Monday, February 28, 2011

Speaking of King George VI...




The people of the British dominions were talking expectantly about the coronation of their new king.

On May 12, 1937, the archbishop of Canterbury placed a crown on the head of a young prince. In that act, the Church of England, a religious authority much stronger and older than any one man, proclaimed George VI the anointed King of Great Britain and its dominions. After the disruptive abdication of former King Edward, the restoration of British royal authority into the hands of a willing sovereign was a welcome relief for the English people. And all was once again well in the realms of the British empire, or so it seemed.

Couple years later, and all hell was breaking loose; the world was falling apart. Britain was fighting for its life to prevent Hitler and his crew of thugs from taking over. The Teutonic madman had usurped governmental authority from the whimpering sovereign of Hohenzollern of Germany,and was running roughshod over civilization, bent on conquering Europe and probably the world if he'd had half a chance.

King George VI of England ultimately had to lean on the common sense and fortitude of his vigorous people, their army, the RAF, and Winston Churchill's fierce resolve to prevail against the heathen horde that had sought to subdue them.

It was quite a severe burden to bear for a young king with a stutter. But King George managed, by God's grace. to pull it off. Cheerio!

The picture you see above is brought to you electronically. I scanned it from a yellowed, dog-eared original copy of the Coronation issue of the Times of London, published May 20, 1937. I purchased the old newspaper from a friend last fall. Later this week, I will show you more of that paper's contents, pertaining to the pre-war world that confronted King George on that fateful day of his anointing.

Glass half-Full

Sunday, February 27, 2011

Gender issues in Islam

Phyllis Chesler posts an audio of her being interviewed by Tomar Yonah of Israel public radio.

http://www.phyllis-chesler.com/945/how-to-not-treat-a-woman

It's an ear-opener for sure, and an eye-opener too, making me wonder if its time to take off the rosy glasses that color my hopeful view about a spring blossoming of freedom in Egypt.
I go back and forth between these two opinions about what may become of this new current on the Nile: "democracy" winning out, or "sharia" creeping in instead.
So anyway, Phyllis offers a discouragingly realistic assessment about the infamous Muslim Brotherhood, and sharia, hajib and niqab, lurking in the dark background of these groundwell changes that seemed to reach a crescendo in Tahrir Square. Phyllis' informed perspective presents a glimpse of the organized force from deep-rooted Islam. It is a strong native presence that could overpower disorganized nascent democracy factions there in the ancient land of the pharoahs.


Ms. Chesler's wake-up call makes me wonder if my fledgling hope is laced with threads of naiveté. Listening to pubic radio and other sources here in the good ole US of A, I've been wishfully(perhaps) thinking that the throng of free expression reverberating from Tunis and Tahrir is all about freedom and secular opportunities facilitated by our western electronic sweethearts--Twitter, Facebook, and Google.

It seems that public radio in the US is a different animal from public radio in Israel. No surprise there, I guess. Israel has been fighting for its existence since long before its rebirth in 1948.
Dreaming about the power of western liberties and their proliferation through social media would be nice, but every day or two I'm stricken with a reality check. That's what this Phyllis Chesler interview is, and I'm still trying to figure out what to think about it. Maybe if you listen to it you can help me decide.

Glass half-Full

Saturday, February 26, 2011

Snick'rish tricks

Wisconsin Republicans' midnight legislative hocus
reminds me of last year's Democrat health-care Congressional pocus
with affordable reconciliation smoke and mirrors
focus.
Meanwhile,
across the aisle
beastly fakish pranky calls
'midst legislative stalls
recalls
ruses of Republy pimp and floozie snares,
touting dolled-up deceptive wares,
unplanned parenthood cares,
and conniving conservative enrapt'ments
for liberal entrapments
in virtual video, dontch know,
just for show--
netspeak freaks
conceived by geeks.
Methinks now we've warped into some twilight zone
(financed with quanti-easing loans)
of uncertain credibilities
suspect respectabilities
fueled by shifty shenanigans, whence trust is indeterminable
and truth is irretrievable,
relative to who you think you're talking to.
That said--
it seems the nights have eyes and walls have ears, perhaps
touting Kafkaesque
burlesque.
It's double bubble, night-soil and trouble.
When the hurly burly's done,
political tricks have the power to stun
a titillated nation with a cocky gun.

