A Marriage of Convenience: “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” –a complex and costly policy

Ashley Lukens wrote a great article in the Honolulu Weekly about the recent repeal of the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy and the complexities surrounding the issue of gays in the military:

One year into earning his bachelor’s degree at Hawaii Pacific University (HPU), John Foster longed for more structure and direction in his life. In 2003, he joined the US Navy and began a career as a linguist. Shortly after, Foster married Amy Carson. During their five-year marriage, the couple, who asked not to have their real names published, remained open about their gay and lesbian sexual identities.

Their story highlights the absurdities of living as a gay or lesbian service member under the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) policy. It also illustrates the complexities involved in the repeal of the policy, which will soon go into effect. What will the repeal of DADT mean for Foster, Carson and other soldiers–gay or straight, married or single?

She raises complex questions about justice and equality for LGBTQ service members and the impacts and role of the military in U.S. wars and occupations of other countries, including Hawai’i. Some doubt that the repeal of the policy will amount to significant change in the military culture:

Kathy Ferguson, professor of political science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, doubts that the repeal of DADT will significantly alter the military’s homophobic culture.

“As long as the military proudly trains soldiers through the strategic use of sex and gender –“Don’t be a lady, a little girl, etc.,” and as long as contempt for women and homosexuals remains at the heart of soldiering –then gay service members will remain the object of contempt.”

The importance of sexuality in soldiering underpinned the conservative opposition to the repeal of DADT.

Eri Oura, former organizer of the Collective for Equity Justice and Empowerment and AFSC Hawai’i committee member and yours truly were interviewed for this article:

“A change in policy does not lead to a change in culture,” echoes local LGBT activist Eri Oura. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, like gay marriage and civil union legislation, are policy changes. The repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell does not in any way imply that we can stop fighting for justice for all peoples.”

For Oura, this fight for justice requires that we not uncritically laud the repeal of DADT.

“I remember the day that Obama signed the repeal, there was an air of triumph across the LGTB community. People were really excited about it, my friends included, because it would open up new job and educational opportunities. What people were forgetting is that the military is a vehicle for war. Every day, people are being killed unnecessarily–soldiers and civilians alike. It does not help those of us who are struggling to liberate their communities from the forces of our economic draft.”

So, does celebrating the repeal of DADT bolster US militarism or make us complicit with the US’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Does it implicate LGTB activists in the effects of militarism here in Hawaii?

The fight against militarism and the fight for equality are important political battles in Hawaii. As Native Hawaiian activists struggle for cultural access at Makua Valley, environmentalist fight against the Stryker Brigade and LGTB advocates begin to assess the passage of a civil unions bill, the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell raises some interesting questions for local residents and political leaders.

Kyle Kajihiro of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), is particularly wary of the effects of DADT’s repeal on demilitarization efforts in Hawaii. The AFSC focuses on the clean up, restoration and return of military-held lands in Hawaii as a way of moving toward a sustainable, peaceful society.

“We feel Hawaii should not be used as a place to expand US militarism and conduct wars against other peoples,” he explains. AFSC focuses on educating Hawaii’s youth on the realities of military service and promoting alternative ways of serving their community.

But even Kajihiro admits that the repeal of DADT creates a conundrum for progressive activists.

“Although we advocate for demilitarization and alternatives to the military, we are strong supporters of Hawaii’s LGTB youth. The AFSC feels that they should be treated fairly and equally when serving in the military.”

The author generously gave me the last word:

For the Army, no matter how you look at it, the repeal of DADT is a step in the right direction, according to Kajihiro.

