It looked shaky for a while but finally, the Egyptians have done it and Mubarak has gone.
Now we can only hope the West keeps it's nose out and allows the Egyptians to elect who they want and not who we want them to elect for our own selfish ends.
Quite sickening to see and hear the likes of Cameron and Obama handing out ethical and moral advice when up until these demonstrations in Cairo, we haven´t bothered about the poor and the oppressed in Egypt. Why try pretend they give a stuff about them now?
A number of people should take the praise for ousting this corrupt, Western backed regime, mostly the Egyptian protesters who risked their lives to challenge the Mubarak Government. Taking a bow should also be the Tunisians who inspired the Egyptians to rise up when they overthrew their own head of state and the spark that began the whole chain of events, Wikileaks.
It was the leaked cables from the US Ambassador in Tunis, describing the opulent lifestyle of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and his family that fired up the nation's disaffected citizens.
The rapid success of the two revolutions have us now scanning the rest of the Middle East for other troubled regimes. Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Jordan have all attracted attention recently and the Iranians who challenged Ahmadinejad after the 2009 elections, may be dusting down their banners in preparation for another go at overthrowing him.
This century has began with a slew of uprisings against dictators and authoritarian regimes in Iran, Tunisia, Burma, Egypt, Ukraine, Jordan, Yemen, Niger, Thailand, Belarus and Sudan all with different results but this does not change the fact that it seems that the people living under these regimes are fighting back. While some of these oppressive governments have been propped up by the Western countries, hopefully these changes show that there is no room for dictators in the new century.
These are interesting times and the man who should be feeling proudest tonight is Bradley Manning whose brave actions are having a greater affect than anyone could have dreamed.
6 comments:
lucy,
if you want to believe that manning is a hero and that wikileaks led to the change in egypt go ahead.
when i look at the history of revolutions and big social change what i see is major forces shifting. many people try to attribute change to a minor event or person when in reality it was the big stuff.
American civil rights example: white america was tired of blacks being mistreated. too many whites had good personal relationships with blacks and didn't see blacks as faceless masses but as people. TV, radio, sports, and the print media helped break down the myths of hate. if MLK had come along a few years earlier none of use would have heard of him. dito Rosa Parks. They were incredible and heroic, but they had good timing.
American revolution didn't happen due to the tea party or the boston massacre. big forces were in play and they came together when adams, jefferson, paine, washington, etc. were alive. a few years earlier or later and we would have a different list of founding fathers...
q
If you don't think what Manning gave to Wikileaks was the catalyst for events in Tunisia, which in turn inspired Egypt, i don't think you have been paying attention q.
pollyana, i mean lucy,
fair enough. you are entitled to your thoughts.
i don't think manning is a philanthropist, or a do gooder, or whatever. i think his motives are somewhere else and that they are self-centered.
wikileaks without millions of people living in abject poverty with nothing to lose but their lives would have gone nowhere.
wikileaks without a hungry new leader lying in wait to take over mubarak's power would have gone nowhere.
wikileaks without tacit support for regime change from the US and UK would not have gone nowhere.
wikilinks without the egyptian army action, or in this case in action, would have gone nowhere.
remember tianamen square? nothing the US or UK could do, the army supported the regime, even millions willing to lay down their lives was not enough. the chinese said wikileaks and world press be damned...
q
I agree that a revolution depends on several factors and i agree that Manning didn't do what he did out of altruism. I do think that every revolution needs a spark to ignite it and for me, this spark came from Wikileaks. That the pieces all came together in Tunisia and Egypt, but never in Iran, Burma or China, is down to one or several of the factors you mention being missing but each had a spark to start it even if it wasn't successful.
Pollyana means someone overly optimistic right?
It doesn't affect my own opinion of WikiLeaks whether posterity judges the organisation to have played a key role in the events of last week in Egypt, or not. That's because I think that having a media outlet that refuses to be kow-towed by state power to spoonfeed us bullshit, repeating lies as fact, and refusing to examine suspect information because of the status-quo interests of their owners, is a good thing in and of itself, and if it goes on, will surely reap positive political consequences (if it hasn't already). Genuine right-wingers/ liberals/ libertarians tend to agree with this. Those who prefer the government's officially sanctioned Ministry of Information tend not to.
overly optimistic? no. sorry. good try. it means foolish.
it is optimistic to think you will live to be 100 years old. it is overly optimistic to think you will live to be 120 years old. it would be foolish to beleive that you will never die.
it is more than overly optimistic to believe that human nature will change in fewer than millions of years.
the limbic portion of the brain is very old and very powerful in its ways...
q
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