Oh,but there's no turning back now,
no time for cow-tow
'cuz the die is cast; integrity's past.
And my mind misgives
some consequence,
yet hanging in the stars,
shall bitterly
affix
these snick'rish tricks.

Glass Chimera

Friday, February 25, 2011

Sadat on Qadaffi, 1970

Here is an early character observation about Muammar Qadaffi, the young dictator of Libya, who was at the time of the event described herein, only 28 years old.


(From page 201 of Anwar Sadat's autobiography, In Search of Identity) :

"In September 1970 (Egyptian President) Nasser convened an Arab Summit Conference in Cairo to put an end to the September 1970 massacre--the showdown between King Hussein of Jordan and the Palestinian resistance forces. King Hussein had decied to liquidate those forces and so fought them ruthlessly. A massacre, in the full sense of the term, took place. Nasser could not, of course, sit idly by. He convened that conference in Cairo...and it was attended by all the Arab kings and presidents...
"Muammar al-Qaddafi was there. He was an eye-catching character, with a revolver that never left his belt. He attacked King Hussein constantly, describing him as a madman who should be confined to a lunatic asylum; until then I had put his attacks down to overenthusiasm and youthful impetuosity.
"It (the Arab Summit Conference) was...very nerve-racking, not because of King Hussein's participation but because of the off-stage conduct of both Qadaffi and Yasir Arafat."

What's curious to me about this situation is that Qadaffi was attacking King Hussein as "a madman who should be confined to a lunatic asylum." I guess it takes one to know one.

Glass Chimera

Monday, February 21, 2011

Arrested Destiny

Will the people of Egypt now have their collective destiny arrested while the Islamists and the liberators vie for control of the levers of power?
Will the citizens of Wisconsin now have their state government held hostage while national politicians play their stage like a puppet show?
Does a bear shit in the woods?
Does a bull carefully consider his path in a China shop?

Glass Chimera

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Sadat on the power of love

I have loved, and been married to, a wonderful woman, Pat, for thirty-one years. Together, we have discovered the exquisite treasures and pleasures of marital love to be precious beyond measure.
True love is almost beyond description. And yet last night while reading, I came upon, from an unexpected source, a meditation about love that resonated with me deeply. I would like to share it with you. But first, here's a little background.

Anwar el-Sadat, formerly President of Egypt before he was assassinated in 1981, spent most of the 1940s in a stinking jail in his home country. In spite of the tribulations that he endured there, Mr. Sadat was destined to soon become vice President of Egypt, following the 1952 coup that evicted King Farouk.

That coup d'etat was enforced by a group of army officers who were led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, a charismatic leader who would emerge as the first President, and under whom Anwar el-Sadat would serve as vice President, before himself becoming President in 1970. Three years before his 1981 assassination, President Sadat wrote a reflective autobiography, later translated and published in the USA by Harper & Row. This is the book I was reading last night when I encountered the author's insight on love.
http://www.amazon.com/Anwar-El-Sadat-Identity-Autobiography/dp/0060137428

Through most of the 1940s, while his compatriot, General Nasser, was preparing for revolution, Anwar was stuck in jail on sedition charges. That was unfortunate, of course, for Mr. Sadat, and a burden difficult to bear. But he was a great man with a constructive attitude, and managed to make the best of a terrible situation.

On page 86 of In Search of Identity, he shares this meditation that came during that last year of his prison experience:

"...To see someone smile, to feel that another man's heart beat for joy, was to me a source of immeasurable happiness. I identified with people's joys. Such despicable emotions as hate and vengeance were banished as the faith that 'right' ultimately triumphs came to be ineradicably implanted in my conciousness. I came to feel more deeply than ever the beauty of love: to me it was that invisible bond which united people in my village both at work and out of work (as I had realized in my childhood). Throughout my life my mother nourished that emotion in me. She had, God rest her soul, inexhaustible resources of love; by nature she was a loving, love-inspiring woman."
( editorial note: Those last two sentences are a perfect description of my own wife, Pat, who has always been a perfect mother to our now-grown children.)

