Had to pass this along for the photo:
<http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2011/01/28/egypt-too-soon-to-analyze-so-heres-my-outbox/>
Zuckerman's point that shutting down the Internet last night was likely too late to be really effective is a good one, though.
Best, C.
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Thanks for the links. I saw the last of Murbarak speech. Damn, was it obvious this SOB was lying through his teeth. Get ready for the bloody club coming down.
Just sidebar points.
You don't need much to bring off an overthrow. No `social media' or internet, use land lines. No land lines or if they are tapped, use handbills and posters. If the presses and copy shops are closed, use home printers and or hand made posters. When all those are gone just get up in the morning and go see what people are doing. Most people know their cities well enough to know where the action is going to be.
It was announced that Mubarak dismissed the `government', which I assume means the cabinet ministers. Does it mean including parliment? Either way, that sounds like the preamble to mobilizing the military.
If the above is accurate, then that means the thousands in the street better get thousands or millions more to pack everything and stop the whole country from functioning. If they don't do that, they may end up under a crushing and murderous military rule.
I could be way off, but this is beginning to souund like a threshold point or point of no return. If it is such a point, the next phase has to prove the civilian security is loosing control. If that happens or is perceived as happening, then Murbarak will probably deplay the army in the streets. If that's what the government does, this could be a tremendous mistake for them, provided enough people in the street can lure the lower ranking military to come over to their side or take no action, thus dividing the military. That's what it looks like happened in Tunisia.
The other action to take is to mobilize any unions so strikes start. This was another action that helped the Tunisians. If there are no unions, then just create them ad hoc by organizing them on the spot. If none of that is possible for some reason, just don't go to work.
I go dellusional when I see people in the street. Yeah overthrow the bastards.
I sure hope Tunisia and Egypt keep going at it, because I am pretty sure people in Europe and the US are watching. So, when the US and other nations try to violate civil and human rights and impose economic austerity measures on their people, it blows up in their face.
Arab intellectuals, students, ordinary people who follow events must be out there drawing the connections with global capital, neoliberal policies, and the conditions of their peoples, and the anger in the streets.
Another direction sidebar. According to Palestinian Papers, the Israelis government is really worried about `democracy' breaking out, especially in Egypt. I think that means that Egyptian government silence and complicity is deeply hated by most Egyptians who must have watched their government do nothing to stop the endless assault on the Palestinians. Egyptians must have watched the US humiliate and destroy Iraq while they could do nothing.
Jeese, I am getting myself worked up. I first became aware of a strange sensation I never felt before as the days after January 1, 1968 unfolded, day by day with one stunning event after another, starting with the Tet offensive. Berkeley was in riot mode almost every week while strikes, revolts, wars, and potential revolutions were breaking out around the world.
The feeling was something like what seems to be happening lately. I called the feeling the sensation of feeling history move, something like a minor almost imperceptible earthquake. It is also associated with dizziness, heart palpatations, fear, anxiety, and joy, promise...
Maybe it is just a byproduct of watching too much news or hoping too much to be released from these endless oppressions.
Here's is AJE on Jordan:
In the third consecutive Friday of protests, about 3,500 opposition activists from Jordan's main Islamist opposition group, trade unions and leftist organisations gathered in the capital, waving colourful banners reading: "Send the corrupt guys to court".
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/01/2011128125157509196.html
You can see why the Israelis are worried. The US should be very worried too, because Arab political freedom and democratic reforms means a shift in power relations away from the US, if not outright anti-US demands.
Another aspect to that feeling of 1968 was the tremendous growth of awareness that government power only exists if enough of its people believe that power exists. That belief can evaporate and can evaporate in almost a moment.
Part of the foundation of my own experience was realizing one sleepless night, while I was agonizing over whether I had enough courage to refuse induction, was the realization that the US government really didn't care if I lived or died much less the conditions of my struggles. In otherwords there was no such thing as a social contract. The ideas of protection of life, civil liberties, moral causes, all of it was just empty words.
I've occasionally tried to speculate about this strange phenomenon feeling the pace of history, both its psychological and social manifestations. At some level it was part of a deep solidarity between peoples. It's why I love to watch people get out in the street and resist. Another part is seeing things work when I read about revolts. The seeing amounts to answering some question of what it was like to be in a revolt or revolution.
