Mubarak resigns, Egypt rejoices
An amazing time for the Egyptian people, for the Middle East, and for the power of the people. My Egyptian friends and colleagues tell me they are beaming, crying, celebrating. May this advent mean that we retire the tagline “the only democracy in the Middle East” speedily.
Now the hard part begins.
Amen.
I’ve always wondered how Coptics square portions of Exodus that deal with liberation from Egypt given their animosity toward the Jews. I’m especially interested if any Egyptians see parallels between Pharaoh and Mubarak and how that plays in to their thoughts. And how they will participate as a block inthe new governing coalition.
I heard that much of this revolution is more about the generational shift and the orientation of the older generation’s Nationalism infused Pan-Arabism and the young generations’s Western influenced desire for democracy, social media and Coca Cola. All the more so for the Officer Corps and their training. I hope that’s true and that it translates into institution and society building.
In any case, glad to see Mubarak go. I am confident that the Egyptian people will prove all the doom and gloom prophesies wrong. My prediction is the Egyptian army, which has an economic interest in keeping the peace internally and internationally, will chaperone a shift to democratic republicanism.
To the dismay of fearmonger defense organizations seeking to capitalize on this and raise money, Egypt will maintain the cold peace with Israel. Without a dictator pointing to Israel as the boogey man in order to control the streets, and the ‘street’ having just put the man out of office, we might even see a gradual warming of relations. Though we see occasional examples to the contrary, by and large, Kant was right about democratic pacifism.
The Muslim Brotherhood will emerge as a conservative party and player in a governing block, but not the warmongering terrorists everyone fears. Most of them are too old for that crap, but even if they’re not, they’re likely to be restrained by playing a governance role. More Egyptians want economic security than they want ideological purity, and most disdain the internal terror war waged a decade ago.
The shift to Egyptian democracy will likely precipitate more changes toward democracy throughout the Arab world. Changes in Yemen and Jordan are already underway. Tunisia? Uh-huh. There’s an Army mutiny going on in Sudan and Libya and Syria are next.
Can’t hardly wait to see what happens next.
Ohh noos!
How will we keep stealing Palestinian land and torturing Gazans now!
But “we” were always on the side of democracy and for the people…even if they are cockroaches, I mean Arabs.
Be very scared of justice fat ones.
They all hate you(r depthless hypocrisy). Suffer Barak–both of you bastards.
Wow, “Slave Revolt”, fuck you for calling Arabs cockroaches. Seriously, fuck you. We always complain about how Muslims don’t call out the assholes in their midst (even when they do), so I’m just trying to hold us to the same standards that we hold other groups.
Shmuel, jeez, learn to recognize criticism of Jewish racism toward the Arabs.
What is so tragic is that many zionists have become the inverted reflection of everything they hate–and Arabs have become the easiest scapegoats in this treachery.
It’s so obvious, the patterns persist: Empires, colonial subjects, Pharisees, compradors, slaves, etc.
In any case, glad to see Mubarak go. I am confident that the Egyptian people will prove all the doom and gloom prophesies wrong. My prediction is the Egyptian army, which has an economic interest in keeping the peace internally and internationally, will chaperone a shift to democratic republicanism.
To the dismay of fearmonger defense organizations seeking to capitalize on this and raise money, Egypt will maintain the cold peace with Israel. Without a dictator pointing to Israel as the boogey man in order to control the streets, and the ’street’ having just put the man out of office, we might even see a gradual warming of relations. Though we see occasional examples to the contrary, by and large, Kant was right about democratic pacifism.
@Adam.
Thank you. This is truly a great day, not just for the Egyptian people, but for Israelis as well.
At this point, the West should have two objectives: (1) end its oil addiction (2) and put to rest–finally–this farce of the mythical “moderate” Arab dictator’s vital role in maintaining regional stability.
Wow, “Slave Revolt”, fuck you for calling Arabs cockroaches. Seriously, fuck you.
Lol, literally.
Slave simply holds up the mirror–if you don’t like what is staring back at you, then change your perspective. That simple.
In my travels, the most closed mined and racist youth I have ever met were Israelis. Well, the Croatian skinheads came pretty close, but the arrogance of the Israeli skin-heads, coupled with their economic privilege, was pretty repulsive. I head Arabs referee to as vermin and cockroaches repeatedly.
The five percent peace nick Israelis are the only people with any degree of shame and sanity. About the same as in the US, but it is probably a bit better here.
Zionistsnare in for a rough ride, and it seems that their gut instincts and might-makes-right attitude, as well as tier religious fanaticism–all these will combine into a series of great big mushroom clouds.
Terrorism has it’s own logic that builds over time. Patting yourselves on the back for your level of delusion is not a virtue.
If you believe in real democracy, then seek that which is truly just–and question the politicians and reject their cynicism.
Truth can be a mo’fo. No pain, no gain fatties.
