The first attempt to steal Egypt’s revolution…

The realpolitik apparatus around the world may be about to line up behind Omar Suleiman as successor to Hosni Mubarak. Suleiman, former foreign intelligence chief, is credited with shattering an Islamist terror network – using tactics still spoken of in whispers. He is highly educated in a variety of pretty tough schools, including the Soviet military academy in Frunze. He is also – and this is the important bit – an acceptable candidate to the military and security apparatus in Egypt, and a man who sees eye to eye with the US on Israel-Palestine and a variety of related issues. He is being touted as a logical successor and one who can hold the line against the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamism inside Egypt, a comforting idea to many in the Pentagon and the State Department.

He’s not really a democrat, though. In fact, he was seen two years ago as a possible successor to Mubarak because he was hard enough to continue the same policies, making it comfortable for Egypt’s strategic partners – basically, us. So as I said in my earlier post, this is the classic opportunity for the US and EU to sell a democratic movement down the river in the hope of securing our lines of supply. There will be much chatter about ‘stability’ in the region – by which is meant political and social lockdown so long as the oil continues to flow. The contention is and has always been that it’s better to have a strongman – like Saddam Hussein, for example, or Hosni Mubarak himself – than a weak democratic government or, worse yet, an unfavourable government elected in free and fair elections.

It’s a bad idea for so many reasons. Chalmers Johnson, alas now dead, wrote extensively about the phenomenon of blowback, which is essentially endemic in our lives today. William Blum has detailed the interventions and upsets which have resulted from this position since WWII in his book, Killing Hope.

But that doesn’t mean it won’t be pushed hard and represented as our only sensible course. Watch for talking heads telling us we’re far better off with Egypt under the thumb of a powerful leader than Egypt free.

“The Book Of Revolution is not written, it is sung.”

Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic has a translation of what appears to be the manual of the Egyptian protestors – except that, if they’re following this text, they’re not engaging in civil disobedience, they’re attempting – or believe they are attempting – the full monty.

Briefly – because that manual is too fascinating to mess around talking about it and analysing it too much right now – that is a professional document. It is written by someone with some form in civil disobedience. It is cautious of communications media – the new dictat of technologically asymmetrical rebellion is that you abandon more advanced comms for more secure ones. A lot of thought has gone into it. There’s always one, wherever you are; announce you’re having a demo, and it turns out the mild little bloke who makes the tea is a union rep.

The document makes no mention of religion, but it does strike the basic chords I mentioned in my earlier post – it talks about freedom, justice, and peace, and it mentions the exploitation of Egypt’s resources in the context of those things. In other words, it may not be directly taken from 1917, but it wouldn’t look out of place there, either.

The question is what will happen to this action plan out in the world. At the Poll Tax riots here in the UK in the 80s, I saw three disparate strands of rhetoric become one at the lowest common denominator. The South Africa House Picket was about the ‘fascist South African Embassy’; the Anarchists were screaming that the police were the ‘Guardians of the fascist ruling class’; and the Socialist Worker people were talking about the ‘fascist Poll Tax disenfranchising the working man’ and the representatives of the government were – again – the police. That wasn’t half so loaded nor so lethal a situation as what’s happening in Egypt, but you know the outcome: South Africa House was set on fire, and the police were suddenly in a fight they weren’t really prepared for.

The five hundred devils of revolution – personal greed, personal fear, political expediency, cock-up, itchy trigger fingers, old scores and vengeance, opportunism, fundamentalism both religious and secular, overcaution, overextension, betrayal from without, and misunderstanding, to name just a few – will be out in force if this really does become the moment Egypt enters a new era.

I realise I sound like a doom-monger. I’m not. I believe this can be a moment of positive change. But only if those inside hold the line, and the governments of the world around behave with an eye to the long haul and the world we want, not the world we fear. Since 1989, we have missed any number of moments where a little hope and a little courage from our governments might have achieved amazing things. We missed, for example, the moment when Russia could have become truly democratic.

Let’s not miss this one. Please.

[Notes: this post is unwarrantied and unchecked; I'm in a cafe with my iPad and the dratted, awful WordPress app, so there are no links; my on-the-ground knowledge of the specifics of Egypt is nil; my entire expertise here derives from two years as an undergrad studying revolution, during which time my principle concern was the girl with the gorgeously tiny waist and the nose ring and whether she would go to bed with me if I was able to demonstrate sufficient grasp of the Critical Theory of Theodore Adorno; I wrote this mostly for myself and I welcome corrections; oh, and it's long. Caveat lector.]

The thing about revolution…

Sooooo… Egypt is in turmoil. If the Mubarak government falls – and this morning, every seems to be saying that is on the cards – the face of the region will change. The eternal optimism of the industrialised capitalist world seems to be in play again: the press narrative has been of plucky Egyptian democrats standing against oppressive regime coppers. And that may well be or have been the reality. However, a few words of caution are in order, lest we once again be disappointed by the outcome of a political upheaval and wrong-footed by the direction it takes.

In the background (until a few hours ago when it declared support for the protests) is the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s the largest single opposition group in Egypt, where, indeed, it was created. The product of the early part of the 20th Century and its ideological revolutionisms, the Muslim Brotherhood is a modern fundamentalist movement with aspects culled from Russian Anarchism and Marxism as much as from Islam. What it emphatically is not is an organisation which loves America, liberal values, and rock and roll.

