Preliminary Lessons from Egypt

As I write, it is not yet known which moment of 1989 the situation in Egypt will emulate, Tienanmen in June, or Prague in November. Whatever the outcome now, we know the world has turned again, and the lessons of Cairo will be applied, on all sides, in civil struggles that will dominate the coming era. With a precarious balance between pessimism, and still a little more optimism, it is not too early to comment on what we have seen happening and what that means for us, here, in a faraway corner of the North American continent.

All over the world we have been stirred, in the last week, with the hopeful sight of the people of Egypt, rising at last, against the murderous dictatorship that has strangled their country for many decades. Beginning with Tunisia, and including Yemen, Sudan, Jordan and soon other places, the Arab nation is at last awakening. The corrupt and brutal leadership of these countries, almost without exception, supported by their friends in Washington, have a lot at stake in the outcome of Tahrir Square. Their eyes, as ours, are watching.

The latest phase of this battle has been dominated by the counteroffensive of Mubarak. Outside of the Square, the bloody crackdown against journalists and human rights activists leaves no doubt about the regime's intent to fight back. It is far from being immobilized by the protesters, up to a million strong, who have occupied the center of Cairo. Beginning Wednesday, US media reported "counter-demonstrators" massing on the outskirts of the square, and attacking pro-democracy forces with machine guns, Molotov cocktails, and rocks, causing thousands of casualties and more than a dozen deaths. These are not counter-demonstrators of course. These are the shock troops of Mubarak's National Democratic Party, employees of the Ministry of the Interior, and the police themselves.

If anyone believes that the American government stands on the side of the people of Egypt, one only has to recall the weak, equivocating, and ultimately disingenuous reaction of the Obama administration and the state department beginning a week ago, when it could not be roused even to call for an immediate resignation of the dictator, Mubarak. With the initiation of the bloody phase of the crackdown, US officials have wrung their hands, expressing a heightened level of concern, part of a slow, systematic ratcheting up of reaction to problems of the embattled ally. No amount of appeals for stability, peaceful transition, or diplomacy can hide the fact that the weapons of the so called thugs are American weapons. The tanks of the military, which could yet be turned against the protesters instead of protecting them, are American tanks. The jets and helicopters which buzzed Tahrir a few days ago to intimidate the occupation were American. The military might of the neighboring state of Israel, ready to stop Arab democracy by force if need be, is American. The intelligence, military and police training, interrogation tactics and black site jails are all American.

The official voice of the Obama administration is that Egyptians must determine who will be the leaders of Egypt. Of course that is true, but even now we hear rumors of a deal being brokered by the US State Department and Vice President Biden that will allow Mubarak to resign, to be replaced by his newly proclaimed, completely unconstitutional, "Vice President" Omar Suleiman as a caretaker head of a military interim government. There will be a massive attempt to sell this solution as a victory for the pro-democracy movement. But it will fool no one in Tahrir! Suleiman, the hated former head of Egyptian intelligence, who received his military training at Fort Benning, who is known as the CIA's point man in Egypt, and who has been deeply involved in the US practice of "extraordinary rendition", is no friend of democratic governance. He is part of the ruling cadre for the past thirty years. He is a continuation of Mubarakism under another name. He is more of the same, a new puppet for the Western interests forever holding hostage Arab nationalism and Arab democracy.

What has this to do with us? What are we to do? How are we to effect change from far away without any standing in this fight? It is not for us to say how a foreign country is to organize itself. But it is also not for us to let a US administration speak for American democracy. We stand in solidarity with freedom loving, democratic people everywhere and that means we are always opposed to US foreign policy, dominated as it is by the interests of corporate elites and neo-imperialists. We can take it for granted that our ultimate struggle is with these elites and their state apparatus here. We can assume our ultimate fight will bring us into the streets in our own country, occupying our own squares, eventually calling on the rulers of this country to stand down.

We knew this. This is not the lesson to learn this week from Egypt. What knowledge there is to gain from this requires a deeper look. We need to examine What is happening and How it is happening to be able to develop strategies to contend with the forces of repression and reaction in our own country.

The most ominous implication of the events in Egypt in the last two weeks was the disappearance and apparent withdrawal of the civil police authority. At first this was assumed to be a capitulation. But with the looting and savaging of Cairo neighborhoods by non-uniformed police appearing as criminals, with actual criminals let out of jail and paid by the regime to foment a reign of terror against the people, and now with the organized attack against the pro-democratic forces in Tahrir Square by police and other officials of the ruling party, it is apparent there is a counteroffensive underway. The tactic of disguising the "security forces" as "thugs", pro-regime enthusiasts if you will, is the alarming development of this struggle. It is means to maintain control through the exercise of systematic terrorism against the civilian population. We can be sure every ruling elite in the world, and especially the Arab world, has noticed. We will see this tactic again and again.

So the question becomes, when will we see it in the United States. Do you think we won't? Do you think it can't happen here? If you do, why? What is stopping the ruling elites from exercising this kind of terror on our own streets and in our own neighborhoods? Well, for one thing, they know perfectly well the Americans aren't going to give up their Dairy Queens or put down their Wii stations long enough to occupy any real estate to demand political change. So they continue down a road that redistributes 65% of all new wealth creation in the last 20 years to the wealthiest 1% of the population. They continue to leverage any demand for economic or social reform with give-aways to Wall Street and the Medical Insurance Industry. They continue the charade of economic "stimulus" by giving tax breaks to the rich, impoverishing local governments until they slash education and other social services, and entice the growing body of unemployed and unemployable youth into the military.

This trend cannot be sustained. At some point Americans will demand a more just and saner political economy and that will be a direct threat to the ruling elites of this country. What will stop that elite from exercising the "Mubarak Option"?

There are three things right now that hold back this barbarism in the United States.
1) The tradition of US journalism and Independent media is not yet completely moribund and would resist the most obvious forms of co-option from the ruling elites.
2) As social media and greater peer to peer communication networks have played an important role in resistance movements all over the world in recent years, these tendencies are, if anything, stronger in our country, and
3) The police cannot be relied upon to act as consistent adjuncts of the ruling elites in the terrorist class war unleashed on the rest of us. This is largely, although not exclusively, because the public sector is the last bastion of the unionized work force in the United States.

Lest these reassurances that it can't happen here lull us to sleep, look at which way each of them is trending! Media consolidation and the subjugation of news reporting to corporatist demands is choking out independent voices in print, broadcasting, and over the internet. Network access and social media are almost completely under corporate control and the technology does or will soon exist to block any communication deemed a threat to certain interests. Attacks on public employee unions are the front line of attacks on the labor movement itself, and police forces are becoming more and more militarized across the country.

We must work toward breaking the power of corporate monopolies. We must insist on free and open internet access and destroy any capability of state surveillance and communication monitoring regardless if it seems to offer some short term benefit. We must build, rather then tear down, the civil society represented by an organized working class continually fighting to maintain and improve democratic unions as a buffer against the ruling elites and their state apparatus.