I’m just laughing that shmuel didn’t see you obvious attempt at sarcastic language, Mr./Mrs. Slave Revolt.
(But you might want to try to write with a bit more clarity, as they say.)
“your”
@Jonathan1 Thanks. In light of everything, I ‘m finding it interesting to see how my thinking, and events, are lining up with Bernard Avishai’s 2008 book Hebrew Republic, which I”m rereading.
And @slave- WTF? Can’t you troll and spew hate elsewhere. I hear a moderator’s footsteps approaching…
I believe in being brutally honest and not blowing smoke up peoples asses. I wouldnt rebuke a white supremacist on their turf unless there were gains to be made. I am harsh on Jewish people because I expect better, and the fate of humankind hangs in the balance. That said, some of Jewery that have made a pact with Western imperialism are beyond redemption.
Johnathan, communicating enigmatically and with levels of metaphor has it’s place.
A new age is dawning, and it is time to move beyond entrenched pathologies. Let’s not let the paranoid fanatics control the narrative any longer.
I have listened to many Christians that are intent to lead us all to a mushroom cloud, so Jesus will take the elect into heaven.
What a diseased narrative these people nurture, and it should be rejected. They promulgate hate and fear, it is the only currency they know. Lame-asses, the lot of them. Same with the jihad hatrers, intent on mass suicide because ray can’t move beyond fear.
We humans have to be better than that. It starts with each of us, and ends there as well.
In the end the military did force Mubarak out for all sorts of reasons.
I think most of us can agree that this is good to see. The people brought this about.
But they are far from democracy. The military had control and still has control.
MANY businesses are owned by the military (one reason you see so many generals in their 70s with lots-o-property). They have a lot of money and influence in their hands over nearly every aspect of society.
I can imagine that they will move toward greater freedoms and elections.
I can not imagine they will allow transparency to let people see just how much money the top officers own. If the public knew just how much the army has plundered – they may call for the top generals to be put on trial.
So, since the army will oversee the plan for the next step, it may be decades (as with Turkey) before a civilian government gives the marching orders to the military.
People don’t seem to understand, this was a military coup with populist support, not a democratic uprising. The constitution has been discarded, the transfer of power and rebalancing of Egypt’s power centers are now in the hands of a group of unaccountable, unelected, unrepresentative officers. Count the many times in history that such a set of inputs had an outcome resembling anything we might call a pluralistic democracy anywhere in the near term.
Meir, I agree with everything you wrote, and will add that, as with Turkey, once the army’s rule grows stale, the likely outcome is an islamist-leaning civilian government struggling against a secularist military establishment. Which is as it should be. Egyptians are vastly muslim, just as Turks are. Anyone who thinks that any Arab regime to emerge in our lifetimes will not have a strong or dominant Muslim religious component is delusional. Trying to suppress Islam or hoping to contain it, or praying that it will be contained are just skirting the issue.
By “Islam”, I mean political Islam, the dominant political manifestation of the faith, not the faith, per se.
Victor, this more than put into the catagory of military coup–the military pushed te dictator out because of mass, sustained democratic revolt.
This revolt, more, had at it core, a recognition that the mass oppression was tied to US and Israeli terror/imperialism. Arabs have eyes, hearts, and ears, and are not convinced by all the rhetoric regaling US and Israeli “democracy”–they did not see the hundreds of thousands of civilian victims of US blood-lust as mere collateral damage. Pimping these notions is for the empire’s domestic consumers–and, as it is repeated ad nauseum, 24/7, enough of the consumers internalize the corporate-state propaganda as if it were “the truth”.
The Arab street see the big lies for what they are.
The empire will fall in due time, in the time of Allah and Jesus. Jesus always hated the hypocrites that pimp imperial violence.
The hypocrite and the liar (difference?) have reason to feel the fear.
Stay tuned fatties.
So Egypt’s gone from a one-person dictatorship to military rule and this means Israel isn’t the only democracy in the M/E?
Dave-
KFJ was careful to phrase this as a wish for the near future, not a statement about the present. But I share your hesitation.
And maybe the democratic opening in the ME will compell Israel to clean up it own house. By the way, that the US and Israel refer to themselves as “democracies” is way, way too self serving and congratulatory.
Oligarchies and quasi-tyrannies give themselves this designation as part of the quotidian propaganda campaigns, to keep the wage-slaves a bit off-balance.
Elites, by nature, hate the idea of equality in every sphere.
Corruption, it’s whats for dinner. Once in a while the hypocrites chock on the bones.
Lastly, it is funny to watch the corporate media and their paid intellectuals discussing Egypt as if they were on the side of the democratic forces all along. In reality, if they could revert to the status quo ante they would engage mass extermination of those they fear and loath.
Emmy time, fatties. Peer into the soaless depths of that one-eyed monster.
My bad, it’s the Grammy awards tonight.
Slave’s always behind the curb. Slave don’t do pop-culture or TV.
