02. February 2011

A Completely Unpredictable Revolution Mubarak, the military, and the future.

Only fools would predict the unpredictable, and thus with the course of the Egyptian revolution. Imagine yourself as a pundit in Paris at the start of the French Revolution, the mother of them all. In August of 1789, you would have celebrated the “General Declaration of Human Rights,” an ur-document of democracy, as the dawn of “liberty, equality and fraternity.” Yet, four years later, the Terreurerupted, claiming anywhere between 16,000 and 40,000 lives. In 1804, one-man despotism was back. Except its name was not “Louis,” but “Napoleon.”

In the Russian Revolution of 1917, a halfway nice man by the name of Alexander Kerensky pushed out the Tsar, only to be replaced by Lenin and Stalin. And then, some soothsaying from Berlin in 1918: Who would have thought that the first German republic would be done in by communists and Nazis? Shift forward to Cairo in 1952. A genuine people’s revolt drives King Farouk into exile. Yet democracy takes a fall, too—toppled by Egypt’s officers’ caste. Egypt has been a military dictatorship in civilian garb ever since.

Let’s move to Tehran in 1979. The Shah flees for his life, semi-liberal Mehdi Bazargan officiates for a few month, and then, the iron fist of Khomeinism closes around the country. It is still there 32 years later, prevailing in a long civil war and shrugging off the democratic revolt of 2009.

Radicalization, then, is revolution’s fate. The one big exception being Eastern Europe’s “Velvet Revolution.” Yet the template doesn’t quite fit Egypt today: The regimes in Warsaw, Prague, and East Berlin lived on borrowed power, courtesy of the Soviet army. Once the loans were called in by Mikhail Gorbachev, these satrapies simply evaporated. Hence, there was no violence, and yesterday’s freedom fighters didn’t turn their guns on the next day’s “counter-revolutionaries.” The East Europeans were lucky, as the Egyptians may not be, even as President Obama threatens President Mubarak with the cut-off of $ 1.5 billion in U.S. alimony. The revolution is velvety no more. Some hundred dead have been reported. There is looting and shooting. So Mubarak, the tottering tyrant, is allowed to pose as the guardian of law and order. “Egypt challenges anarchy,” trumpets a government gazette.

Mubarak’s next line of defense, however, is less successful. Appointing Omar Suleiman as vice president, in an attempt to appease the masses, means that Mubarak’s offspring, Gamal, not exactly a beloved figure, can scratch the dream of a “dynastic dictatorship” in the way of Syria’s Assad père and fils. Yet, as revolutionary history shows, appeasement like Mubarak’s late offer of political concessions only emboldens the opposition. What’s more, Barack Obama’s pressure for reforms and free elections isn’t helping the Egyptian president. Mubarak must surely ponder what happened to the Shah of Iran once he was dropped by Jimmy Carter back in 1978, when the White House dispatched the same “mend your ways” message to Tehran. That was the beginning of the end of the Pahlavi dynasty.

This doesn’t mean that Mubarak’s fate is sealed. Iran had an organized opposition with a sturdy base in the mosques as well as in the rural areas, and a charismatic leader, Ayatollah Khomeini. Egypt has the Muslim Brotherhood, which seems to defer to the secular forces, and these have only Mohamed ElBaradei, who has made his name as U.N. bureaucrat—no Abraham Lincoln he.

The most critical difference, however, is in the power structure. The Shah regime was as cancerous as the despot himself; there was the Peacock Throne surrounded by sycophants and nothing else. The army, though munificently equipped, was a shiny shell. I remember walking the streets of Tehran just before the Shah escaped. The people simply ignored the latest-model Centurion tanks posted at key intersections. Or they handed flowers to the bewildered conscripts. Even if the Shah had given the order, the machine guns would have remained silent.

Not so in Egypt. Amid all of the country’s familiar dysfunctionalities, one institution stands out: an army of 450,000. It is coddled, elitist, and respected. It controls vast swathes of the country’s economy, even the lucrative tourism business. Hence, it has a vast stake in the status quo—but not necessarily in the survival of Mubarak’s regime. If the 82-year-old president has to go, so be it.

