Revolution in the air: tea party on the nile

Rioting and roaring mobs have part of humankind’s lot since time immemorial. Hate, blood-thirst, looting and pillaging have historically required minimal incitement to break a state of uneasy peace. For centuries mobs have risen and destroyed, from the Roman Empire, straight through the Enlightenment and headlong into the French Revolution, vengeance has been meted to those whom thought responsible for their circumstances. The French Revolution began a new era where strategists used the mob as a tool to achieve long-term ideological ends which gave the dispossessed an even more ruthless sense of identity. And so the riot became an instrument of revolution. …

Christopher Hitchens: Sooner or later, the line gets crossed and people can take no more. Nicolae Ceausescu wrote his own death warrant on the day in December 1989 when he decided to summon the people of Bucharest for just one more compulsory rally where they would have to stand, screaming with inner boredom, and clap their hands to order while he spoke for as long as he liked. I remember thinking, of the Egyptian “elections” of last fall, that President Hosni Mubarak would have gotten more respect for simply cancelling them than for pretending to hold them in the insulting way he did. Something similar applies to the “green” rebellion that followed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s most recent plebiscite: Everybody already knew that things were “fixed,” but this time the mullahs didn’t even trouble to pretend that they were not fixed. It’s possible that people will overlook outright brutality sooner than they will forgive undisguised contempt. Read More: http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/Fighting+Honour/4207354/story.html a

…Things got better toward the end of the nineteenth-century. Baron Haussmann drove his great boulevards through the riotous heart of Paris, providing excellent vistas for the rifle and, later, the machine gun and the tank. The weapons at the command of authority outdistanced the capacity of the mob to retaliate once the issue was joined. It was not until the 1920′s and 30′s that the riot was resuscitated by the paramilitary formation of the fascists, the Nazis, and the Action Francaise on the one hand, and the Communist Party on the other. The military fanatics having been crushed, riots declined in Europe into protest that teetered along the border of violence but rarely broke into it.

The student riots of ’68  in Europe were usually provoked by academic situations, but were cleverly exploited by astute political leaders. The students, in France became a type of false proletariat and were exploited as such. Attempts were made with some success to harness student idealism to the political programs of the working class; the rioting belonged to the tradition of both radical socialism and anarchism, but seem different in dimension to what is transpiring in Egypt which seems to belong to a more classic tradition: a deeper convulsion in the very bowels of society.  The disturbances in Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia seem more akin to riots in pre-revolutionary Europe before the mobs became infiltrated with political agents and exploiters who turned the riot to social revolutionary ends. At least so it appears in the early stages….

Hitchens:The best of the Egyptian “civil society” dissidents, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, produced the extraordinary effect that he did by the simple method of challenging the Mubarak regime on those very terms. If it was going to pretend to hold elections, then Ibrahim and his fellow researchers claimed the right to conduct independent surveys of the voters and to publish the results. One can hardly imagine a milder form of resistance, yet, because of the overweening stupidity and crudity of the authorities, it had consequences of an almost seismic kind. Show trials of mild-mannered opinion pollsters and think-tank scholars; dark accusations of secret foreign funding for the practice of political sociology: The whole lumbering apparatus of the Egyptian state conspired to make itself appear humourless and thuggish and to convince its people that they were being held as serfs by fools. Again, the sense of insult ran very deep, and Mubarak’s bullies were too dense to understand their own mistake. Read More: http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/Fighting+Honour/4207354/story.html a

…The classical riot was generally more than a sudden hysterical outburst of anguish and despair. While it lacked political leaders it did not lack leadership. Their approach was often direct: break open the granaries to lower prices by threats of destruction, or to improve wages or even secure work. The rioters were out to secure immediate benefits that were economic, social and local, though in the Egyptian case there is ostensibly an element of overturning the social structure, of which only time will tell. We have riots because they work more times than not. True, some rioters are caught, hanged, shot and imprisoned, but the rioting mass usually escapes scot-free and often with loot, and many times they were successful in winning their immediate short-term gains.

Large practical gain is quite simple. Large physical losses of property scare owners into action. It is a sobering fact, as in the past, so in the present that riots scarcely fail. The rioters always win at least in the short-term. The second gain is the release of social emotion. Society, as far as most Egyptian’s see, never changes so riot brings revenge as well as a windfa

In the old days men burned their way across the countryside and into the cities in an orgiastic release of hatred and frustration. As long as the conditions that lead to violence continue, the riot with its emotional release , material windfalls, and illusory social gains will never extinguish itself whether in Egypt, or even in the developed world.

The West has always been saved by its enormous affluence and the creation of a pattern of social hope through better education and greater political participation whatever its merits. Obviously, there are more complex factors at work, but these seem to be the primary ones. The present political divide in America could lead to some fundamental changes ; classes like individuals leap at a glimmer of real hope and this has sustained the demonstrations in Egypt.

Whatever happens in Egypt and beyond, the hope must be real. It might have to be more fundamental than the American template of normative democracy based on property law. If  the changes prove illusory, then looting will stop, rioters will become disciplined, ferocious, dedicated, willing to die by the tens of thousands so they can kindle an unquestionable spark of hop in the hearts of their own people. They will start fighting not for the present but for future generations.

ADDENDUM:
Conrad Black: Even Arab experts admit great uncertainty about what will come next. There is no evidence that the Muslim Brotherhood, a thoroughly terrorist organization that assassinated Anwar Sadat, could come close to winning an election, and the army will not tolerate a coup d’état, other than, if necessary, by its own leaders, in emulation of the initial rise of the National Democrats in the coup by Colonel Nasser and comrades in 1952. (There have been just one party, and three presidents, in 58 years.) The attempt by Mohammed ElBaradei to represent himself as a respected and popular leader is a fraud and a levitation. The former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency was just an apologist for Khamenei and Ahmedinejad’s nuclear military program in Iran, which ElBaradei considers an equal-opportunity move by Islam (though Pakistan already has what it calls “an Islamic bomb”) and by the developing world generally.

President Obama’s remarks on Tuesday night were relatively inoffensive, but the United States wants to be careful about bandying the idea of democracy around too loosely in countries that have had no experience of it and have a naturally combustible socioeconomic makeup. It should also make a goal-line stand for the theory that to be America’s ally is not subscribing to one’s own death warrant. The Chinese stick with their allies, no matter how reprehensible they are, such as the Kims in North Korea and the colonels in Burma, and even the unspeakable Mugabe. The U.S. should avoid such lepers, but it mustn’t run for cover whenever the heat comes up on its allies.

Read more: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/02/03/conrad-black-give-mubarak-time-to-exit-gracefully-and-the-world-will-be-better-off/#ixzz1D1tLjwmn