Anwar Sadat continues his meditation on love:
"What I suffered most in Cell 54 was perhaps the lack of a love relationship. For a man's life to be complete, he must have a female partner to whom he is bound in mutual love. This is indeed the greatest blessing. When a man's heart heart is animated by love, he is naturally impelled to accomplish his vocation. Without love, a man may grow old indeed and yet feel he hasn't live at all; he would feel he has missed a very important thing--that, however great his achievement, he has really achieved nothing."

This is Sadat's insight to love that resonated so deeply with me, and so I share it with you, in hopes that we will together benefit from his wise counsel.

Anwar el-Sadat, a peacemaker among men, was assassinated in 1981. He was, perhaps, too good for this world, somewhat like Jesus Christ, who saved me from myself in 1978. Yes, I am Christian, but I have admiration for this former President of Egypt who happens to have been a Muslim. For such is the stuff that makes a little peace now and then among the men and women of this perilous earth.

Glass half-Full

Saturday, February 19, 2011

Birth of Democracy in Islamic lands?

We Americans are caretakers of a noble experiment that goes back 235 years. Since 1776, we have attempted to govern ourselves through consensual politics that is enabled and protected by a constitution. When it comes to democracy, we are perhaps grand old masters of the game; but when it comes to fledgling democratic impulses in a 21st-century world, we are the new kids on the block, trying to puzzle out what is going on while the rest of the world moves too quickly for us to assimilate.
During the fiery days of our revolutionary birth, the urges for freedom had been squeezed out of a painful crucible of Christian Reformation and Enlightened humanistic Rationalism.

But now we are witnessing, through media, nascent democratic movements in Muslim North Africa and the Persian Gulf. We must understand, however, that we see this amazing roll of events only through a myopic, self-deceiving lens of electronic images and theoretical biases.

We must not deceive ourselves into thinking we know anything about what is going on over there, although the consequences can be huge for us and for the world if things go wrong. There is a lot at stake, including, just go ahead and admit it, the frigging oil supply.

With or without full understanding, we as Americans must necessarily support the democratic movements that prove to be authentic, even if the resultant chaos is scary as hell.
In Egypt, for instance, the united front of idealistic, young reformers emanating from Tahrir is now fracturing into a collection of disparate groups. Which faction will emerge with the mantle of leadership?
It needs to be all of them, and none of them. What do you expect from a democracy?

Look at our own inception. We had the Patriots and the Tories, then the Federalists and the Democrats, the Whigs (whatever they were), then the Republicans and the Democrats, which we still have today. Who came out on top? Both of them, and neither of them, and that's the way it should be. What do you expect in a democracy?

In contemporary Egypt, they have--let's just say for the sake of rhetorical simplicity--two poles of political possibility. On one end are the "democrats." That's the broad, generic meaning of the word. They're the ones who got on Twitter and Facebook and made this whole thing happen. But they are young and disjointed, zealous but politcally inept, and certainly naive when it comes to dealing with the army, the police, and entrenched political structures. Charles Levinson offers, in the Wall Street Journal, an initial inventory of some leaders who may emerge there:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703561604576150604132131990.html

So, on one end of Egyptian political possibilities we have these liberators. On the other end are the Islamists, aka known most commonly in that particular country as the Muslim Brotherhood. They are well-established, well-organized, legalistic, and (to this American Christian) scary as hell.
But in a free society you can't have one without the other. You're always going to have the wild-eyed democrats on one end and the fanatical legalists on the other. I mean, look at Wisconsin.

