the sculptures terrassed
Okay, I love Ai Weiwei, and all his creatures, perhaps more than anyone I know, but I’m going to be a little grumpy here. I left the apartment early today, much earlier than I am want to (or ever want to) in order to be a part of the unveiling of “Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads,” the artist’s installation at the Pulitzer Fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel. I’m an incorrigible activist, and I think of Ai as an activist as much as as an artist. I thought I would be joining a crowd of fellow enthusiasts dedicated to the artist and to what he has come to stand for all over the world (even before he was “disappeared,” which is now more than a month ago).
I didn’t expect a huge throng, and since it was raining, I told myself I wasn’t going to be too disappointed if the numbers were modest. But I didn’t expect to be disappointed, as I very much was, both by the installation and by the event. When I arrived I saw that the subject of numbers had become irrelevant; I was able to enter the establishment precinct surrounded by steel barricades only by identifying myself as a member of the press. I didn’t know I would otherwise have had to have an invitation.
Zodiac Heads and talking heads
It was described several times during the ceremony as Ai Weiwei’s first public art installation, but the public was not permitted to be a part of the event (apparently only “dignitaries” and the press were allowed in).
The occasion was supposed to be a celebration of a youthful, bold and courageous artist, but there were only suits and a few older pros in the temporary shelter with the Mayor (twelve of them had been asked to recite short excerpts from Ai’s writings).
The work means nothing outside of its conceptual element, but there was no mention of that. The public talk was only about its eye-appeal and importance, whatever that may have actually meant to the speakers during the ceremony and in the Q&A after.
The title of the piece is “Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads,” but oddly there was no circle.
The artist was absent from the event, hosted by the city which he loved and which we shared with him for over ten years, only because of his magnificent activism, but there was no room today for activism, aside from that of Susan Henoch, who was holding two hand-written signs (“where is weiwei!” and “free weiwei”) just outside the police barricades.
the demonstration, outside the barricades
Ai Weiwei’s work was there, but the artist was not. Of course this was not the fault of the organizers or of the well-meaning folks who took part in the event, but I missed any sense of loss, or urgency, in the conventional procedures to which we were witness. It felt like a ribbon-cutting ceremony on some dull, secure site not accessible to ordinary people. It wasn’t only uninspiring; it was lifeless.
Actually, maybe Ai Weiwei’s work wasn’t really there. I know I didn’t feel it. For an event intended to celebrate an artist and his art, maybe the most damning verdict I could hand over was, for me, the surprising absence of art in the scene on Grand Army Plaza today, and only part of that was the fault of the gracelessness in the placement of the 12 zodiac heads*. I have to believe Weiwei would have had it all very much otherwise.
*
They are supposed to be installed in a circle, and ideally, I think, around a fountain, but their arrangement here, in an arc stepping up and across the lower terraces of the Pulitzer Fountain, seemed a bit like my childhood memories of church, when the florist would arrange huge flower baskets in front of the altar on the occasion of some important wedding (or funeral).
Category: Politics
Ai Weiwei has not really disappeared, or been silenced
real sunflower seeds waiting for fertile soil
There are all kinds of artists, millions of ways to create art, and all of them must be respected, but Ai Weiwei is The Compleat Artist, as much as anyone else now on earth, particularly because he is a social activist as well. I call him a saint.
I really haven’t been able to completely stop thinking about this man since I first became aware of his art. I was almost immediately astonished by the signs of his courage and the size of his heart, and my admiration for the artist and the man has only grown with each report of his comings and goings. Six days ago the reports stopped. We know that the artist has been “disappeared,” and that the man has been silenced, but ironically the frightened regime responsible has ensured by its cruelty and stupidity that an important part of the artist-activist’s work continues, and his voice might actually now be louder than ever, thanks to his friends, millions of admiring strangers everywhere, and the power of the modern connectivity on which he doted – and thrived.
I cannot imagine a China, indeed a modern world, without his presence, his conscience and his art. If we deserve the art we get, the government we get, we will have to do everything in our power to see Ai Weiwei return to the people of China, and the world.
[image by An Xiao from anxiaostudio flickr]
of shirtwaists and straitjackets: labor and Republicans
Don’t let the Republican barons bring back their “good old days.”
