The Slow Fall of the Last Pharaoh: Mubarak

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horusd

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Have to say I'm glued to Al Jazeera watching events in Egypt. Incredible footage, incredible drama, and those people in Tahrir Square are very inspiring. We take elections so much for granted, it's amazing watching ordinary people put their lives on the line and fight for their freedom. Can only wish them success. Strangely, the arab world from Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and Yemen is now a place of great hope, after so many years of misery and dictatorship. People-power & modern communications is revolutionizing the place. I hope they get the freedoms they deserve, and it's not all hijacked after these events. I wish them well
 
Whether or not their lives will be better after Mubarak is gone is questionable.

At least Egypt has been a stable secular state with booming tourism bringing in a huge amout of foreign revenue and creating jobs for Egyptians.

If they get the 'freedom' to vote, like most of the Middle East and Africa, they will vote along tribal / religious lines and there will be more chaos and discrimination against minorities, probably Coptic Christians.

At least Mubarak kept the Islamists at bay, goodness knows what'll happen now to the most populous country in the Arab world, the Muslim Brotherhood are very active in the organisation of the current disturbances. They are apparently in favour of Sharia Law and an Islamic State.
 
I have to agree with delgirl. The Muslim Brotherhood has moved right down the horn of Africa and are now major players in Kenya as well as it's northern neighbours.

I can’t think of one North African country that is a successful democracy.

There are very few anywhere in Africa that are. Botswana does stand out as a country that has been peaceful and democratic since independency in 1966 but Botswana is exceptional in African terms in that its population is relatively homogeneous and it has good mineral resources that were well developed prior to independence (by DeBeers). It also has one party that’s dominated politics, remaining in power from day one. The only minority it does have are the Bushmen tribes and they have almost been wiped out (think in terms of how Australia treated it’s aboriginal peoples).
Ghana is the only country that I can think of where there is a strong opposition and power has changed hands peacefully after very close elections. Not even South Africa can say that as there’s no chance of the ANC getting kicked out any time soon (and I’d be very surprised if they leave peacefully if that happens).

To quote from an excellent article in the Economist from 2009;
“Democracy is far more than just elections. It requires independent courts, non-party civil servants, robust institutions such as churches and universities; the rule of law and property rights; a free press; constitutional checks and balances; above all a culture of openness and tolerance, especially of minorities. But voters’ ability to throw the rascals out at regular intervals is still the indispensable sine qua non.”

Judging by those standards certainly narrows down the list.
 

To zero
 
The fear of the rise of islam and the fear of extreme versions of it have been used to prop-up regimes and maintain the status quo's all across the ME. Algeria immediately comes to mind. Massive support came from USA et al after 09/11 despite an allegedly extremely violent & corrupt cabal of army officers who raised the threat of islamism & Bin Laden to join "the war on terror", stay in power, cream-off money corruptly and supress opposition.
　
　
Mubarek has done the same, both with his own people and the USA who annually bankrolls the army to the tune of over 1 billion dollars. Ironically, the rise of extreme islam is directly proportionate to the lack of freedom to express legitimate oppositon. Islam has become the focus of oppositon, as it has generally been the only institution allowed to exist where people can gather in any significant numbers. The islamists have also generally helped people in order to garner support, and they have not been tarred so much with the nepotism and corruption inherent in the regimes. Hamas is a good example of this.

Today in Cairo,as the Muslims prayed, their Christian fellow protesters formed a protective wall around them. Don't believe the misrepresentations of Muslims trotted out to justify their surpression on a mass scale. As a regular visitor to the ME including Egypt , I have always been met with courtesy, kindness and humour.

More than elections are needed, you are right about this Purple, but the process starts with giving people justice and a voice. Ironically, I beleive that once they achieve this, we will see the fall of extremism that has arisen because the people have had neither.
 
horusd said:
Ironically, I beleive that once they achieve this, we will see the fall of extremism that has arisen because the people have had neither.
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Wealth is the enemy of extremism. People who have something to lose are less likely to rebel. Look back through history; people are happy to like under dictators and absolute monarchies as long as there is bread on the table. The first function of a government is to provide internal stability and secure borders. That may seem anachronistic to us here in our surreal bubble of security and affluence in North-western Europe but for most of the world it’s still a very real consideration.
The second function is to make sure that the state serves the people (and not the other way around). That encompasses the requirement for low levels of state corruption and laws that allow the economy to function properly. Once that is in place people aren’t that pushed about democracy. Russia is a good example of this. It has moved from being a relatively free democracy with a shattered economy to being an autocratic state with a much stronger economy. Most Russians are happier with their government now than they were 10 years ago.