Anyway, we Americans need to support the thrust of democratic reform in Egypt. And if we must take sides as events further unfold, I say it is necessary for the cause of freedom that we support fully the young secular whippersnappers with their tweets and facebooks.
http://blogs.aljazeera.net/middle-east/2011/02/15/live-blog-egypt
When the time comes for Egyptians to select between them and the Islamists, the young democratic-republicans need to have our full support, lest the "brotherhood" muscle their way into a new repression based on Khomeini-style religion instead of human (and I believe, Creator-endowed) rights.

There are of course many dark clouds on the horizon.

Daniel Greenfield opines on the Bahrain situation, which is very different from Egypt, for numerous reasons, the two major ones being 1.) puppeteering hegemony between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and 2.) the labor constituency in Bahrain being largely foreign ( ie Pakistani) imported labor, instead of native citizenry.

Mr. Greenfield also links to a report on a Tunisian mob gathering vindictively outside a synagogue in Tunis, which is quite alarming when you think about it from an historical standpoint, pogromically speaking. And Mr. Greenfield also mentions the emergence, back in Egypt, of one Qaradawi, whose high-profile leadership in the Muslim Brotherhood could indicate what direction that well-organized force will take in politics along the Nile.

The energetic impulse for political reform in the middle east is forged, like ours was, partly upon religion. But this time the religion is not a blooming protestant Christianity tempered with latent humanistic rationalism, but rather a fierce Islam that considers itself restricted by the historical dominance of Europe and USA.
The rolling revolutions in North Africa and the middle East--are they Islamist or democratic?
They are both. But for the sake of true political freedom, that's a chance we'll have to take.

Glass half-Full

Friday, February 18, 2011

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Cranked-up times

Poor ole uncle sam; all strung out on crack and heroin. Or, excuse me, I'm thinking of somebody else, some loser squatting in the abandoned house down the street.
Uncle sam is junked up with those other habits, the acceptable ones--credit crank and mainline oil.
The politicians all have their two different camps for rehab strategies:

Liberals want to keep the methadonish greenback mainline flowing freely, with that rubbery Fed strapped around uncle sam's arm so everybody rich and poor high and low has a little jingle to keep their jangle pump primed up, and they want to keep the oil price high with energy taxes to discourage consumption and theoretially get us weaned off the middle east fossilized mainline, which is so politically unstable these days due to widespread outbreak of democratic frenzy, rendering the Gulfs unpredictable, liable to be cut off at any time and you know we'd really be up shiite creek then. But it'll be a sunni day in hell before we ever achieve energy independence. Nice thought though.

Conservatives want to cut the hell out of credit by going cold turkey with fiscal responsibility, which they mistakenly think the "American people," couch potatoes all, want. They talk big about slashing budgets, but know it can never really happen thanks to the credit-cranked old new deal and all the neo-deals since then. On the other side of the pump, they wanna keep energy prices low so everybody can drive to work at the jobs they don't have any more or are working parttime, gotta keep them gas tanks filled up, and if the Ahabs the Arabs get to be upstarts with their ole OPEC tricks we'll send the boys over there to whip em in line and teach em a thing or two about democracy.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, Dick and Jane are starting to figure out they better make the best with what they got. What will you do today to make the world a better place for you and yours?

Glass Chimera

Monday, February 14, 2011

Cairo and Care

This thing going on in Egypt now--whatever it is--is really quite amazing, although similar "revolutions" have happened before in Egypt.

My curiosity having been piqued this week about political history there, I visited our local university library to undertake some research about that ancient culture on the Nile. My search, guided by the Library of Congress cataloging system online at ASU, was productive. Wandering through the vast annals of paper antiquity, I found so many promising books about Egypt that I had to check out five of them just to determine which one to read.

After a brief survey of them all at home, I finally settled into Anwar Sadat's autobiography, since I like to view recorded history through the subjective lens of someone who was "there."

But along the inquisitive path leading me toward the slain President's memoir, I picked up a few historical facts from the other books, for instance:

~In 1919, Sa'ad Zaghlul led a revolution that initiated the serious ejection of British colonial occupation.
~In 1952, Gamal Abdel Nasser led Anwar Sadat and other military leaders in an overthrow of King Farouk.