I was downtown on Friday afternoon at the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place, at 4:45, the exact moment one hundred years earlier when a fire began inside one of the three floors occupied by the Triangle Waist Company. In 1911, less than an hour after the fire began, 146 garment workers were dead, most of them young women and girls (the youngest were 14), either from the fire itself or because they had jumped a hundred feet and more to their deaths. The factory owners had locked the exits on each of three floors, to ensure that their hundreds of pawns (600 female workers, and about 100 male) could not leave their work stations, in violation of even the rudimentary safety statutes in effect before the horrific disaster which changed everything. Well, not everything, and not quite overnight.
Also, appallingly, today we see increasingly bold attacks on unions and governmental regulatory authority of any kind, which, if successful, would straitjacket all working people, even Republicans not yet become rich: The party is maneuvering to roll back everything which was won by organized labor in the years after 1911, including both safety and living wage rules.
The Republicans want to be able to lock the exit doors, just like they used to.
The Triangle Waist Company factory fire should be remembered as a tragedy dividing an age of capitalist barbarism from an age of enlightened, direct government interest in the welfare of the governed. Instead today there are ominous signs that it may be remembered as only one more horror inspiring only a temporary improvement in the condition of the powerless.
On the 100th anniversary of the tragic – and criminal – fire which engulfed the top three floors of the building which once housed the Triangle Waist Company factory, an installation on the eighth floor, visible from the street below, suggested both funerary bunting and the parachuting skirts of young women jumping to their deaths.
One man, a member of the Socialist Party USA, waved a brave red flag, telling everyone in hearing, “We were there!” He’s right.
Benjamin Kurtz, 19, was one of the few male victims of the fire, represented here by one of the shirtwaist replicas which was carried to the site in a procession earlier.
On Friday, one woman in the crowd explained that the most common name among the dead was “Rosie.” She carried a large bowl of rose water and rose petals into which people were invited to dip their hands and caress the side of the building or the pavement.
The names of those who had perished had been written in oddly-festive, parti-colored chalk onto the sidewalk, and here the name “Wisconcion” alluded to the unravelling of both hard-fought workers’ rights and industry regulations currently underway in Wisconsin and elsewhere in the U.S. Even in New York today, the sweatshop itself survives.
While I was standing about and photographing the group and the visual props gathered on this historic corner, I noticed in the near distance a woman dressed all in black, of brave proportion and stately manner, perfectly-costumed in the manner of a hundred years back. She carried an old-fashioned sign, and moved slowly on the edge of and eventually right through the crowd. At first it seemed that no one else had noticed her, but eventually it was clear she just couldn’t be ignored.
I felt a cold shiver and my knees weakened when I first spied her, and I thought about her heroic models and at least a century of noble antecedents. Did she represent one of the founders of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) or local 25* specifically, to which the Triangle workers belonged? Since she seemed very well dressed, perhaps she was a patron, like Mary Dreier, Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, Anne Morgan (J. P. Morgan’s daughter), or any of a number of wealthy and influential women who worked to share their privilege with their sisters.
As I was leaving, I heard the sad phantom speak to the crowd for the first time: She began by asking, “Are any of you members of a union?”
The figure I’ll call our conscience seemed to appear out of nowhere, perhaps with a warning: The robber barons are back.
*
The New York State Archives has this to say about Local 25:
Local 25 [of the ILGWU] was known for its militant members. These members led the famous 1909 Uprising of 20,000 in which workers walked out of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. The uprising eventually sparked a widespread walkout among shirtwaist workers throughout the city. Many shops met the union’s demands while others including the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory did not. Strengthened by a post-strike spike in membership, the workers remained active. The tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 further spurred the union’s growth, finally establishing the local’s position in the New York garment industry.
In its account the archive addresses the particularly-energetic radicalism of Local 25. There were communist sympathizers in all ILGWU locals, but the more conservative union leaders, regarding 25 as the hotbed, decided to divide its workers into two new locals. It didn’t quite work, but eventually, reflecting the history of the American labor movement generally, the union was able to keep genuine leftists out of it leadership entirely.