The army is hanging back, even as it stages a show of force in Cairo. It may not shoot, letting the despised police do the dirty work. But it won’t retreat into the barracks, either. It may shore up the president as long as it can be done economically—that is, with minimal damage to its reputation. The game, one must assume, is to save not the octogenarian, but the state, be it as bulwark against anarchy or as arbiter of the new dispensation.

Will its name be “democracy”? Only fools will tread where so many revolutions have ended in shattered dreams. So let’s consult the past, which we do know. Since the ouster of King Farouk, army and state have been one. Since 1952, Egypt has been ruled by a succession of officers-turned-pharaohs who never forgot where they came from: Naguib, Nasser, Sadat, Mubarak. They were the army, and the army was them. In other words, don’t count out the colonels.

There is only one problem, as a Spanish proverb has it: You can support yourself on a bayonet, but you can’t sit on it. At least, not for very long.

Josef Joffe is the editor of Die Zeit, a senior fellow at the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies, and an Abramowitz Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Tags: USA, Roger, News, 11feb, Egypt, Egyupr, Obama

Write a comment

Comments: 0

Fri

Nov

2015

Are Languages Products of their Environment?

shutterstock_222422665_151112

DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article:

Languages Are Products of Their Environments

The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different environments.

2 Comments

Thu

Jun

2014

Fun with Newspaper Headlines

Newspaper Headlinigs

0 Comments

Tue

Jun

2014

The Case for Reparations

The Case for Reparations

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

May 21, 2014

Chapters

0 Comments

Mon

Jun

2014

A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA

PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.

As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.

The New York Times

Sunday Review

By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014

A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks

American children of the 19th century had a reputation. Returning British visitors reported on American kids who showed no respect, who swore and fought, who appeared — at age 10 — “calling for liquor at the bar, or puffing a cigar in the streets,” as one wrote. There were really no children in 19th-century America, travelers often claimed, only “small stuck-up caricatures of men and women.”

This was not a “carefree” nation, too rough-hewed to teach proper manners; adults deliberately chose to express new values by raising “go-ahead” boys and girls. The result mixed democracy and mob rule, assertiveness and cruelty, sudden freedom and strict boundaries. Visitors noted how American fathers would brag that their disobedient children were actually “young republicans,” liberated from old hierarchies. Children were still expected to be deferential to elders, but many were trained to embody their nation’s revolutionary virtues. “The theory of the equality” was present at the ballot box, according to one sympathetic Englishman, but “rampant in the nursery.”

Boys, in particular, spent their childhoods in a rowdy outdoor subculture. After age 5 or so they needed little attention from their mothers, but were not big enough to help their fathers work. So until age 10 or 12 they spent much of their time playing or fighting.

The writer William Dean Howells recalled his ordinary, violent Ohio childhood, immersed in his loose gang of pals, rarely catching a “glimpse of life much higher than the middle of a man.” Howells’s peers were “always stoning something,” whether friends, rivals or stray dogs. They left a trail of maimed animals behind them, often hurt in sloppy attempts to domesticate wild pets.

And though we envision innocents playing with a hoop and a stick, many preferred “mumbletypeg” — a game where two players competed to see who could throw a knife closer to his own foot. Stabbing yourself meant a win by default.

Left to their own devices, boys learned an assertive style that shaped their futures. The story of every 19th-century empire builder — Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt — seems to begin with a striving 10-year-old. “Boy culture” offered training for the challenges of American manhood and a reprieve before a life of labor.

But these unsupervised boys also formed gangs that harassed the mentally ill, the handicapped and racial and ethnic minorities. Boys played an outsize role in the anti-Irish pogroms in 1840s Philadelphia, the brutal New York City draft riots targeting African-Americans during the Civil War and attacks on Chinese laborers in Gilded Age California. These children did not invent the bigotry rampant in white America, but their unrestrained upbringing let them enact what their parents mostly muttered.