In both of these earlier revolutions, the forceful energy driving change was initiated and led by the army.
But now, in February of 2011, the unprecedented groundswell of national zeal has originated from the very heart of the Egyptian people, with the army providing carefully calculated support, and a sort of amazing protective custody, for their movement. That is a very important difference between what is happening Now in 2011, and what was happening Then (1919 and 1952):

At least we hope so. We like to think that the progressive crescendo of last week's popular Tahrir uprising originated with the people of Egypt. And it just may be so. Although this is starting to sound like a naive cliche hatched by American news junkies-- it just may be true that a large part of the communicative power that enabled Tahrir came through widespread use of Twitter, Facebook and Google. And of course a most-Honorable mention goes to Al Jazeera, that old-style-but-new-kid-on-the-block news-media network.

Wouldn't we like to think so. Wouldn't we like to think that regular people, empowered by these new devices, were the compelling force that sharpened widespread discontent into successful politics. Surely, surely it was people yearning for freedom who pulled off this mass movement. Surely it was the people of Egypt instead of, you know, armies or CIA black ops or undercover communist instigators or insidious jihadist usurpers. Wouldn't we like to believe it.

Time will tell about the longevity and liberative quality of these whirlwind changes.
The glass half-Full view says true democracy is being strengthened and aided by participants freely tweeting and blogging. Glass half-empty says eventually the people's networks will be overtaken and restricted by big brother and the access-holding companies, or even by the government itself, as in China.

We shall see.
Meanwhile, taking a break from the pages of hard-bound inky antiquity, I broadened my Egyptian inquiry into cyberspace, as I always do these days. And I encountered, while online, this curiously graphic analysis of social networking during the Tahrir event, from Kovas Boguta: http://www.kovasboguta.com/index.html
Kovas writes that we are embarking on a "new collective consciousness that is being formed," for orchestrating events spontaneously--events such as the Tahrir phenomena we have just, virtually speaking, witnessed.

Could be, although I subscribe to no illusory expectations. I don't see our electronic tower of babel reconstructing reprobate human propensity to screw things up. New technologies, impressive though they may be, are powerless to prevent people from degenerating into fractious infighting, a la Lenin and Trotsky--or, as in this case--democrats vs. the infamous "brotherhood."
Once again, we shall see what which leaders and/or cells of organizing innovators end up atop the revolutionary aftermath.

Isn't great to be an armchair revolutionary. Ha! What would Patrick Henry think of all this?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch dressing, as I was eating salad yesterday evening...my serious pyramidal research had been interrupted because we were scheduled to host a party of very old (double meaning there) friends in our home last night (Feb 12.) These dear friends, with whom we had somewhat collectively raised all our kids (takes a village dontcha know) back in the day--these friends would be coming over en masse to celebrate the valentine glories of long-lived blessings and marital faithfulness!
And, with all thoughts of the "new consciousness that is being formed" aside, I dug with them into our deepest shared experience roots and abiding friendships with flesh and blood hugs, kisses and potluck food, which is what its really all about anyway:

Guess which couple here has been married 48 years. That's revolutionary stuff these days. On the other side of the heart, another couple got hitched less than a year ago. True love can be quite Tahriring.

Glass half-Full

Friday, February 11, 2011

The Camel of Tahrir

For a camel to stand
atop the great pyramid of Egypt
he would have to drag his knobby knees
across those windblown stacked-up stones
a thousand times, i guess.
He would have to heft his humpy back
along that blocky incline steep
so dry
and high
so as to maybe even see
across the blue mediterranee
to the birth of democracy
in ancient Gree--
c
stands for a camel
creeping up to the apex of history--
so unprecedented the dromedary
to be
beyond fear
in Tahrir.
For a camel to boldly do that
was just about as likely
as a million of Egyptian citizenry
gathering peacefully
to throw off tyranny
to make their nation free.
And yet that is what we,
the world, did see--'twas about as likely
as a camel through a needle eye
could be,
so high
so dry
in that land thirstee,
panting for liberty.
Yet its what the world did see
the eleventh of Februaree,
the day they toppled old Hosni.