Manning’s torture: preventive war on open government
stills from 2007 video posted by Wikileaks showing a US Apache helicopter firing on civilians in Baghdad
Are we doing the government’s own, dirty work?
I just now got it. I’d searched my mind for weeks, probably months, trying to figure out why the U.S. government (and the British terrier) has come down so hard on Bradley Manning and Julian Assange. Sure, no institution wants its endemic practices of deception to be broadcast to the world, and there is no institution more powerful than the U.S. government, but the aggressive offensive it has launched on these two men appears to be all out of proportion to what it might gain from any likely outcome.
While lying in bed this morning listening to the BBC I was pondering if or when we will learn the story behind the UN resolution which approved foreign intervention in Libya: How did the most gung-ho elements in the most gung-ho countries arrange it? That is, how did they ensure that no members of the Security Council would vote nay (including two with absolute veto power)? And why? I mean, what do they think is in it for them? Then, as my mind went back to Bradley Manning’s parlous plight in a Marine Brig,* I realized that we may never know more than we do now; the leaks may have been fixed, the taps plumbed tight.
I don’t think the U.S. has any intention of trying and sentencing either Bradley or Assange. Aside from the fact that it would be too messy, for many reasons (including more revelations?), our entrenched oligarchy, that brutal mob, already has what it wants. It’s frightened the whistle blowers.
This is all part of an full-out war on open government.
The extraordinary damage Manning has done to exposing the lies of the war regime in Washington, beginning shortly before the world saw the Apache helicopter video, can’t be reversed now, but he’s certainly not going to be handing over more evidence. As for Assange, our government doesn’t even really have to have him physically in its hands: The role of the WikiLeaks editor is to hand off to other media, and publish on his own site, information furnished him by others, and even if Assange now has some worthy imitators, anyone who might be thinking of leaking to the public more information about illegal and criminal government acts of any kind will now be reconsidering the cost of acting with moral integrity and fighting for open government. The lesson seems to be: Don’t fuck with the military; don’t cross the bosses. You’re not going to survive the war.
So it would seem to follow that when we write about and demonstrate against what has been done to Bradley Manning we are doing what the anti-whistleblowers want: Warning of the dangers in working for truth and open government.
But that would be true only if they are expected to win, and we can’t let that happen.
*
Manning has been imprisoned without trial, shackled, tortured and drugged, for almost ten months. He was not charged with any crime until 7 months after he was locked up. He has undergone prolonged isolated confinement and total idleness, and he is now forced to go naked inside his tiny cell much of the time and during daily inspections by his guards while standing outside of it. He is subject to sleep deprivation because of repeated nighttime physical inspections, and not permitted to sleep during the day. He is constantly drugged with antidepressants. He is unable to exercise in any ordinary way and never in his cell, but only after being moved to an empty room where he is allowed to do nothing other than walk in circles or figure eights for one hour (or less, if he decides to stop). Manning’s cell has no window or any natural light. He is permitted no pillow or sheets and his “blanket” sounds like it’s a stiff carpet (can’t be fashioned into a noose). He has been stripped of the glasses he needs to read, and is shackled whenever he leaves the cell. No trial has been scheduled. I can’t imagine how he could survive intact as a human being.
[image from BoingBoing]
we’re “good Germans,” Bradley Manning’s the real thing
surely we can hold ourselves to a higher justice than that which condemned them
The Six core members of Die Weisse Rose (The White Rose), a non-violent resistance group in Nazi Germany, were arrested by the Gestapo, tried and executed in 1943. Some of the male members had been activated for military service and been witness to atrocities, both on the battlefield itself and against civilian populations. The group had become known over the eight months prior to the arrests for an anonymous leaflet campaign describing what the government was doing and calling for resistance. The text of their sixth and final leaflet was smuggled out of the country and copies of it were dropped over Germany by Allied planes.
Today the members of the White Rose and others who opposed the Nazi regime, including those inside the government and the military who revealed the plans of the Nazis to other governments both before and after the war began, are honored as some of Germany’s greatest heroes. They acted from conscience and spoke truth to power; almost all of them paid for it with their lives.
Pfc Bradley Manning is their heir. Having learned about government and military lies, official war crimes, and having even been asked to contribute to them, he could not claim ignorance, or deny his moral responsibility to expose and to put an end to the hypocrisy and the atrocities.