“People feel that if they applaud the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, they are somehow endorsing the further militarization of Hawaii,” he says. “It’s not so. Anytime the government has less control over our bodies is a reason to celebrate. That is what the repeal of DADT means — for gay and straight people alike.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

February 22, 2011

The Rise and Fall of America’s Military Henchmen: History Repeats Itself? From the “King of Java” to the Pharaoh of Egypt

In “Dictators are “Disposable”: The Rise and Fall of America’s Military Henchmen: History Repeats Itself? From the “King of Java” to the Pharaoh of Egypt”, Michel Chossudovsky cautions against overestimating the role of people power in the toppling of Mubarak in Egypt, lest we overlook the other forces at play. Reviewing the overthrow of Suharto, the brutal U.S. backed dictator of Indonesia, he argues that the regime change was induced by western powers because Suharto had outlived his usefulness to the global capitalist order. He draws parallels with events in Egypt:

The outcome of Suharto’s demise was continuity. To this date, the military machine combined with a ruthless form of capitalist development prevails in Indonesia. The country is rich in natural resources. It is an oil producing economy. Yet poverty and unemployment are rampant. The country’s wealth is appropriated by foreign conglomerates with the support of the military machine and police apparatus.

Both Suharto and Mubarak were America’s henchmen recruited from the ranks of the military. They are disposable leaders. When they are no longer needed, they are replaced. In the words of Finian Cunningham in relation to Indonesia (1998), “the country’s military machine continues to operate with brutal efficiency…”

Democratic elections took place in 1999, Abdurrahman Wahid was appointed president by the Parliament with Sukarno’s daughter Megawati as Vice President. Wahid was later impeached. The illusion of a populist government prevailed with Megawati as a figurehead president (2001-2004).

Meanwhile, the role of the military and its links to the US have remained unscathed. In 2004, a (former) career military commander with close ties to the Pentagon, trained at Fort Benning and the US Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono became president. He was reelected in 2009.

Egypt: US Sponsored Coup d’Etat?

In Egypt, following Mubarak’s demise, the military machine prevails. Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, Egypt’s defense minister, commander in chief of the Armed Forces and since February 11, 2011 head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, is the de facto Head of State, the Vice presidency is held by Omar Suleiman. Both men are US appointees.

February 22, 2011

The Army’s persistent Depleted Uranium problem in Hawai’i

Joan Conrow has written an excellent synopsis of the military’s depleted uranium (DU) contamination issue in Hawai’i on the Civil Beat website. Here’s an excerpt of her article:

The Army prohibited all training with DU in 1996; however, munitions containing DU remain in wide use.

Although the Army for years denied that it had ever used DU munitions in Hawaii, contractors found 15 tail assemblies from the M101 spotting rounds while clearing a firing range at Schofield Barracks in 2005. Even then the Army did not publicly disclose the presence of DU in Hawaii. The issue came to light inadvertently in 2006, when Earthjustice discovered communication about DU in Army e-mails subpoenaed as part of the ongoing litigation over the use of Makua as a live fire training facility.

The Army subsequently acknowledged that it trained soldiers on the Davy Crockett weapon in Hawaii and at least seven other states during the 1960s.

As a result, some residents have developed a deep distrust of the Army’s statements regarding DU, even though the Army maintains it is committed to transparency on the issue.

Impacts

It’s unclear how much DU is located in the Islands, or exactly where. Some 29,318 M101 spotting rounds containing 12,232 pounds of DU remain unaccounted for on American installations, according to the Army’s permit application. In Hawaii, the Army’s initial surveys were conducted at just three installations — Schofield, PTA and Makua — and the effort was severely limited by dense vegetation, rugged terrain and what the military characterized as “safety considerations” due to unexploded ordnance.

It’s also unclear just how DU may be affecting human health and the environment in Hawaii, as well as other parts of the world where it was used in combat. Its potentially severe and long-lasting impacts are the core of a growing controversy over its use on the battlefield and its presence in the Islands.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Here’s a related article from August 2010 on the Army’s application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for an after-the-fact license to “possess” DU at ranges in Hawai’i.