The ideal, or course, is a strong economy and an open democracy but given the choice of a vote or a car and TV most people seem to go for the latter. Indeed if they have the latter they tend not to hold extremist views. There are of course exceptions but the great revolutions of the late 18th century were all caused by economic factors (America, Poland, France etc, even Ireland). Political reform is usually the result of a desire for greater material wealth. Basically once people are fat and happy they are not pushed how they are ruled. 10 years of Bertie showed us that!
 
This is an interesting topic Purple. Apparently many Chinese are baffled by our calls for democracy, given the abject poverty many lived in, and have now been rescued from by economic advancement. Russia I think, is also a special case.They had no experience of democracy and a long history of the "strong" man ruler. Putin is a perfect example of this. Interestingly, Suliman, (spelling?) the vice president in Egypt talked about Mubarek in the same terms as the father of the nation, making rebellion sound like perfideous disloyalty. All very pharonic. But underneath this notion is the sense that men (sic) are not equal, that there is a "natural" order to things where leaders have a version of the divine right of kings to rule which can be handed down to their children. Immediately, Syria, Egypt, Morocco & North Korea all spring to mind. The struggle to get most African leaders to step down demonstrates the ubiquitousness of this idea. What seems to happen is that both the rulers and the ruled forget their equality and assume such structures are" natural" and they are wrong.

I don't argue the point that economics underpin most people's lives, and little enough attention is paid to how we are ruled. But this doesn't obviate the moral wrongness of the inequality that underpins it, or the nauseous misrule that follows from it. I've been reviewing Thomas Paine's Rights of Man recently. He makes some extremely pertinent points:

  • " It is by distortedly exalting some men, that others are distortedly debased till the whole thing is out of nature."
  • "The equality of man, so far from being a modern doctrine, is the oldest upon record."
  • "His natural rights are the foundation of his civil rights."
  • Natural rights are those which appertain to man by virtue of his existence."
  • "Civil rights appertain to man in right of his being a member of society."
  • Society grants him nothing. Every man is a proprieter in society and draws on the capital as a matter of right."
  • "If the present generation or any other are disposed to be slaves, it does not lessen the right of the succeeding generation to be free."
Mubarek's problem, and the problem of all dictatorships is that they don't understand these principles, or know them and tryto supress them. What we are witnessing in Egypt and elsewhere, is that people are remembering & realising them, and critically they have lost their fear. As I said, I wish them well. Viva la revolution!
 
I think the fact that modern democracy grew out of Europe is critical. It was the respect for the individual rather than the collective in Christian thinking and teaching (if not practice) that allowed men like Rousseau to postulate that the individual should not be subservient to the state, that the people should be sovereign. While I like Paine I still think Rousseau was, to steal and paraphrase Pablo Picasso’s line about Cezanne, “The father of them all”. The major flaw in Rousseau’s “The Social Contract” was that he didn’t think his democracy and guiding principles would work in a nation the size of France, but only in a city state like his naive Geneva.
It was this assumption that allowed Catherine the Great to roll back on the liberal and progressive policies of her youth and rule with an iron fist in her later years. It’s interesting that the young Catherine financed many of the French philosophers of the time and had life-long correspondences with a few. Without her the USA would not exist as her alone stood against the proposed British naval blockade of the upstart colonies in New England. It was the collapse of the French Revolution into mass murder and failure that turned her away from her reformist liberal views.

China is not a Christian country (obviously) and the Confucius influence in their history has tended to teach them to be compliant and see authority as a virtue. They have no history of valuing the rights of the individual. They also have a history of splintering into provinces and being invaded so they like to have what they perceive as a strong leadership.

My view is that freedom and democracy are not a natural state, I don't believe that there is such a thing. I do thing they are the desired state and everyone should strive for them but that's not the same thing.
 
Okay , I'm going to be awkward here (nuthin new so!). Democracy preceded Christianity in the Greek "polis" city states. But I would agree that the Christian (protestant) idea of individuality that underpinned the Enlightenment played an important role. I would also mention that the works of Plato, Aristotle etc were lost to Europe and were given back to us by the Arabs. Translated back into latin by our own Don Scotus if memory serves me right. So they(the Arabs) had knowledge of the concepts inherent in Western philosophy.