Manning is the real thing.
Manning is a hero, not merely for what he did, which is only what morality and codes both command, but because doing it is still today an exceptional act for anyone within government or the military. He is also a hero because he is being punished horribly for doing it – by the real criminals themselves. Finally, and perhaps most discouragingly, he is a hero because, although he has not been tried or convicted of any crime, most Americans seem to believe he is a traitor, or much worse.
The shy young army private did precisely what all members of the armed forces are supposed to do, and have been instructed to do, at least since the 1946-1947 Nuremberg Trials. Those processes established that the traditional military defense of just following orders, the “Superior Orders” plea, isn’t enough to escape punishment.
These trials established the “Nuremberg principles,” which provided the basis for all subsequent prosecutions, anywhere in the world, for crimes against the peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. They continue to stand even if most Americans do not believe this sort of thing could apply to them. They are encouraged in maintaining this perverted self-deception by their most exalted leaders: When he was asked about the possible prosecutions for American torture practices, our current President says he’s “a strong believer that it’s important to look forward and not backwards.”
In fact, most of us share directly in the guilt for American crimes at home and abroad. We’ve been waging wars on the other side of the planet – shamefully – for almost ten years. My partner Barry ended a 2007 post on American electoral politics: “Americans didn’t exactly reject the Bush administration in 2004, when we had all seen the images of Abu Ghraib, and knew that they had no legitimate evidence of Iraqi WMDs. When Americans . . . say the people of countries like Germany under the Nazis were guilty, what does that say about us?”
Any individual or group choosing to describe and oppose criminal U.S. policy on ethical or moral grounds is without honor in this country today, this in the nation which was so instrumental in destroying Nazism and creating the document which set guidelines for determining what constitutes a war crime. Manning’s experience confirms this.
The most salient muckraker in the country today is now the least visible to his fellow citizens.
Manning remains locked in solitary confinement, ten months after being arrested for allegedly passing a mountain of digital “U.S. secrets” to WikiLeaks. He awaits his kangaroo court. Meanwhile, inside the Marine brig he is subject to no-touch-torture regimens which include being stripped naked each night and forced in the morning to stand outside his cell naked for “inspection.” After the revelations about American prisoner treatment over the last ten years, I think we know what that’s all about.
Meanwhile the real criminals, inside government, corporations, or the military, are free to continue the practices which were the subject of Manning’s whistle-blowing (no 5 am naked inspections for them). Those at the top have flourished and become rich, but those who would point out their crimes are ignored, punished, or imprisoned (and in at least one extraordinary case, fired for speaking out).
Ours may be the least responsible government in the West. Its elected (a generous adjective) officials do not pursue even in the most general terms the policies which the voters enjoin on them, and the mainstream media doesn’t cry foul. It’s the height of idiocy for citizens of a modern republic to believe in the first place that they could trust the paid officers of an unrepresentative and irresponsive oligarchy to know what is best for them, but to permit them to properly administer the affairs of the citizenry in secrecy is more dangerous still. The secrets, in any event, belong to the people. Bradley Manning is the agent of their retrieval. He is our tribune.
We know that as a nation we’ve been bad, very bad; an impenetrable cocoon of silence at the top means that no one with any political power will admit it; but worst of all, too many “good Americans” also refuse to admit that we might be guilty of anything.
Surely we’ve never engaged in optional wars, tortured the state’s “enemies,” or killed incalculable numbers of innocents in the nations we’ve invaded. Nor have we enslaved many of our own people, or placed others in concentration camps solely on the basis of race, and we’ve never corrupted our own constitution or judicial systems in the name of “national security.”
Or if we have done those things (we have, and we’re still doing some of them today), maybe we stay silent because we didn’t do them on a Nazi scale. Or maybe it’s because we think our shit don’t stink.
