Feb 12, 2011, TW wrote:

To ALL:

Well, it’s something I guess.

Hey, Men, just catching up with things: What’s frying up the edges of the Arab world is a popular revolution of identity. It’s big, and actually new, but it remains a purely psychological revolution. The Arab people are only now learning they can force a change of government on their own, instead of just rolling with coups as has been the case -exclusively- throughout their history. However they have achieved nothing beyond this psychological breakthrough. Although conscription armies mean that military leaders must weigh the potential of soldiers refusing to fire on their pauperized kin -and even protecting them against police apparatus- it was in both Tunisia and Egypt the military which decided when to withdraw their protection of the autocracy, and the real administrative power passed of course directly to the extant military commissions.

Now, despite the general imagination of a new administrative model, no clear directions are laid for a constitutional congress, only a call for democratic elections, which are absurd without the former step. From the scraps of obsolete oppositions and fresh swarmings political parties are supposed to coalesce -and take their place in institutions which either don’t exist or have been gutted of all moral life. The civil bureaucracy almost alone functions on a paying basis -although it is permanently bent to impede everything within its purlieu, and it doesn’t prop up society through revolutions as is has usually done in Europe. The where and when of history has pinched the people between renouncing the western consumerist society and yearning for it. Such is the ironic imperative of the market world as it reaches deep into corners where mere subsistence itself is a consumerist ordeal.

Because the Arab world has been directed by market forces throughout its colonial and post-colonial periods. Because the Arab revolutions were in fact all coups which led to the systematic enrichment of each new autocrat and the collusion with external markets, playing tit-for-tat with pounds, francs, dollars and its own considerable resources, with the deliberate impoverishment of its citizens the invariable correlative. Which now goes unaddressed except as sloganeering.

Skipping over a constitutional congress to direct elections will leave the Arab people without any solid program to feed their millions. Which is what this new wave was about. Further, it is inconceivable that any new national government will engineer social mechanisms for diverting the financial rewards of ‘opening their markets’ (again. As always) to the staggering number of starvelings they own. No Arab Common Market exists with the strength to completely withdraw from the world market. No Arab revolution will yet arise with the necessary audacity to turn its firing squad on the real traitor: money.

February 12, 2011, PN wrote:

Kleptocracy is something of a new tradition in the Arab world. It has never known democracy, but the Bedouin tribal customs, combined with Muslim belief in the ordination and responsibility of rulers (and the historic Arab loathing of centralized government) tended to provide checks on power. These eroded during the caliphate period, and the Mumlaks were immune to it, but nonetheless, a sort of homeostasis existed prior to the European colonial era.

The Young Turks and multiple socialist, nationalist and neo-Muslim parties and congresses thrived in the early-Twentieth Century, but the ones that weren’t exterminated became co-opted into the Baath or sidelined, like (until this week) the Muslim Brotherhood. The Turks developed their own especially brutal autocracy. In this poisoned environment, only the cruel and the greedy ascended. Israel was a godsend to these dictators, providing a place to direct the rage and the blood of young Arab men.

The Arab street nonetheless erupted from time to time until Asaad’s slaughter of Hama in Syria in the 80s. After that, it all went quiet.

When Mohammed Bouazizi, the displaced fruit and vegetable vendor, set himself on fire, all that changed. And the connectedness provided by the Internet has forever changed the face of revolution. I agree that this is something new. It is a welcome development, in and beyond the Middle East. Now the Arab world (and the rest of us) need to catch up to the technology.

It’s a long walk. With the exception of Lebanon, a sort of city-state “plurocracy” in the Greek tradition (and deeply, brutally flawed as my relatives would tell anyone) a combination of Muslim disdain for market economics and deep Arab mistrust of all things central and urban has hamstrung the rule of law in the Middle East. This, after decades under the European boot, have combined to keep the Arab people in a time warp that makes Cuba look au courant.

The problem is not necessarily education. Tunisia is full of well-educated young people with nothing to do. So is Egypt. The problem is Arab society itself, the schism between the “notables” and the rest, a deep classism that oppresses the spirit of the people. The oppression of women is an equal or greater problem.

There is also a terrifying stratum of violently racist, antisemitic, anti-Christian, anti…everything-except-Wahhabist-style-Islam just seething and waiting for the opportunity to erupt. This, I am afraid, will always poison any Middle Eastern political development, at least for many years to come.