On Rousseau I'm going to be awkward again . His concept of the "General Will" is highly contentious. This doctrine held that the society's general will would supercede the individual will, and demand unqualified and absolute obedience from all. It was always a force for good and for justice. And was both infallible and inviolable. This principle underpinned later ideas that formed part of authoritarian societies like Marxism & even Nazism. Isaiah Berlin wrote a really interesting and seminal article on this in the 1950's called "Two Concepts of Liberty". It was ground-breaking stuff, and from memory it is well summarised on the open university website.

My view is that freedom and democracy are not a natural state, I don't believe that there is such a thing. I do thing they are the desired state and everyone should strive for them but that's not the same thing.
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Interestingly, this was also essentially Edmund Burke's view expressed in Reflections on the Revolution in France. It was this that Paine was relpying to in his rights of man. Burke held that philosophers were attempting to impose a view of man competely based on a theoretical view, rather than looking at actual societies and how they worked.
 
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I’m always a bit wary of equating Greek democracy with modern democracy. The Greeks who were part of the Demos could vote but it was essentially a tribal system. Citizenship was based on kinship by birth so an Athenian living in Thebes could not vote and his sons could not vote. Slaves, women and foreigners (even ones whose families had lives there for generations) couldn’t vote so in effect they resembles oligarchies as much as democracies. It’s also worth noting that in many cases citizenship was confined to the wealthy so Greek democracy wasn’t anything close to universal; they had a minority holding all the power, they were just larger minorities than was usual at the time.

I’m very interested in the philosophical development of modern democracy but I need to do quite a bit more reading before I can engage in a meaningful discussion about it.
 


All true about the Greeks, nothing is ever that simple. But I like an argument! I love reading up on philosophy generally. There is a great and highly respected free resource online from stanford university that might interest you. http://plato.stanford.edu/


I also love the series of "justice" lectures available free online from Harvard's Micheal Sandel. It offers a range of episodes on various topics.

http://justiceharvard.org/
 
And so what started as a popular revolution ended as just another military coup.
 
Well they promise a new constitution (for eventual referendum )in 2 weeks, and elections in 6 months, so not quite. Have to say tho, it all smells a bit, the army are into everything from bottled water to farming. They'll want to protect themselves, interesting to see how this develops. Incredible stuff now going on everywhere in the region, Bahrain looks next. The big one will be Gaddaffi.
 

The average income in bahrain is $18'000 per anum. Unemployment runs to 5%. The Americans have a massive naval base and the Brits have a large presence there as well. Saudi like it as it acts as a pressure valve for them to go and drink and sleep with Russian prostitutes. There's far too much external pressure to let it change (there are Saudi troops on the streets there at the moment).
 
Purple while I'm been breakin me back in the garden and checkin AAM every now & then, you've had time to keep up and carouse the news!....give me a chance to watch the latest, surprised to hear the Saudi's are on the streets, that's a serious but perhaps not unexpected development. They are being surrounded by unrest, Oman, Yemen, Jordan, Bahrain, I'd say they're worried and rightly so. I'd imagine even the Iranians would help to put this down to stop it from spreading.
 
Purple, I saw nothin on the news about Saudi troops in Bahrain, are you sure? I was watching Al Jazeera so maybe it's reported elsewhere. I did watch the latest from Libya, it's really shocking, apparently 50 odd killed in Benghaz incl a 13 yr old and an 8 yr old, protests in Tripoli & another city as well. Gaddaffi has apparently imported African mercenaries to put this revolt down, paying them 30K each. Libya is the one I fear for the most, we could be seeing another Algeria. I saw protesters breaking into the local armoury and running away with shells etc.
 
horusd said:
Purple, I saw nothin on the news about Saudi troops in Bahrain, are you sure? I was watching Al Jazeera so maybe it's reported elsewhere.
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I was talking to a friend who has a family member living there.
 
Purple, don't know if your watchin the news( instead of ag obair!) Listening to a Libyan diplomat(on al jazeera) in Eastern Libya (Bengahzi), the east has fallen to the protesters. He's inviting journalists etc to enter Libya thro there. I filled the car this am, say petrol is on its way up.
 
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