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
Showing posts with label Riots. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Riots. Show all posts
Friday, February 11, 2011
Sunday, February 06, 2011
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
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
Monday, November 01, 2010
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: Black Power Revolt of the 1960s
Black Power Revolt of the 1960s
With Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
We Are Many
Link to the Video
With Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
We Are Many
Black Power Revolt of the 1960's - Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor from RedReel on Vimeo.
Link to the Video
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Nicholas Sammond: "Hidden," or Fear of a Black Planet
(Comparative analysis of Haneke's Cache; the French banlieues riots, Jeremiah Wright's sermons, Gate's arrest in his home, Obama's speeches, and the rise of militias in the US)
"Hidden," or fear of a black planet
by Nicholas Sammond
Jump Cut
On July 23, 2009, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, who is African American, was arrested on the front porch of his home in Cambridge Massachusetts, on charges of disorderly conduct. The professor had yelled at the white police officer who was responding to a neighbor’s call about a suspicious looking man (Gates himself) trying to break into Gates’ home. The charges were soon dropped. Several days later, when asked about the arrest, President Barack Obama suggested that the Cambridge Police Department had acted “stupidly,” setting off a storm of media criticism. Regretting his words, President Obama invited Gates and the arresting officer to join him for a beer and a private conversation about the incident. The President and his aides described the event as a “teachable moment” about race, without specifying exactly who was teaching whom or what might actually be learned.
This empty moment of racial panic and its containment recalls the day in Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign when he had to repudiate the words of his onetime mentor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, after it came out that Wright had earlier delivered sermons critical of the United States. While the speech that Obama gave was moving and beautifully crafted, it reduced Wright’s complex commentaries on the history of racial oppression and its current expressions to a “teachable moment” about those who cling to outmoded ideas of race and those who do not. Wright’s sermons had been much more than that. They had explored the relationship between racism and colonialism, and between U.S. foreign and domestic policies, in interesting and troubling ways. Given that Barack Obama then reduced them to caricature in order to call for a postracial capitalist United States, “teachable moment” would seem to mean “forgetting.” This brief essay explores three distinct but related moments of race and its erasure, one of which is the Jeremiah Wright incident, with an eye to reclaiming teachable moments from the dustbin of history.
Caché: beheading the chicken
Michael Haneke’s Caché ("Hidden," France 2005) is a story about urban bourgeois anxiety. Georges and Anne Laurent (Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche) are a successful couple with a handsome teenage son, living in a stylish townhouse in Paris. Georges hosts a television talk show; Anne is a player in the Parisian literary scene. Their life is elegant, graceful, and good. Then, someone begins to videotape their home and to leave the tapes—sometimes accompanied by bloody, childish, violent drawings—on their doorstep. The mystery of who is behind this is never fully resolved, but it reveals discord in the marriage and the family. This seeming invasion of the Laurents’ privacy also spurs Georges to relive a childhood trauma surrounding the betrayal of his boyhood playmate and foster brother, Majid (Maurice Bénichou), an orphan of the brutal 1961 massacre of peaceful Algerian protesters by the French police.
Though we will not learn much of this till later in the film, from its very beginning Caché imposes on us a question that makes this information seem like a series of clues that will help us solve the mystery. The film’s first establishing shot shows a building seen from street level. By convention, we are to understand that both the scene and our relationship to it as neutral observers has been established. But then the shot goes on, and on, and on. We are presented with a decision. Is this an establishing shot or a point of view shot? If a POV, then whose? In an intervening shot from a different angle a man comes out of the same building and looks up the street. Then we are back in the first shot…which then shudders, and the bars of a tape rewinding appear on the screen. We discover we are watching a videotape of the Laurent home…playing on the television in the living room of that home.
This is the question we are offered: “Who’s watching?” It’s the one the film asks us to address. It’s also the wrong question. Although it persists throughout the film and is never fully answered, it obscures the very real relationship between the Laurents’ comfort and security and the eventual immiseration of Majid and his son (Walid Afkir).