Glass Chimera

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Have Americans become risk-averse to freedom?

">"If you think yourself a man, then come with me on January 25th..."


And the rest is, as they say, history.
With those words, Asmaa Mahfouz, a young woman brimming with courage, challenged the men of her nation to take a stand for freedom. Little did they know it, but those men and women who chose to accompany her one week later to the heart of Egypt were making a date with world history.

Although Asmaa's passionate appeal turned out to be a perfectly-timed ultimatum, the basis for her urgent Tahrir call is nothing new in Egypt. The cauldron of discontent has been heating steadily for many years. Now it is boiling over. Mubarak and his crew saw it coming, but instead of reforming their police state--as elected leaders should do--his government sought to repress the grievances of their people.

As it turns out, now with the going forth of a young woman's impassioned youtube message, the captive genie of justice has been released from its bottle. No, the basis for demanding reform through free elections is not a new development in Egypt.

In 1993, Edward M. Said wrote:

"With literally no exceptions, every Egyptian I know and have discussed these matters with for the past half dozen years says the same disaffected, even disgusted things about the government. Deals on every conceivable commodity are made by middlemen and commission agents, usually with some minister or Mubarak-in-law as a front; public discourse is so devaluated that it is virtually impossible to tell the truth; the country is in effect ruled by a series of autocratic measures licensing the government to stop articles in newspapers, to jail and torture dissidents under emergency laws passed by Sadat but still in force now, and to prevent unions, political organizations, secular human rights groups from assembly or action."

"We just want our human rights and nothing else..." pleaded Asmaa, on her grainy, un-hyped video posting of January 18.
"If you have honor and dignity as a man, come! Come and protect me and other girls in the protest..."

And come they did, by the hundreds of thousands.

Now cautious, comfortable people around the world are asking: Does this impetuous demand for popular government portend a soon-to-come takeover by Islamofascists? Does it pave the way for usurpation of rising democratic impulses by the Muslim Brotherhood or some other extremist groups?

That could happen, yes. Freedom is always a huge risk. Recall from your middle school social studies class what our founders risked in order to emancipate themselves from the burdens of King George III.

But the freedom and prosperity of the people of Egypt is worth taking that risk.

As a Christian who supports Israel, I say: Go for it, Egyptians! Go for freedom and justice. Go for constitutional government.

And as a born-free American, my insistence on freedom of assembly--my conviction that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth--requires that Egyptian citizens must be allowed to elect, in internationally-validated elections, their own leaders. And those elections should be arranged as soon as possible, before Mubarak's crew has time to neutralize the presently positive thrust toward reformative democracy-- and even, perhaps, before extremist elements have the chance to get their explosive ducks in a row.

It's time for the people of Egypt to vote! United Nations, figure out how to make it happen, and how to effectively moniter those elections so that they are, as many have advocated, "free and fair."

This could be a grand lesson in democracy for every nation of the world, including our friends the Israelis.

Glass half-Full

Saturday, February 5, 2011

The dynamics of revolution?

The cynical realist says: After what has happened in Iran since 1979, you cannot blame vigilant observers of history for harboring a skeptical wariness about popular revolutions.

The idealist says: On the other hand, there are some very real societal injustices and inequalities that legitimately demand periodic restructuring of governments, and this can be accomplished.