David House
David House is Manning’s support team. He is a friend, and a computer scientist now a researcher at MIT, who visits him in jail twice a month, one of the very few people permitted to do so. On December 23, 2010, House appeared on MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan Show, guest-hosted by Jonathan Capehart, to describe his latest visit. I transcribed a section of his statement in a video shown on Firedoglake (FDL), specifically, Firedoglake TV:
After commenting that there are laws protecting whistel blowers in the United states, Capehart asked House, “Do you think Bradley Manning did anything wrong?” He replied: “If the allegations against Bradley Manning are true, I think he is an ethical giant of our generation. I think perhaps in this case America has judged him in the press much too quickly, and we should really reconsider why we keep alleged whistle blowers locked up in solitary confinement.”
When he was asked if he holds Assange resposnsible for the situation in which Manning finds himself, House responded that he would have to have information about whether they had a relationship, adding that all information to that effect is coming out from one very unreliable source [Adrian Lamo]. “So I don’t think that’s something I could speculate on now.” Capehart then suggested they talk about House’s thoughts on what Assange has done with the information that he has released via WikiLeaks. House: “So I think that the underlying principles of the WikiLeaks organization are actually principles which are very much in line with most American ideals, the principles of open government, the principles of government transparency; so at least from an abstract, 30,000 foot perspective, I think the actions of WikiLeaks are very much in line with the principles of the American people.
I can’t imagine a better spokesperson. House is awesome.
EXPOSING WAR CRIMES IS NOT A CRIME!, reads the banner on the home page of the Bradley Manning support site. There are demonstrations of support planned for Manning all over the world tomorrow, March 20. The site has information for all of them. The gathering in New York will be at 2 pm in Union Square. Clothing optional.
supporters of Army Pfc Bradley Manning at a rally at the State Department March 14th
(SF activist Logan Price, in the pink sign, writes on FDL about why he got naked)
APPENDIX I: Manning was, and still is, a very young man (only 21 when he first started transferring classified data into his personal computer). He was not a sophisticated undercover agent. It seems to me that he was in the place where he found himself, where he had incredible access to government documents, because he was smart and because he was a techie, in fact a computer geek. I also can’t help noticing that, since Manning is gay (openly for I don’t know how long), the army may have chosen neither to ask nor to tell; there just may not be enough straight men who answer that description and are also willing to serve their country, as Manning was when he enlisted (and is now more than ever, as we see). But all of that, including the impact upon Manning’s story of DADT is the subject for another discussion altogether.
APPENDIX II: [This account of how Manning met House is taken from the Wikipedia entry for Manning] While he was at Fort Drum in New York, Manning regularly traveled to the Boston area to visit his then boyfriend, Tyler Watkins, who was studying neuroscience and psychology at Brandeis University. At Brandeis he “was introduced to Watkins’s network of friends, and the university’s hacker community, as well as its ideas about the importance of information being free. He visited the university’s “hackerspace” workshop, and met David House, the computer scientist and MIT researcher who has been allowed to visit him in jail twice a month, the only person apart from his lawyer with permission to do so.”
[first image from Wikipedia, the second from Jay Marx’s Zimbio photostream]
the 2011 Egyptian Revolution: end of colonialism?
today in Tahrir Square, “Egyptian people greet selves as liberators”*
While the victory of the Egyptian people is a major problem for authoritarian governments throughout the Middle East, it’s a bonanza for virtually everyone else, one which could be world-changing: Last night I heard Ayman Mohyeldin, speaking on Rachel Maddow’s show (before the announcement of the resignation of Mubarak), say that their success was Osama Bin Laden’s worst nightmare:
It might take a day or two or a week or two. They have already won. But this scene of winning peacefully the way they have, this is Bin Laden’s nightmare. What we’re seeing here is Bin Laden’s nightmare.
If the Egyptian protests are copied elsewhere, and successfully, it would not only put Bin Laden out of work, it would put an end to his and others’ hopes for the world governed by Sharia law which they envision.
And President Obama couldn’t see that? Actually, he may still not see it.
I propose that even now the Egyptian Revolution may be viewed by our own government as a disaster, regardless of the tardy words of support and congratulation coming from Washington. Mohamed ElBaradei, in an Op-Ed piece published in today’s New York Times, also before Mubarak’s resignation, makes this comparison:
The United States and its allies have spent the better part of the last decade, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars and countless lives, fighting wars to establish democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now that the youth of Cairo, armed with nothing but Facebook and the power of their convictions, have drawn millions into the street to demand a true Egyptian democracy, it would be absurd to continue to tacitly endorse the rule of a regime that has lost its own people’s trust.
