown, more than 10,000 tore apart military barricades in front of the towering State Television and Radio building, a pro-Mubarak bastion that has aired constant commentary supporting him and dismissing the protests. They swarmed on the Nile River corniche at the foot of the building, beating drums and chanting, ‘Leave! Leave! Leave!’ They blocked employees from entering, vowing to silence the broadcast. Soldiers in tanks in front of the building did nothing to stop them, though state TV continued to air.” (AP, Feb. 11)

The steadfast determination of the youth-led uprising coupled with the dramatic entrance of the Egyptian working class into the mass movement radically changed the relationship of forces.

Imperialist hypocrisy, fear

Having armed and financed the Mubarak dictatorship’s 30-year-long war against the Egyptian people, the U.S. government abruptly shifted its position in a last-minute effort to prevent U.S. imperialist interests in Egypt going down with Mubarak’s doomed ship.

As the regime seemed to be crumbling in the face of the uprising and the mass strike wave, Obama appeared on national television yesterday to announce that the U.S. government saluted the youth-led uprising.

For 18 days, Mubarak’s police and thugs murdered, beat, arrested and tortured thousands of valiant and peaceful protesters—and during that entire time, the U.S. government refused to cut its massive financing of the regime.

Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton refused to call for Mubarak to step down immediately. The senior U.S. civilian officials and the Pentagon’s top command stayed in constant contact with their agent Omar Suleiman, Mubarak’s vice president, and their other agents in the senior leadership of Egypt’s military.

For now, the Egyptian military has assumed the power in Egypt. This is the preferred plan of the U.S. government. The continued presence of Mubarak was accelerating the militancy and radicalism of the uprising. Suddenly, as a consequence of the entrance of the people in a genuine uprising, Mubarak turned into a liability rather than a valued asset.

The main goal of the U.S. government now will be to find a way to sustain the authority of the Egyptian military high command, which has functioned as a client for the past 30 years.

It is too early to know how the ouster of Mubarak will impact the overall struggle in Egypt and throughout the Middle East.

A great victory has been secured. But the institutions of the dictatorship remain and behind them stand the Pentagon and the CIA. Undoubtedly, a new stage in the struggle will quickly unfold. The opening of political space for revolutionary and working-class forces to organize is of monumental importance.

The Israeli Zionist regime is deeply alarmed by the prospect of the end of the dictatorship. Although the Israeli regime pretends to be the great champion of “democracy,” the reality is that it fears the development of a genuine people’s government in Egypt, the largest Arab country that possesses the largest army in the Arab World.

The 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, which followed the Camp David Summit Accord, is in fact a complete misnomer. The treaty gave the Israeli military a green light to wage war against other Arab peoples free from the threat of interference from the Egyptian military. In fact, this treaty sidelined the largest Arab army from engaging in any opposition to Israeli war plans against Lebanon, Syria, other Arab countries and especially the besieged Palestinian people. In exchange for the agreement, the United States provides nearly $2 billion to Egypt—most of it military aid—each year.

Youth, workers made the revolution

The young people of Egypt and the mass of the working class have, through their own efforts, changed the political equation.

To Read the Entire Commentary

Revolution: Peace and Conflict Studies Archive

Ahmed, Nafeez Mosaddeq. "Tunisia, Egypt, and the Big Picture
Egypt lies on the fault lines of the convergence of global ecological, energy, and economic crises—and thus, on the frontlines of deepening global system failure." Yes! (February 2, 2011)

Ali, Tariq and Zalmay Khalilzad. "A new beginning: As social revolutions sweep through the Arab world, how will they affect the role of the US in the region?" Al Jazeera (February 28, 2011)

"Reporting the Egyptian Revolution." Listening Post (February 13, 2011)

Ball, Julien. "A People's History of the French Revolution." We Are Many (June 2010)

Chomsky, Noam. “This is the Most Remarkable Regional Uprising that I Can Remember” Democracy Now (February 2, 2011)

Cole, Juan. "Scenarios for Egypt’s Future: How Democratic Will it Be?" Informed Comment (February 12, 2011)

"Egypt Today, Tomorrow the World." CrimethInc (February 2, 2011)

Hajjar, Lisa. "Omar Suleiman, the CIA’s Man in Cairo and Egypt’s Torturer-in-Chief." Democracy Now (February 11, 2011)

"History of the Paris Commune." Marxists Internet Archive (Archive)

Lynch, Marc. "Tunisia's Twitter Revolution?" On the Media (January 21, 2011)

The People Want to Bring Down the Regime [Cairo, Egypt: "This blog is a collection of comments, contributions and visual media from the Egyptian uprising. It is sent out from one of the few locations in Cairo with an internet connection. Mubarak’s regime cut the internet to the country ahead of a call for a day of rage. The consequences of this day have gone beyond any expectations. “The people want to bring down the regime” has become the most common chant on the streets.]

