Egypt: We May Despise The Muslim Brotherhood, But A Coup Is A Coup

[Purveyor]

Nick Cohen
The Observer, Saturday 17 August 2013 17.04 EDT

When a state massacres 600 demonstrators, it is not just its own citizens it murders. It also kills the possibility of compromise. The perpetrators mean you to understand that there can be no going back. When they kill, they are well aware that they are shedding too much blood for normal politics to kick in and allow differences to be patched up and deals made.

The killers have the swagger of gangsters. "We know," they seem to say, "that we are breaking all the basic standards of civilised behaviour. We know people will hate us until the day we die for what we have done today. But do you know what? We don't care."

The rest of the world may not care either about the revolutionary, or counter-revolutionary, terror in Egypt – and for reasons I will get to later our inability to agree on what to call it speaks volumes. Everyone from politicians to concerned citizens says they care, of course. But do they in their hearts? I confess that although I deplore the murder of protesters and the suspension of democracy, I cannot feel any gut identification with reactionary men and women in the Muslim Brotherhood. It is not as if the Burmese military had arrested Aung San Suu Kyi, rounded up the leaders of the National League for Democracy and restored the junta. Then I would know how I felt and how to respond – as, I suspect, would hundreds of millions around the world. But when the same thing happens in Egypt, I understand why it is wrong in theory but cannot feel true anger in practice.

We got used to revolutions that got good people – to use babyish language – out of jail: Mandela, Havel, Suu Kyi. They have happened everywhere, except in the Middle East, where the choice is between secular, or occasionally secular, authoritarians and Islamists – between "fascists with uniforms and fascists with Korans" as the Egyptian feminist Mona Eltahawy put it, with only a touch of hyperbole. That choice is no choice at all.

Even the pro-Islamist elements in the European left, which have shamed radical politics for a decade, are quiet now. The streets of London, Paris and Berlin are not clogged with demonstrators calling for the democratic process to be followed and the will of the Egyptian people (albeit by a tiny majority) respected.

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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/17/egypt-unrest-west-response

[cali]

1. thanks for posting this.

I'm disgusted with the reaction here at DU. I've seen post after post defending and even applauding this mass murder.

It makes me sick.

[Purveyor]

2. A couple of issues and the reaction to them on DU surprise me as of late. eom

[Fumesucker]

3. The ultimate question is, do we support the right of the people of a country to vote in a theocracy?

A great many DUers would be at least theoretically subject to execution under a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy not for what they do but for who they are or what they believe or don't believe.

I'm not sure where I stand on this really, I certainly hate what's happened but I hate to think of my neighbors as wanting to institute a regime that will execute me for my beliefs.

It's something that needs to be discussed.

[socialist_n_TN]

4. It's a pretty tough choice all right.........

And quite frankly, I don't think that the Egyptian military will stop with the MB. After they take out the Brotherhood, then they'll go for the revolutionary socialists and the rest of the revolutionaries who rose against Mubarak.

The only out is a true Permanent revolution, a la Trotsky, where the workers take the factories and the people take the neighborhoods and the grunts take the military. The soldiers that al-Sisi is using against the MB are mostly the elite troops, NOT the average Egyptian GI. The generals don't trust them to carry out the orders to fire on civilians. The workplace, neighborhood, and soldier councils created using IMMEDIATELY recallable delegates would then meet to set up a worker's government and self defense militias to protect against the remnents of both the Brotherhood (and the other fascistic groups) and the generals.

[Warpy]

5. I don't think so, honestly.

Morsi's main problem was that he was more intent on remaking the country than governing it. Government departments fractured apart and nobody was minding the store, so to speak.

Anyone who thinks he'd have gone meekly out of office should he finish his term and be defeated in an election doesn't know the MB very well. These are not moderates, they weed those out in the selection process. Morsi would simply have assumed Mubarak's lifetime office and their brand of harsh Islamic law would have created another repressive theocracy in the region.

I seriously doubt the military will be interested in any gadfly groups like socialists. Those groups are small and weak but if they grow, they'll be likely to take the reins in the future so the military can get back to its main business of training and defending the borders.

However, anybody who rules the country does so with the approval of the military.

[socialist_n_TN]

6. Well, sure Morsi was more interested in setting up the Brotherhood.....

in a theocratic fascist permanent rule. That's why 17 million people were in the streets in June protesting his rule and calling for his ouster. You can look at the unpopularity of Morsi and the Brotherhood by seeing who's in the streets now. It's emphatically NOT 17 million people.

As to the rest of your post, I think that you can look at Turkey for an example. Even though Turkish communists were NOT a very influential group, they were the first victims of the crackdown after the unrest settled down in Turkey. ALL of these groups, the MB, the military, the liberals will ALL kowtow to the international capitalists when it comes to reordering Egyptian society. Which is why the international capitalists don't really care WHO takes control and settles things down so they can get back to business as usual. The only ones who DON'T kowtow are the revolutionary socialists. They are the ONLY group that will show an alternative way out. Just agitating for an alternative is why they are so dangerous to the established world order and all of their toadies. And that's why the military will turn on them next, just like Erdogan did the communists in Turkey.

As to the Permanent Revolution scenario, I make no predictions about whether it will happen or not. In fact, the odds say it probably won't. But it IS the only scenario that will work out for the Egyptian people. All the rest will involve some form of dictatorship in the service of capital.