The Americans in possession of enormous power and access to the ordinary taxpayer’s money (or mortgaged futures) did not engage in these foreign wars in order to bring about the kind of world which the peaceful and triumphant Egyptians are about to carve for themselves after over half a century of military dictatorship and heroic exertions over the past weeks. It’s hard to imagine even the least astute of our dull politicos having any illusions about the efficacy of Imperial American war policies in planting freedom and democracy by force and intimidation.
I’m often tempted to think of almost all of our post-war foreign policy as just a game played by boys who never grew up, but it’s probably more useful to understand it as the work of a military industrial and media complex, in it for the money and the power; its lip service to freedom and democracy was always cant, and talk of a communist, and later a fundamentalist threat, only a cover.
May the Egyptians now safely secure the awesome accomplishment of popular revolution – and incidentally save Americans from themselves.
*
The phrase in quotes was tweeted by David Waldman today, in negative tribute to Dick Cheney’s 2003 prediction that the Iraqis would welcome us with open arms and greet us with flowers (or some such words) when we invaded their country.
[image (uncredited on the site) from Huffington Post]
the army in Egypt
a complicated relationship*
Egyptians have a complicated relationship with the army. While we are told over and over that it occupies a high status within Egyptian society, largely because of perceived (early) success in the Yom Kippur War, if we take a longer look, it’s clear that it has a problematic history when it comes to the welfare of the Egyptian people. Today as well, while vaunted for its restraint over the last two weeks, the army has not been truly impartial.
While we are still awaiting events, even in a first draft, the 2011 Egyptian Revolution may already be writing the most definitive statement of the army’s position within Egyptian society.
We’ve been hearing for weeks that the enemy of the popular protests isn’t the army, that the army is close to the people, that the army would not turn on the people, and that the conscripts, at the very least, are identified with the people and have the same interests as the people.
At the beginning of the Egyptian street demonstrations these sentiments and judgments were being expressed in a context which showed that the police, on the other hand, were not close to the people, would turn on them, were not conscripts and therefore not identified with the people in the streets – or their interests.
Today concern with both the physical presence and threat of the police has been overshadowed, even replaced by considerations of the army, lower ranks of which now share, sometimes even intimately, the spaces occupied by the protesters. Today it is the posture of the army that is being discussed. Early on, when the more reflective protesters talked about the army not being the enemy I always suspected that much of their expression of comfort was strategic, with the object of helping to engage the support of the military, at all levels.
All of this is the context which will determine how the revolution will respond to a possible military replacement for Mubarak – and Suleiman, even it is described as temporary.
In the end Egyptians will make that call (and perhaps they have already). Even the youngest revolutionaries are almost certainly aware of the army’s chronicle, at least starting with the end of the Muhammad Ali Pasha dynasty and continuing to this week.* *
It was a cadre of high military officers who staged the coup which brought down King Farouk in 1952, and every president since then has been a high military officer, as has virtually every key figure in every government, including the one currently disintegrating.
If Mubarak steps down, and Suleiman exits as well, turning over authority to the army, absolutely nothing will have been accomplished by the revolution. The army will merely be continuing its almost 60-year ascendancy. I’m sure the streets know this.
I saw this re-tweeted on Mona Eltahawy’s feed this morning:
To All Egyptian youth: It’s YOUR country ,YOUR revolution NOT the army’s. GO CLAIM YOUR RIGHTFUL TROPHY
*
The published caption reads:
An Egyptian civilian kisses an army soldier after troops took position at major junctions in central Cairo on January 29, 2011 as thousands of anti-regime demonstrators continue to pour onto Cairo’s streets, demanding President Hosni Mubarak stand down the day after the veteran leader ordered the army to tackle the deadly protests.
* *
Egypt is five to seven thousand years old, but in its modern history as a state (from 1805) it has had only two regimes: the Muhammad Ali Pasha dynasty, and that of the generals. The generals have been operating under a state of emergency since 1952 (and not 1981, as the media reports).