Prins, Nomi. "The Egyptian Uprising Is a Direct Response to Ruthless Global Capitalism." AlterNet (February 4, 2011)

"Tunisian Blogger Lina Ben Mhenni." On the Media (January 21, 2011)

A Tunisian Girl (Tunisian blogger, linguist and activist Lina Ben Mhenni.)

"Tunisia Revolution 2011." Global Voices (Ongoing Archive of Reports)

Zizek, Slavoj. "For Egypt, this is the miracle of Tahrir SquareThere is no room for compromise. Either the entire Mubarak edifice falls, or the uprising is betrayed." Guardian (February 10, 2011)

Slavoj Zizek: For Egypt... There is no room for compromise. Either the entire Mubarak edifice falls, or the uprisi

For Egypt, this is the miracle of Tahrir Square. There is no room for compromise. Either the entire Mubarak edifice falls, or the uprising is betrayed.
by Slavoj Žižek
Guardian (United Kingdom)

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.

To Read the Rest of the Commentary

Paul Mason: Twenty reasons why it's kicking off everywhere

Twenty reasons why it's kicking off everywhere
by Paul Mason
BBC

We've had revolution in Tunisia, Egypt's Mubarak is teetering; in Yemen, Jordan and Syria suddenly protests have appeared. In Ireland young techno-savvy professionals are agitating for a "Second Republic"; in France the youth from banlieues battled police on the streets to defend the retirement rights of 60-year olds; in Greece striking and rioting have become a national pastime. And in Britain we've had riots and student occupations that changed the political mood.

What's going on? What's the wider social dynamic?

My editors yesterday asked me put some bullet points down for a discussion on the programme that then didn't happen but I am throwing them into the mix here, on the basis of various conversations with academics who study this and also the participants themselves.

At the heart of it all are young people, obviously; students; westernised; secularised. They use social media - as the mainstream media has now woken up to - but this obsession with reporting "they use twitter" is missing the point of what they use it for.

In so far as there are common threads to be found in these different situation, here's 20 things I have spotted:

1. At the heart if it all is a new sociological type: the graduate with no future

2. ...with access to social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and eg Yfrog so they can express themselves in a variety of situations ranging from parliamentary democracy to tyrrany.

3. Therefore truth moves faster than lies, and propaganda becomes flammable.

4. They are not prone to traditional and endemic ideologies: Labourism, Islamism, Fianna Fail Catholicism etc... in fact hermetic ideologies of all forms are rejected.

5. Women very numerous as the backbone of movements. After twenty years of modernised labour markets and higher-education access the "archetypal" protest leader, organizer, facilitator, spokesperson now is an educated young woman.

6. Horizontalism has become endemic because technology makes it easy: it kills vertical hierarchies spontaneously, whereas before - and the quintessential experience of the 20th century - was the killing of dissent within movements, the channeling of movements and their bureaucratisaton.

7. Memes: "A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures." (Wikipedia) - so what happens is that ideas arise, are very quickly "market tested" and either take off, bubble under, insinuate themselves or if they are deemed no good they disappear. Ideas self-replicate like genes. Prior to the internet this theory (see Richard Dawkins, 1976) seemed an over-statement but you can now clearly trace the evolution of memes.

8. They all seem to know each other: not only is the network more powerful than the hierarchy - but the ad-hoc network has become easier to form. So if you "follow" somebody from the UCL occupation on Twitter, as I have done, you can easily run into a radical blogger from Egypt, or a lecturer in peaceful resistance in California who mainly does work on Burma so then there are the Burmese tweets to follow. During the early 20th century people would ride hanging on the undersides of train carriages across borders just to make links like these.

9. The specifics of economic failure: the rise of mass access to university-level education is a given. Maybe soon even 50% in higher education will be not enough. In most of the world this is being funded by personal indebtedess - so people are making a rational judgement to go into debt so they will be better paid later. However the prospect of ten years of fiscal retrenchment in some countries means they now know they will be poorer than their parents. And the effect has been like throwing a light switch; the prosperity story is replaced with the doom story, even if for individuals reality will be more complex, and not as bad as they expect.

To Read the Rest of this Outline

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed: Tunisia, Egypt, and the Big Picture

Tunisia, Egypt, and the Big Picture: Egypt lies on the fault lines of the convergence of global ecological, energy, and economic crises—and thus, on the frontlines of deepening global system failure.
by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
Yes Magazine

The toppling of Ben Ali in Tunisia in the wake of mass protests and bloody street clashes is likely to signify a major transformation in the future of politics and geopolitics for the major countries of the Middle East and North Africa. The Tunisian experience triggered the escalation of unprecedented protests in Egypt against the Mubarak regime. The question is: ‘Will events in Tunisia and Egypt have a domino effect throughout the Arab world?’

The potential fall of Hosni Mubarak is serious stuff. Egypt is “the most populous country in the Arab world,” viewed by the United States, Britain and the West as “a strategic pivot” and a “a vital ally” in the ‘War on Terror’. No wonder then that activists across the world are holding their breath in anticipation that one of the world’s most notorious dictators, and one of the West’s most favored client-regimes, might be overthrown.