This unrest may have begun as a popular democratic rejection of the Mubarak regime, but what will happen now is not clear. A coup d’état is a relatively simple business in which one person or group displaces another, but the system of government and social structure is largely unaltered. This isn’t going to be one of those. In one way or another, this looks set to be what Theda Skocpol called ‘rapid social change’ – or, more popularly, revolution. And revolution is fundamentally complex, even chaotic (in the mathematical sense) and its outcome is hard to predict and impossible to control.

Take a look at a few historical examples. Start with the one which is most often considered normative, in part because history claims the word was coined to describe it: the French Revolution. You had a social structure which was incompatible with its economic environment – an increasingly affluent middle class being denied status by an entrenched but largely unproductive aristocracy. Down below, the peasants class and the urban working class were, inevitably, getting screwed by everyone. The middle class went into rebellion – political, not physical – over voting rights and power. Their desire was not in the first place to destroy the monarchy or to smash the existing structure, but to join the elite. The lower classes, meanwhile, did not intend to usher in the new tyranny of The Terror or the rise of an empire. They wanted what peasants and workers almost always want from their government, and rarely get: food and personal security. But once the ball started rolling, no one could steer it. Consilient, contradictory forces generated outcomes which were painful for French people for decades. One can argue, in favour of the revolution, that the end product was a democratic republic – but that requires a selective slice through the history, a drawing of lines under one period and an assertion of beginnings and endings which I find a little arbitrary. Safer to say that the Revolution was a part of France’s journey to democracy, a turmoil in which the ideal was first expressed as the future of the nation, albeit with uncertain sincerity. But those ideas did not spring full blown from the revolutionary period and they were not actualised until after the period was over.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 is the same. The original uprising against the absolute monarch was a rejection of the state as it stood and of the social order. In the chaos, a small but extremely well-organised group of ideologues was able to take control of the popular discourse – but when they found themselves in power, the contradictions of their position became apparent. Their ideology was in conflict with the promises they had made. The system of distributed local government – of soviets – was destroyed and replaced b the centralised Party. The grass roots revolution became the soviet one, which was in turn displaced by a totalitarian group, and the White Tsars were replaced by the Red Tsars.

America, China, England, Spain, Portugal, and Iran have all engaged in revolution in the last four hundred years, some of them more than once, and on not one of those occasions has the outcome matched the expectation. England’s revolution was the first, and even now the aristocracy, the monarchy, and the Church of England retain an extraordinary if indirect grasp on power. Our present government is composed largely of men whose path through life would not look socially out of place in a history of 17th, 18th, 19th, or 20th Century Britain.

So who are the players in Egypt’s drama? Sayyid Qutb, decades dead, is one: an angry young man sent from Egypt to America by friends who wanted him to loosen up, he underwent instead a kind of transformation. His journey through early 20th Century America as a man who was obviously not white, and who was inclined towards a conservative and faith-based perception, so appalled him that he crafted a synthesis of modern revolutionary ideas and Islam which effectively took the evils of capitalism as the evils of unrighteousness and substituted the deity for socialism or anarchy. That synthesis is one of the foundations of modern Islamism (and the Muslim Brotherhood), and of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Above all, their strength is in a clear, simple rhetoric and a pre-existing power structure.

Democrats, for sure: basic assumption is that they’re urban and educated middle class people, cosmopolitan in outlook and desperate for prosperity and gentle social progression (but not too much of it). A powerful, intellectual minority, but not a power base in and of themselves. And nuance plays badly in revolution.

The army, inevitably: classically the poorer and less well-educated people from rural and urban-poor backgrounds. Are they largely secular or moderate, or do they tend towards the Muslim Brotherhood? The officer class may have sympathies with the democrats or may be vested in Mubarak’s regime, depending on their own culpability and their assessment of the threat from within.

The rural and urban lower classes – farmers and manual workers. The ‘real people’. Historically – in other cases, which may or may not be similar – they know when they can’t take any more, and what they need – but which way will they break? Absent a charismatic and powerful leader emerging from this group and creating his or her own structures, they will be channelled by a nearby, compelling narrative. The slogan will be akin to ‘food, peace, freedom’, and the new regime will have either to delivery very fast or suppress the inevitable cries of outrage and betrayal. This is where the Russian February Revolution fell and the October Revolution changed the course of Russia from nascent distributed democracy to one-party state.

External forces – the US, EU, Israel, Pakistan, Hamas, Al Qaeda, the other Arab states. All or any of the above may seek to influence events and any such attempt will change what happens, but not necessarily in a predictable way.

So, yes, Mubarak’s regime is nasty. But given Egypt’s place in the world and the powers in play, it’s not clear to me that its fall is going to take us anywhere good. Given that it’s happening, of course, we will have to be in the mix, trying to get an outcome which suits us. The trouble is, again looking at history, our power brokers will prefer a strongman to a democrat vulnerable to being unseated by a religious ideologue. Someone, somewhere, is even now submitting a recommendation to back such a person over and above a genuine democrat, and if that course is followed we will yet again be in the business of supporting a monster for fear of a worse one, and the reputation of the developed northwest will sink further in the eyes of the Arab world – and, indeed, anyone else who’s paying attention.