It is interesting that the “state of emergency” (emergency for whom?) was originally provoked by a successful military coup (eliminating King Farouk and installing Naguib and then Nasser, both high military officers), and fully-institutionalized by the assassination of one president (Sadat, a high military officer), also by military officers (an army major, a lieutenant and four enlisted men) and the succession of another high military officer, Mubarak.
So what is the current regime talking about when the say they fear the disruption of the state from below, and warn they will call upon the military to protect that state? I think everyone now knows the answer.
[image by Mohammed Abed – AFP/GETTY IMAGES from NewsObserver]
has Obama assumed massa’s role in the Mid East?
Tahrir Square, the afternoon of February 6
Is it racism?
In Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East the U.S. is acting like the plantation owner who is certain that his negroes don’t really have the same sensibilities and capabilities as he and his kind do: The poor darkies are incapable of fully rational behavior, they certainly can’t govern themselves without the slave driver or overseer, and they’re there to support his civilization and keep him rich and comfortable. Today the same patronizing attitude could be laid at the door of most Western governments, if not all.
Massa never went away; he now strides the world and he still wants it his way.
Unless I’m reading it wrong, at the moment Egyptian policy for European and American leaders alike, what they would like to see happen, seems to reflect the desire of their peoples. While they may be operating as democracies to that extent, there appears to be no wish that the world should share their blessings.
The Western establishment have made accommodation with the existing but now seriously threatened “stability” in the Middle East, and they want to preserve this corrupt old order at all costs, even at the expense of a genuine stability.
An indigenous, popular, secular, non-partisan and cross-generational protest has been initiated in the country which forms a keystone in the arab and muslim world. It represents an awesome, unprecedented, beneficent opportunity for all of the Middle East and for the world. It was handed over to Western democracies and the world, freely, without strings, and with love. We all hit the jackpot, and we hadn’t had to lift a finger. That opportunity is now being lost, and we will live to regret it.
With notable exceptions, and in spite of occasional lip service to their ideals, people outside Egypt don’t actually seem to want democracy there. It is seen as a threat to their own comfortable world, and they haven’t the courage of their advertised convictions. If there has to be change, their arguments generally describe a slow process, perhaps a very slow process, one which should be under the control of the existing government (a brutal dictatorship which has repressed all political reform for 30 years under a spurious emergency decree).
From the beginning of the Egyptian protests two weeks ago our own “change” President was extremely slow to speak up or act, and when he did he was always seen to be trailing events (not unlike his partner, or client, Mubarak). Eventually it seemed that Obama had started to get it. Judging from statements which have come from the administration over the last few days however, incredible as it may seem, he’s now backpedaling from whatever support he seemed to be giving to the protests. My guess is that he swallowed premature reports that the movement had begun to weaken, and decided he was now off the hook.
Yesterday an AP AP story by Matthew Lee reported this:
“A question that that would pose is whether Egypt today is prepared to have a competitive, open election,” State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said. “Given the recent past, where, quite honestly, elections were less than free and fair, there’s a lot of work that has to be done to get to a point where you can have free and fair elections.”
That was hardly the line in 1989.
Twenty-two years later it may be cynical calculation, if extraordinarily shortsighted, but it’s definitely racist.
The Washington Post editorial board thinks Obama is being played a fool. I think he knows exactly what he’s doing, and it’s just plain wrong.
ADDENDUM: Then again, could Obama be acting as a double agent? Not likely, I think, but I just watched a February 6 New York Times video by Rob Harris, David D. Kirkpatrick, and Enas Muthaffar, titled “Egyptians React to U.S. policy.” After showing shots and statements of protesters angry or disappointed about Obama’s support of the regime, the reporter’s voice-over says, “Still others saw American support for their cause as a liability, bolstering the state’s portrayal of the protesters as tools of foreign powers.”
One young man questioned in Tahrir Square [looking much like one of the of the movement’s attractive “kind of scruffy intellectuals” described earlier in the video] is recorded saying, “Barack Obama being against our agenda here is something good for us.”
One thing is clear: These people are not going to be anybody’s patsies.