The debate that arises between these two perspectives, as pertaining to Egypt, is persuasively represented by two opposite perspectives:
~ Daniel Greenfield, aka Sultan Knish, http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2011/02/friday-afternoon-roundup-pulling-back.html
~ Max Ajl, in Truthout, http://www.truth-out.org/egyptian-protests-grounded-decades-struggle-portend-regional-transformation67425

A third voice in our analysis appears as the voice of experience:
~ Kasra Naji, on NPR, 2009 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111944123

To facilitate your thinking about this, I'll furnish two quotes from each above source:

Daniel Greenfield says:
~"The fundamental difference between the protests in Iran and those in Egypt, is that Iranians were protesting a stolen election, and in Egypt the protesters want to steal an election before it actually takes place."
~"The Egyptian 'Bread Riots' of 1977 which rocked most major cities in Egypt from January 18-19 of that year, were a spontaneous uprising by hundreds of thousands of lower class people protesting World Bank and International Monetary Fund-mandated termination of state subsidies on basic foodstuffs. As many as 800 people were wounded, and the protests were only ended with the deployment of the army." (Mr. Greenfield's source was an Associated Press report.)

Max Ajl says:
~"The January 25 protests that began the current stage of social revolt were organized by several groups, including the April 6 movement, a wide-based group with overwhelmingly young leadership that emerged to mobilize support for the April 2008 strikes at Mahalla al-Kubra, a textile manufacturing center in the Nile Delta. In Mahalla, 25,000 workers went on strike amidst deteriorating standards of living as the prices of basic foodstuffs careened upwards. The workers won their demands - their strike was the crest of a massive wave of labor unrest that has hit Egypt hard since 1998. Between 1998 and 2008, two million Egyptian workers participated in over 2,600 factory occupations. In the first five months of 2009, over 200 industrial actions took place, a trend that continued through 2010. Stanford historian Joel Beinin calls it the "largest and most sustained social movement in Egypt since the campaign to oust the British occupiers following the end of World War II."
~"Predictably, Western media is misreporting the role of both labor and the Muslim Brotherhood, understating the role of the former and overstating the role of the latter. The agenda is to obscure socioeconomic grievances and promote the narrative that the choice is between an authoritarian but secular government, or a democracy that will bring Islamists - code for the Taliban - to state power. The corollary is that people are not in the streets struggling for social revolution but to put in place a variant of Islamofascism. Thus, people shrug, the revolt must be drowned in blood. This narrative is indefensible."

Kasra Naji says:
~"He (Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 Iran) played a very clever game. Those days, before he returned to Tehran, all he would talk about was democracy and freedom. He would not talk about a religious revolution. He wouldn't talk about a religious state, and democracy and freedom worked for us too, on the left, in a sense that we wanted to have a say. And freedom and democracy would provide that."
~"This whole (revolutionary) establishment is divided into an extremist wing and a moderate wing, and they fight each other, and the moderates are eliminated. And then you'll have the extremists taking over."

Let's take an abbreviated look, though, at my oversimplified assessment of modern revolutionary history. It shows us that:
1.) The human race is caught up in cyclical tides of history; one of those tides is the never-ending exploitation of the have-nots by the haves.
2.) In any given society, nation, or empire, when that cycle of labor expolitation reaches a critical mass of hunger/deprivation, the oppressed workers revolt.
3.) Although the victims of oppression are mostly poor people who suffer a dearth of food/shelter, their discontent is propelled by the theoretical and rhetorical support of some comfortably educated symathizers.
4.) Those literate supporters are fundamentally idealistic. In modern history, their idealism has manifested as, first, communism, and then secondly, as socialism. These days, both of those camps are appropriating the more viable and elder "democratic" rationale.
5.) The rhetoric and politics of literate, idealists can, and does, eventually motivate the hungry masses to effectively assemble and attempt to overthrow the powers that be.
6.) But--and here's the rude awakening lesson of history--those idealists whose rhetoric and politics have fueled a revolution become powerless to implement their theories in real government.
7.) In the wake of their failed theory-driven revolution, intrepid strongmen commandeer the disputing factions and manipulate their naive aspirations into new channels of abusive power.
8.) Think about it:
~The fraternité, legalité, egalité, of the French revolution was overtaken with a brutal, guillotining mob led by Robespierre.
~The rose-colored bolshevism of the Russian revolution was manhandled by Stalin through his gulags.
~The reactionary pride of German defeat after WWI was manipulated by Hitler to become the Nazi wehrmacht.
~The peasant revolution of China devolved into humiliating Maoist forced communilization.
~The nascent democratic impulses of Iran were strangled in the bondage of Islam fanaticism.
9.)~~ Exception to the rule: The American revolution produced a reasonably democratic republic, albeit with some serious structural deficiencies. Slavery was the most reprehensible of those defects. Nevertheless, perhaps our enterprising contributions to human progress could be construed as evidence of some kind of American exceptionalism. Haha