Still, for now the Arab street has taught the US street a lesson. As with developments on the street in France, Greece, Burma, etc., the rest of the world has provided a template for direct democracy that would be instructive to observe and, maybe, to emulate.

Until then I am reminded of what an Arab caliph said when asked, “What makes a happy man?”

He replied, “I have never met a happy man–and he has never met me.”

Feb 14, 2011, TW wrote:

To: ALL:

As the Arab revolution continues to spread I’ll keep this thread open a bit longer. -For those who don’t know, Phil has an Arab background and I a Jewish one. We’ve been best partners for over 30 years.

The psychological revolution I’m noting has a correlative to the people learning their own strength, and that is their acknowledgment of their own culture of oppression, in that they wasted no more energy ascribing all their woes to foreign conspirators. Taken together, this is indeed a colossal identity breakthrough. One of the clearest and most concrete results of this was in Egypt, where the unions were immediately involved -and continue to fill the policy vacuum- on a serious scale for the first time since early last century. This new self-image has already transformed the Arab populace and is absolutely sweeping through the middle east. It has even jolted the youth of such prosperous lands as Bahrain, and will undoubtedly affect the entire Arab world, although I note again that it has ignited around the edges, like paper. Yemen and Algeria face earnest emulation, Libya is straddling and feeling the heat, and things look smoky in the odd weak links, Morocco and Jordan, although both have more-or-less ‘beloved’ kings. Jordan is weaker, being some 70% Palistinian, and the Hashemite scam was as easy target of resentment from beginning. Morocco (I lived there) has a different and gentler make up, still very superstitious Berbers who fought islam 100 years then ironically became the cynosure of high isalm culture/history. Glancing at the fundamental economic culture, the classism you mentioned which is nearly feudalism in places like Pakistan, metastacized into blanket nepotism and economic patronism in the Arab lands. In Egypt, for example, the military has been rewarded by the state with substantial ownership of monopolies producing everything from household appliances to soft drinks and bottled water (in Iran they’ve bought the fealty of the fascist Republican Guards this way. For years, Arafat had his folks making shoes -not quite as developed a scheme but they’re still looking for all his money to this day. -All the foregoing of course in addition to the hilarious rake-off industry). So the tasks of both economic democracy and ‘de-Baathising’ (in whatever guise) are intertwined and insurmountable -there is simply too much profiteering to lose for the military to suddenly align themselves with the underclass or the pulped middle class. Finally, I don’t have much to say lauding the net and ether technology as a locomotive for these uprisings; simply spreading the word to assemble somewhere or exposing the brutality of the cops is usually possible without Twitter or Facebook. Some of the WikiLeaks and Al-J disclosures likely helped form the new identity by illuminating what the people were being battered against, but my interest remains focused on the (very basic) psychology.

Feb 14, 2011, PN wrote:

Elegantly and accurately-put, my friend.

While the ME defies generalities (for instance kleptocracies exist in Egypt, Syria, etc,. but not in Jordan, Morocco, etc.) the spirit of uprising is shaking the Arab world.

As I pointed out to my friend, Inna, these uprisings are not entirely spontaneous in nature. Some are years in the planning. The advent of internet-aided connectedness should not be undervalued. It revolutionized the union organizing I’ve done and it was essential in these events.

The more oppressive the culture, the greater the need for speed and constant contact. What could have been snuffed out with relative ease a few years ago was unstoppable because of these two factors.

That said, a fundamental shift will be needed in the Arab soul in order to give lasting meaning to these events. And the elephant in the room is the deep-rooted classism and religious stultification that infects these cultures, to one degree or another.

So we’ll see how all that pans out in a century or two.

Feb 15, 2011, TW wrote:
To: ALL

Thread continued, Phil’s latest above, my response here. Couple corrections (writing too fast -and some of this stuff is happening just hours after we write of it): My last post should have said Iran’s Revolutionary Guard (and by fascist I meant to describe their function as the regime’s handy S.A. (before the S.S. took over their work), not Republican Guards. In my first post I meant to write denounce, not renounce (..pinched the people between denouncing the western consumerist society and yearning for it.) -as in rage against the autocrats’ plunderings. Also in first post, should’ve written ‘tit-for-tat with pounds, francs, rubles, dollars’.