The eruption of political unrest in Egypt and elsewhere cannot be fully understood without acknowledging the context of accelerating ecological, energy, and economic crises.What is happening in Tunisia and Egypt is only a manifestation of a deeper convergence of fundamental structural crises, which are truly global in scale. The eruption of social and political unrest has followed the impact of deepening economic turbulence across the region, due to the inflationary impact of rocketing fuel and food prices. As of mid-January, even before Ben Ali had fled Tunis, riots were breaking out in Algeria, Morocco, Yemen, and Jordan. The key grievances? Rampant unemployment, unaffordable food and consumer goods, endemic poverty, lack of basic services, and political repression.

Global food crisis

In many of these countries, certainly in both Tunisia and Egypt, tensions have simmered for years. The trigger, it seems, came in the form of food shortages caused by the record high global prices reported by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in December 2010. The return of high food prices two to three years after the 2008 global food crisis should not be a surprise. For most of the preceding decade, world grain consumption exceeded production—correlating with agricultural land productivity declining almost by half from 1990–2007, compared with 1950–1990.

This year, global food supply chains were again “stretched to the limit” following poor harvests in Canada, Russia and Ukraine; hotter, drier weather in South America cutting soybean production; flooding in Australia, wiping out its wheat crops; not to mention the colder, stormier, snowier winters experienced in the northern hemisphere, damaging harvests.

So much of the current supply shortages have been inflicted by increasingly erratic weather events and natural disasters, which climate scientists have long warned are symptomatic of anthropogenic global warming. Droughts exacerbated by global warming in key food-basket regions have already led to a 10–20 percent drop in rice yields over the last decade. By mid-century, world crop yields could fall as much as 20–40 percent due to climate change alone.

But climate change is likely to do more than generate droughts in some regions. It is also linked to the prospect of colder weather in the eastern United States, east Asia, and northern Europe—as the rate of Arctic summer sea ice is accelerating, leading to intensifying warming, the change in atmospheric pressure pushes cold Arctic air to the south. Similarly, even the floods in Australia could be linked to climate change. Scientists agree they were caused by a particularly strong El Niño/La Niña oscillation in the Tropical Pacific ocean-atmospheric system. But Michael McPhaden, co-author of a recent scientific study on the issue, suggests that recently stronger El Niño events are “plausibly the result of global warming.”

The global food situation has been compounded by the over-dependence of industrial agriculture on fossil fuels, consuming ten calories of fossil fuel energy for every one calorie of food energy produced. The problem is that global conventional oil production has most likely already peaked, having been on an undulating plateau since 2005—and forecast to steadily and inexorably decline, leading to higher prices. Although oil prices dropped after the 2008 crash due to recession, the resuscitation of economic activity has pushed up demand, leading fuel prices to creep back up to $95 a barrel.

The fuel price hikes, combining with the predatory activities of financial speculators trying to rake in profits by investing in the commodity markets, have underpinned worldwide inflation. Just as in 2008, the worst effected have been the poorer populations of the South. Thus, the eruption of political unrest in Egypt and elsewhere cannot be fully understood without acknowledging the context of accelerating ecological, energy and economic crises—inherently interconnected problems which are symptomatic of an Empire in overstretch, a global political economy in breach of the natural limits of its environment.

To Read the Rest of the Essay and Access HyperLinked Resources

Democracy Now: Uprising in Egypt: A Two-Hour Special on the Revolt Against the U.S.-Backed Mubarak Regime

Uprising in Egypt: A Two-Hour Special on the Revolt Against the U.S.-Backed Mubarak Regime
Live Reports from Cairo with Democracy Now! senior producer Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Democracy Now! correspondent Anjali Kamat.
Democracy Now

Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif on how life in Tahrir Square "is truly democracy in action."

Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi on the impact of the Egyptian and Tunisian uprisings on the Middle East.

Mohamed Abdel Dayem of the Committee to Protect Journalists on the continued attacks on journalists by supporters of the Mubarak regime.

Khaled Fahmy, professor at the American University in Cairo, on reports that Hosni Mubarak has resigned as head of the ruling NDP party.

University of California-Santa Barbara professor Paul Amar on the military’s role in a post-Mubarak Egypt.

Stanford Professor Joel Beinin on the Egyptian labor movement and the historical roots of the Jan. 25 uprising.

Egyptian-American activist Mostafa Omar on the role of Egyptian youth in the protests.

And we play the "video that started the revolution"–Asmaa Mahfouz’s Jan. 18th message calling for protests in Tahrir Square on Jan. 25.

To Watch the Reports

Egyptian Revolution Media Coverage: February 5, 2011

To keep updated on the Egyptian Revolution this saturday:

Democracy Now is streaming a two hour special at 11am (EST) which can be viewed at any time once it has run.

Al Jazeera English is streaming live reports.