A series of scenes describes the problem in miniature. After the film has been going on for a while, we have learned some things. We know that someone is watching the Laurent family. We know that the observation throws the family into crisis and that Anne may be romantically involved with a close friend. We come to know that Georges suspects his boyhood playmate, Majid—whom he coldly betrayed to secure his mother’s love all for himself—of being the voyeur. The scene is set.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
"Hidden," or fear of a black planet
by Nicholas Sammond
Jump Cut
On July 23, 2009, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, who is African American, was arrested on the front porch of his home in Cambridge Massachusetts, on charges of disorderly conduct. The professor had yelled at the white police officer who was responding to a neighbor’s call about a suspicious looking man (Gates himself) trying to break into Gates’ home. The charges were soon dropped. Several days later, when asked about the arrest, President Barack Obama suggested that the Cambridge Police Department had acted “stupidly,” setting off a storm of media criticism. Regretting his words, President Obama invited Gates and the arresting officer to join him for a beer and a private conversation about the incident. The President and his aides described the event as a “teachable moment” about race, without specifying exactly who was teaching whom or what might actually be learned.
This empty moment of racial panic and its containment recalls the day in Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign when he had to repudiate the words of his onetime mentor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, after it came out that Wright had earlier delivered sermons critical of the United States. While the speech that Obama gave was moving and beautifully crafted, it reduced Wright’s complex commentaries on the history of racial oppression and its current expressions to a “teachable moment” about those who cling to outmoded ideas of race and those who do not. Wright’s sermons had been much more than that. They had explored the relationship between racism and colonialism, and between U.S. foreign and domestic policies, in interesting and troubling ways. Given that Barack Obama then reduced them to caricature in order to call for a postracial capitalist United States, “teachable moment” would seem to mean “forgetting.” This brief essay explores three distinct but related moments of race and its erasure, one of which is the Jeremiah Wright incident, with an eye to reclaiming teachable moments from the dustbin of history.
Caché: beheading the chicken
Michael Haneke’s Caché ("Hidden," France 2005) is a story about urban bourgeois anxiety. Georges and Anne Laurent (Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche) are a successful couple with a handsome teenage son, living in a stylish townhouse in Paris. Georges hosts a television talk show; Anne is a player in the Parisian literary scene. Their life is elegant, graceful, and good. Then, someone begins to videotape their home and to leave the tapes—sometimes accompanied by bloody, childish, violent drawings—on their doorstep. The mystery of who is behind this is never fully resolved, but it reveals discord in the marriage and the family. This seeming invasion of the Laurents’ privacy also spurs Georges to relive a childhood trauma surrounding the betrayal of his boyhood playmate and foster brother, Majid (Maurice Bénichou), an orphan of the brutal 1961 massacre of peaceful Algerian protesters by the French police.
Though we will not learn much of this till later in the film, from its very beginning Caché imposes on us a question that makes this information seem like a series of clues that will help us solve the mystery. The film’s first establishing shot shows a building seen from street level. By convention, we are to understand that both the scene and our relationship to it as neutral observers has been established. But then the shot goes on, and on, and on. We are presented with a decision. Is this an establishing shot or a point of view shot? If a POV, then whose? In an intervening shot from a different angle a man comes out of the same building and looks up the street. Then we are back in the first shot…which then shudders, and the bars of a tape rewinding appear on the screen. We discover we are watching a videotape of the Laurent home…playing on the television in the living room of that home.
This is the question we are offered: “Who’s watching?” It’s the one the film asks us to address. It’s also the wrong question. Although it persists throughout the film and is never fully answered, it obscures the very real relationship between the Laurents’ comfort and security and the eventual immiseration of Majid and his son (Walid Afkir).
A series of scenes describes the problem in miniature. After the film has been going on for a while, we have learned some things. We know that someone is watching the Laurent family. We know that the observation throws the family into crisis and that Anne may be romantically involved with a close friend. We come to know that Georges suspects his boyhood playmate, Majid—whom he coldly betrayed to secure his mother’s love all for himself—of being the voyeur. The scene is set.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
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