[image from Andrew Burton, who has many more great Cairo shots here; plus some personal thoughts on a revolution]
Cairo: “With soup pots into the fray”
It’s now the twelfth day, and even if some of us are thousands of miles away from the magnificent heroes in Egypt, I think we’re all pretty stressed out. Maybe it’s time for a tribute to the Egyptian soul and sense of humor – with a bit of soul and humor from, you guessed it, the Germans!
The image above is from a Der Spiegel page of 14 totally enchanting (is that too irreverent? I don’t think so) images from the demonstrations in Cairo, headlined “Mit Suppent�pfen ins Get�mmel” [With soup pots into the fray]. I love the German language!
The article is about the need of the protesters in Tahrir Square for homemade helmets as protection from the violent attacks of paid Mubarack supporters, and their improvised solutions. The pictures don’t even require translated captions.
I have absolutely no doubts that these wonderful people are going to be able to successfully defend their revolution.
NOTE: Except when they are my own, I always credit the source of the images I use on this blog, and I include the name of the photographer when I can find it. Especially in consideration of the horrible circumstances under which all photographers are operating at this time in Egypt, I am very disturbed that there was no name attached to these images. I can only hope that the explanation has to do with the personal protection of their author.
[image from Der Spiegel (Agence France-Presse)]
today, we are all Egyptians!
Dr. Nawal El Saadawi, a leading Arab feminist, with protesters in Tahrir Square.
ADDENDUM: scroll to the bottom
Innaharda, ehna kullina Misryeen!* Today, we are all Egyptians! writes Nicholas Kristof today from Cairo. All of us, that is, except for Obama; Obama still appears to be waiting for the revolution to be crushed.
I saw this CNN twitter Thursday morning while still lying in bed with my laptop on my chest:
[Update 4:07 p.m. in Cairo, 9:07 a.m. ET] “We are mindful of the violence that we’re now seeing in the Middle East,” President Barack Obama said Thursday at the National Prayer Breakfast. “We pray that the violence in Egypt will end, and that the rights and aspirations of the Egyptian people will be realized, and that a better day will dawn over Egypt and throughout the world.”
What does he mean, “the violence”? And prayer is the answer? This was his statement the morning after peaceful protesters in Cairo and Alexandria were brutally attacked by forces unleashed, supplied and paid for by the Mubarak regime. No god is going to lift a finger for the Egyptians, and apparently neither is our president, except in prayer.
Then very late tonight (after 1 am in New York), as I sat at home feeling like I was in a scene from “War and Peace,” awaiting the dawn and a battle which might change the world, I saw Kristof tweet this:
A video I did of undaunted courage in #Tahrir, not least that of women’s leader N. Saadawi http://nyti.ms/f37sHh
I immediately went to the video link he had cited. It was a short interview with the legendary Egyptian human rights activist, feminist, psychologist, and former political prisoner, Dr. Nawal El Saadawi. I’ve transcribed their conversation here:
Kristof had encountered her in Tahrir Square today, Feb 3rd, and he tellis us that she is 80 years old, and out there every day.
Kristof: “Saadawi, tell us why you are here today.”
Saasawi answers: “I am here because, I feel I am born again. It’s a very spontaneous revolution, not related to the Left or the Right or the Muslim Brotherhood. As you see [turning around toward the crowd behind her], they are ordinary people, ordinary young students, women and men who’ve never known politics, so this is a real revolution.”
Kristof continues: “It is striking that there are many women here in Tahrir, who are also pushing for more democracy. Do you think women are coming out of the margins of society to demand their case?” Saadawi answers; “Most of the women never came out of their houses [before]. Some of them are veiled, some of them with the niqab. They came out of the [the last word is indistinct, but accompanied by her cupping her hands and throwing them before her].”
[another camera cuts to the crowd chanting, “We will not leave until you leave!”]
Kristof’s blog post, “Today, we are all Egyptians!,” includes a description of this encounter, telling us that Saadawi plans to sleep in the square tonight. The New York TImes correspondent also shares some other experiences and impressions of his day in Cairo.
*
colloquial Egyptian (Masri Arabic)
ADDENDUM: If you’re like me, now you just can’t get enough of Saadawi. Amy Goodwin interviewed her a few days ago for Democracy Now!
[image from Nicholas D. Kristof/The New York Times]