To the extent that Jewschool is a sounding board of Jewish opinion, a “safe zone” for expressing nuance and sometimes failing in the task, I have to say, I feel very conflicted about the Egyptian revolution. There’s no need to rehash the arguments; we all know the worst case scenarios, and the better ones also.
There’s something else that’s bothering me. I was very much alive and active for the revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon. I felt them. I remember staying awake late at night studying for an exam with BBC World in the background when the first reports came in of protesters being butchered in the streets of Bishkek. I felt it; there was no conflict. I was in touch with Lebanese after March 15th. I felt their passion. I was watching Russian language TV as Ukranians put flowers into the barrels of weapons being held by smiling soldiers in Kiev. I had friends in those orange-laden crowds. In each case I felt a dynamism, an optimism and hope for the future that transcended the borders of that one revolution. I don’t feel that in Egypt.
Maybe it’s a cultural issue. Maybe I’m getting older (it’s been half a decade since those other revolutions), and I get excited less easily. Maybe I’m a racist, or an Israel/America-firster. Maybe Iraq “fixed” me. The thing is, I don’t question that Arabs are not like me, or that they don’t want to be free of tyranny. It’s just… somewhere, deep down, I feel like these protests are less about fundamental societal-governmental reorganization than about releasing pent up frustration. For these reasons, it’s been very difficult for me to get excited about the Egypt protests. I have this nagging suspicion of impurity that I can’t shake off and go celebrate.
Such ambivalence is problematic. If things turn out great, how does one reconcile not having supported a people’s desire for freedom, and if things turn out horrible, or mash up in some mediocre middle, well, no one will fault you for having been an optimist (or will they?).
Be sure to check out this analysis from Stratfor. It fleshes out some of the personal reservations I described earlier.
Victor, I would venture that the mass psyche of privileged sectors the world over are poisoned by innumerable levels of oppression.
Here in the US South, a great many whites, even abolitionists, harbored varying levels of angst when we slaves were finally freed. It took 100 more years for us to even gain defacto social and political rights. Today, the oppression continues.
Most people have only a TV generated, superficial notion of democracy and freedom. They have been configured by passive consume ring that in true herd-like fashion.
For willing slaves, authentic freedom and liberatory processes are terrifying–and that is why the sheeple send their kids off to die for the infernal machine that traps them into ecocide, mediocre existences.
There is always popcultural diversions, Vegas, promiscuity, gossip, and masturbation to generate the quick fix of dopamin for the brain. Yet the existential angst returns as sure as the sun will rise and set.
The best settle for none of these diversionary circuses–only the permanent revolution will suffice. These are the martyrs and revolutionaries.
Various crises will necessitate entire societies to engage permanent revolution–as this path will be the only option if humans are to survive.
The deep cultural coding that has devolved for eons is a form of slow suicide for the humans as a specie, as the quickening and multifold ecological crisis make clear.
Most of the fattened herd will reject this premise–even as they repeat the pathological patterns of consumption that sentence themselves and their families to an early death. They are stupefied fatties, so willing to believe the incessant lies from their masters. The Iraq war here in the US is a clear example of this tendency.
They, however, cry out to God, the life-force, for pain– anything is bettern than the void of their meaningless existence.
Victor, you are not pathologically racist ( any more than any privileged Westerner), however your capacity for intelligence is allowing you to receive an inkling of future pain.
Walk toward and embrace the sublime and nacscent arrival of pain writ grand and large. This is embossed on the horizon, brought int relief with the rays of the rising sun. Walk toward it, toward the land that is named Egypt.
SR, injecting broad socio-psycho-political neo-anti-colonial commentary into every single post can only lead to confusion on the part of your readership. You seem to have much to say. Try to focus your comments. Maybe everyone else understands, but speaking for myself, I am having trouble following you. It should go without saying, but insulting others as “fatties” is unwise if you want people to read your comments at all.
Furthermore, let me just point out, as someone who hasn’t seen you in the comments here until very recently, you don’t know me (and likely the other commentators here), our socio-economic backgrounds or life experience. Throwing around loaded terms like “privileged sectors” is prejudicial demagoguery, a substitute for substance, instantly discrediting whatever it was you meant to say.
Maybe I’m a racist
That depends on whether or not you voted for President Obama.
Vic, “fatties” is merely a term of endearment. “Privileged” is an assignation that is entirely open for interpretation.
My I’m is to cajole, I admit, but it is also to prompt reflection.
I have roamed these lugubrious environs for years, mostly as a peeping slave ; ) , bit I did comment many times when John Brown used to haunt this gig.
Indeed, KFJ, has long been a person that I think highly of.
What about that Justin Beiber! LOL. He didn’t deserve to win, not his time. Eminem? Well, let’s just Saul that his recent music doesnt inspire–no like the music through which he made his mark initially.
See, Slavve can speak in the trivuialities that are the soothing currency of the every-day. But I likes to use my hammer every so often (insert sexual metaphor/pun as you please).