On the ground, as they say (idiotic expression; we are all on the ground), your assessment of internet power in the revolts is proven true, although much of what happened in Egypt was due to handbills stating where to go, what to do, and who to bring being passed out -by young people- and the net is easier to switch off. My attention is on other aspects, and I suspect far from that particular technology as a result of my own prejudice. I have never used anything like Twitter or Facebook and so must add ignorance to my prejudice. I don’t really know how they work. I’m content to listen to the little voices in my head. But it is an element in these struggles and always adds a good punchline when the U.S. administration touts the glory of its freedom. Obviously, television and especially pop music gnaws at the cultural identity of Fortress Araby, and builds up ontological possibilities beyond those on the doorstep. The lifestyles encapsulated therein are coveted, bastardized and sometimes anathematized, as happens everywhere, on an almost boundless scale. But the technology transmitting these little passionplays are market endeavors, and the market now pushes cell phones (major push in Africa, though, oddly enough, for micro-banking above all), so the messages are still communication determined by corporate production and to me suspect because the market is dictating the very mode and availability of thought. The mechanics of uprisings for me are still in the nature of knowing that the deciding moment is not when the crowds have lost their fear, but when the police begin to fear the crowds.

Rub that last sentence against the religious stultification you note below and the current spotlights yet another pachyderm in the palace: Iran, which I expected, on economic evidence, to implode 2 years ago, is now at risk from the new Arab self-image. The desires, demands and, yes, the technology are all the same as in the properly Arab revolts. Likewise the corruption, peculation, hypocrisy and entrenched power-for-power’s sake of the government. But Iran has been the moral and cultural bastion of islamic identity until now insofar as it is the most modern model of an islamic/arab revolution, beginning with renaming itself the Islamic Republic of Iran. Its revolution was as significant as the century’s earlier creation of the USSR, and its world position perfectly analogous. If Iran falls to a popular revolution, this model will be said to have been discredited. Thoroughly. It would bury the ideology of islamic democracy and force the populace to stick with the new civic personality now being born in the Arab revolts. So, while western media yammers about the Arab changes reflecting the East Block changes of 1989, there is real legitimacy to viewing Iran and it’s preeminence (as the first of that revolutions kind, and its center of operations) in the light of the USSR, that is, its demise. If the Islamic Republic goes, the new identity cast in these Arab uprisings will entirely replace that of the previous big revolution. Just as the ayatollahs’ society wiped out the discredited pan-Arab, nationalist and Baathist revolutions.

For now, it looks like these risings are releasing some people from the hide-bound culture that has warped the civic personality. For them now it’s either that, or else you can have archaic and eat it, too. Anyway, we still have some days to go, but all of these things together at a quick pace would squeegee the landscape completely clean, and open for the sole remaining accepted model, ‘Liberal Democracy,’ which is scary. Lord knows who’s going to feed all those people.

Feb 16, 2011, PN wrote:

I don’t have much to add to your excellent analysis except agreement. Regarding Iran, its influence is limited because it is A) Persian and B) Shiite. But its revolution set a scary precedent. Its populace is well-educated and modern by ME standards; it had a robust labor movement; it has had more liberated women. But it also had a charismatic mullah, and Egypt does not. However it happened (and books have been written on it) the Iranian revolution began with promise and ended with state lynchings and a nuclear program clearly aimed at killing Jews in large numbers. None of us is naive enough to believe that can’t happen again, on a possibly broader scale. What militates against this outcome is the predominantly Sunni and/or secular nature of so many of these regimes (Syria is Alawite-led, but that hardly matters in that Baathist regime, at least not at the moment) and an intervening period of three decades during which much has changed in terms of technology, education and political facts, particularly as relates to the Arab world’s relationship to Israel and the West.

Feb 18, 201, PN wrote:

To: TW:

Wisconsin is a pale rider on a pale horse, but at least it’s moving. I’ve union-organized sine 1995 or so, and it’s depressing work. Unorganized workers in Colorado think you are Satan for trying to get them a dental plan. In Arizona they screamed and slammed the doors/phones. In Oregon we managed an identical occupation of the capitol rotunda (and, when we struck, the governor’s office itself) but that was then. Now these people are too fat to move, much less strike for days in the cold.