For example, I never read much Marx back then, but a few years later I read a short book on the first year of the October Russian Revolution. It was by a guy who worked in some czar bureaucracy as a clerk. In the first few pages he recalled a week or so of when it began. There were shots in the dark, songs, marching often at night. Then he remembers he would go at mid-day break to go listen to speeches. One day, he just didn't go back to work in the afternoon. Over a few days period he started to arrive late and leave earlier and earlier. Then one day, he didn't go in at all. Another day he went in but almost nobody was there so he left to go see what was happening in some location. Unfortunately he didn't go on with a personal account, but changed over to established history of somesort.
I recognized this phenomenon as the state was disappearing. If you don't go to work there is no state. This didn't happen here in 1968. It happened in 1969 when Reagan put Berkeley under marshal law and sent in the national guard. This was deeply foolish, because the occupation became the issue, and after tear gas closed a local school enough of the non-participants got out in the street, the kids were completely loose, while the local police were commanding the national guard units, the city council was in daily emergency session facing crowds of speakers demanding they throw out the national guard and sue the state, and on and on. There was no city government, and there was getting to be very little state government except the beseiged governor's office which was mostly just trying to run the state national guard. But an army can not run a city, even a small city. They don't have people who know how to run government, or public utilities, or teach kids, or do plumbing, etc. All an army knows how to do is kill people, which is obviously a completely worthless social occupation.
Right at that realization is when you understand that there is no state power, if there are enough people who refuse to accept state authority.
There is a critical threshold in these moments, I think. The threshold is very difficult to see in advance, but its there just in possibly the immediate future of tomorrow or an hour from now. You may not even know it is a threshold when it happens. It might be only retrospect. For me, it seemed I did know, or I was moment to moment discovering it.
This all maybe bullshit, but its hard to think so. Another name for these moments is the concrete manifestation of the concept of freedom. There are other elements as simple as finally understanding the french revolutionary slogan, liberte, equalite, faternate. The last one faternate is always a mystery to Americans. It means solidarity, and I think it is a slogan intended to evoke what I am trying to write about.
As for Egypt, I need to watch more. I want to see more women and girls. Maybe they are being protected, maybe not. (Don't go out dear, you'll get hurt?) But when substantial numbers of women appear, that's when I think Egyptians are on the right road. For some reason when women revolt, it is even more scary to state power. It means the foundation of society, which I believe rightly or wrongly women are the foundation, that foundation has evaporated.
I mean think about it. We talk and write history about civil rights for example and always name men. But the deeper reality was not the church deacons, but the ladies auxliary. They were the Sunday lunch organizers with big spreads of food in some black section of public parks. They were talking to each other and sharing family stories of what happened to this person and that. They were the ones who dressed their kids and lectured them on school, behaving themselves, minding their manners and watching out for Mister Charlie. They were the ones who carried the great myths of liberation in their songs as the choir, while the men were singing base.
Well it doesn't really matter. I just know when women and girls get out on the street, you've really got serious problems if you are in state authority. Why do you think appassionaria was so important? It's the voice of women, which you can also hear in music. If the Egyptians are serious some of their radio stations will discover the deeply radical and subversive use of the women's song in Arabic and its radical potential.
Sure it can be co-opt. But art and politics are deeply deeply combined. I have no proof, just the feeling of it which is also not far from those feelings in 1968-69. The meaning of a woman's voice in fado or flamenco is my love, I want to surrender, I want to dance, I want to live. Speak for me because I can not really speak for myself as well as you. Who knew revolution was a love song? It makes the throat ache like a love for a woman that is never forgotten.
Here is Amalia Rodrigues singing fado:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFgctURyGp4&feature=related
I don't know what it means, I just ache for liberation in the street voice I hear under her song. There is a deep profound something waiting discovery that I wish I could articulate in Spanish or Arabic because those languages sound like music to me and of course I don't know how to make English sound like that. Maybe only blues maybe high mountain tenor sounds that good. It's the sound of protest against the human condition.
Is it really too proposerous to claim it is the sound of, the universal sound of human liberation? You probably don't believe a song can over throw a government... You are probably wrong. I think I have seen it or nearly do so.
Well it leads to wondering, is truth, beauty, and freedom all the same thing with just different names?
Forget it. I must be out of my mind...
CG
ps. No doubt I will regret this post in the morning, but not tonight. In solidarity...