But hey--let this optimistic American pose a rose-colored question: Can the fatalistic degeneration of revolutionary dynamics ever be amended to yield a reasonably favorable outcome?
In light of present Egyptian hopes for systemic reform, can the alleged Muslim Brotherhood and Kafayah extremism lurking beneath modern Islam be tempered with consensual democracy? Who knows?
Not me, but there may be a twitter of hope in this predicament somewhere.

Glass half-Full

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

From bitches to burqas

We in America and other postchristian societies have among us a widespread cadre of libertines whose identity is founded upon crossing the old fuddy-duddy moral boundaries. A voraciously sensuous video-cinema media/web feeds the frenzy of sex obsession that goes viral every time a new star is found among the constellation of party-down celebrity icons.
From Hemingway to Kerouac to Hefner to James Dean, James Bond and the Jagger blather, through Gurley Brown, gaypride and Gaga, downward toward gahenna, ever-more-permissive westerners celebrate their taboo-busting liberation. Woohoo.

Meanwhile on the other side of the world, Muslims say no thank you to all that western decadence. One way that they public reject our degenerative licentiousness is by seeking to embrace their legalistic Islamic heritage. Women wearing burqa and hajib is the most obious religious practice by which the neo-Islamists publicly refuse to submit to Euro/American hedonism.
As a Christian who has struggled most of my life to resist sexual provocation of all kinds, I can relate to their resistance.

The aidsy-douchy end of our libertine ways takes many forms: sexually transmitted diseases; epidemic abortions; disappearance of romantic love, of fidelity and of marriage itself. I came across a video this morning that illustrates how far our descent into the libido inferno has taken us. Its one of those undercover videos stealthily obtained at a Planned Parenthood office in New Jersey by a faking pimp/prostitute due. Its a real ear-opener:
http://www.redstate.com/mdannenfelser/2011/02/01/planned-parenthood-caught-aiding-and-abetting-sex-trafficking-of-minors/

Meanwhile, there are among us a few sycophants who have traveled the paths of liberality and lived to tell about it. Phyllis Chesler, erstwhile feminist/neoconservative shares her concerns today--prompted by the current rumblings in Egypt--about the victimization of women in fundamentalist Islam. She posts an alarm today about the trend among women in Islamic countries back to the burqa and the hajib. She includes some "revealing" photos:
http://www.newsrealblog.com/2011/02/01/am-i-the-only-one-troubled-by-cairo-street-scenes/

The class pictures show, as Phyllis says, "Cairo University graduates in 1959, 1978, 1995, and 2004. Clearly, there is a progression—a regression really, in terms of women’s rights. Former feminist gains have, increasingly, been washed away."

Most of the students in the earlier pics appear very much like you or I would have dressed for a class portrait in 1959, '78, or '95. But the 2004 photo with the Cairo women mostly clothed in burqa and hajib is real eye-opener.

I can see Phyllis' point about the "Islamization" of women in Muslim cultures. From a democratic standpoint, I share her concern, especially with the looming possibility of the Muslim Brotherhood strongarming their way into power in post-Mubarak Egypt.

On the other hand, the Islamists have a legitimate point. It just could be that societies function better when women are willing to keep themselves modestly clothed. In that sense, I think the revolution in Egypt, and even the one that happened in Iran, is about more than politics. Its about the clashing worlds of fundamentalism and libertinism.

As for me and where I stand on this--I'm caught in the middle, like many an existentialist post-religiot westerner, and like many an Egyptian citizen standing in Tahrir right now, somewhere between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Mubarak police.

Glass Chimera