Their sisters followed a different path. Girls were usually assigned more of their mothers’ tasks. An 8-year-old girl would be expected to help with the wash or other physically demanding tasks, while her brother might simply be too small, too slow or too annoying to drive the plow with his father. But despite their drudgery, 19th-century American girls still found time for tree climbing, bonfire building and waterfall-jumping antics. There were few pretty pink princesses in 19th-century America: Girls were too rowdy and too republican for that.

So how did we get from “democratic sucklings” to helicopter parents? Though many point to a rise of parental worrying after the 1970s, this was an incremental change in a movement that began a hundred years earlier.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, middle-class parents launched a self-conscious project to protect children. Urban professionals began to focus on children’s vulnerabilities. Well-to-do worriers no longer needed to raise tough dairymaids or cunning newsboys; the changing economy demanded careful managers of businesses or households, and restrained company men, capable of navigating big institutions.

Demographics played a role as well: By 1900 American women had half as many children as they did in 1800, and those children were twice as likely to live through infancy as they were in 1850. Ironically, as their children faced fewer dangers, parents worried more about their protection.

Instead of seeing boys and girls as capable, clever, knockabout scamps, many reconceived children as vulnerable, weak and naïve. Reformers introduced child labor laws, divided kids by age in school and monitored their play. Jane Addams particularly worked to fit children into the new industrial order, condemning “this stupid experiment of organizing work and failing to organize play.”

There was good reason to tame the boys and girls of the 19th century, if only for stray cats’ sake. But somewhere between Jane Addams and Nancy Grace, Americans lost track of their larger goal. Earlier parents raised their kids to express values their society trumpeted.

“Precocious” 19th-century troublemakers asserted their parents’ democratic beliefs and fit into an economy that had little use for 8-year-olds but idealized striving, self-made men. Reformers designed their Boy Scouts to meet the demands of the 20th century, teaching organization and rebalancing the relationship between play and work. Both movements agreed, in their didactic ways, that playtime shaped future citizens.

Does the overprotected child articulate values we are proud of in 2014? Nothing is easier than judging other peoples’ parenting, but there is a side of contemporary American culture — fearful, litigious, controlling — that we do not brag about but that we reveal in our child rearing, and that runs contrary to our self-image as an open, optimistic nation. Maybe this is why sheltering parents come in for so much easy criticism: A visit to the playground exposes traits we would rather not recognize.

There is, however, a saving grace that parents will notice this summer. Kids are harder to guide and shape, as William Dean Howells put it, “than grown people are apt to think.” It is as true today as it was two centuries ago: “Everywhere and always the world of boys is outside of the laws that govern grown-up communities.” Somehow, they’ll manage to go their own way.

________________________________

A National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society who is writing a book on the role of young people in 19th-century American democracy.

0 Comments

Mon

Apr

2014

Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change

From The New York Times

By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD

APRIL 19, 2014

HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.

In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.

A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China. Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests. Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times

But President Xi Jinping has targeted Mr. Zhou in an extraordinary corruption inquiry, a first for a Chinese party leader of Mr. Zhou’s rank, and put his family’s extensive business interests in the cross hairs.

Even by the cutthroat standards of Chinese politics, it is a bold maneuver. The finances of the families of senior leaders are among the deepest and most politically delicate secrets in China. The party has for years followed a tacit rule that relatives of the elite could prosper from the country’s economic opening, which rewarded loyalty and helped avert rifts in the leadership.

Zhou Family Ties

Zhou Yongkang, a member of China’s ruling Politburo Standing Committee from 2007 to 2012, is the subject of one of the highest-level corruption investigations in the history of the People’s Republic of China. Several members of his family, over the years Mr. Zhou was in power, made investments in companies with ties to the China National Petroleum Corp., the state oil company formerly run by Mr. Zhou, although there is no evidence to show that Mr. Zhou was personally involved in the dealings.

1 Comments

Fri

Nov

2015