February 20, 2011February 20, 2011

Why the U.S. is worried about protests in Bahrain

The revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt have sparked numerous uprisings in the Arab world, including tiny Bahrain. But as AOL News reports, due to the strategic location and the large U.S. military bases on Bahrain, the political unrest there has U.S. officials worried:

Most Americans couldn’t find Bahrain on a map before this week, but the escalating violence unfolding in the tiny island monarchy could do more damage to U.S. interests in the Middle East than the more high-profile revolution in Egypt.

Bahrain is a tiny group of islands that could fit nearly six times over into Rhode Island. The country has been the headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet since shortly after World War II and is a major resupply and refueling depot for warships supporting troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and patrolling the pirate-infested waters off Somalia.

It is also a strategic listening post for keeping tabs on Iran and its navy

The military issued warnings to U.S. personnel in the area and is also monitoring the situation in Djibouti, the location of another U.S. military base:

The Navy said it is monitoring the situation and stressed that the demonstrations are not aimed as the U.S. government. Still, the Navy has warned uniformed personnel, civilian workers and their families to stay clear of the area where the protests are taking place.

U.S. forces in Bahrain aren’t the only ones on heightened alert. The Pentagon has several strategic military bases scattered around the gulf. It also is watching closely as protests heat up in the small nation of Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, where the only U.S. military base on that continent is located.

Al Jazeera coverage of the uprising in Bahrain:

Global Research posted an article on the social and political roots of the uprising in Bahrain:

“Have you ever seen an island with no beaches?” The question posed by the young Bahraini taxi man standing among thousands of chanting anti-government protesters seemed at first to be a bit off the wall. But his explanation soon got to the heart of the grievances that have brought tens of thousands of Bahrainis on to the streets over the past week – protests which have seen at least seven civilians killed amid scenes of excessive violence by state security forces.

Why no beaches?

In the early hours of Thursday, up to five thousand Bahraini protesters were forced from the main demonstration site at the Pearl Roundabout, a landmark intersection in the capital, Manama. The Bahraini authorities deployed helicopters, dozens of tanks and armoured personnel carriers, with army and police firing teargas and live rounds. Among the protesters were hundreds of women and children.

At the centre of the site is the Pearl Monument, which alludes to the country’s traditional pearl diving and fishing industries – industries that were the mainstay of communities.

Within view of the monument are the iconic skyscrapers of Bahrain’s newfound wealth, including the Financial Harbour and the World Trade Center. Only a few years ago, this entire area of the capital was sea, the land having been reclaimed and developed. Up to 20 per cent of Bahrain’s total land area has been reclaimed from the sea over the past three decades.

However, this vast reclamation and development drive has, according to local environmental groups, devastated the island’s marine ecology and fish stocks in particular. The rampant development – which has made fortunes for the country’s elite – has had an equally devastating effect on local communities who have depended on the sea for their livelihoods. While these communities have suffered the blight of unemployment and poverty, they also have witnessed roaring property development, land prices and profits benefiting the ruling elite.

And these destabilizing social conditions are linked to the U.S. military interests in Bahrain:

Bahrain’s unstable social formation is underpinned by unwavering US diplomatic and military support. The island serves as the base for the US Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf. The latest wave of state repression has tellingly elicited only a subdued, ambivalent comment from Washington, urging “all sides to refrain from violence” – Washington-speak that translates into support for the government. Last year, Bahrain received $19.5 million in US military aid, which, on a per capita basis, equates to greater than that delivered to Egypt.

February 14, 2011

“Game Over” for Mubarak, “Game On” for Egypt’s Workers

Katy Rose, a good friend and activist who played a key role in the Superferry resistance on Kaua’i and who now works for a union in Californa, sent this insightful article about the revolutionary transformation that is taking place within Egyptian society, much of it driven by the awakened power of the working class: Mubarak’s Folly: The Rising of Egypt’s Workers. Here are a few excerpts:

Rarely do our rulers look more absurd than when faced with a popular upheaval. As fear and apathy are broken, ordinary people – housewives, students, sanitation workers, the unemployed –remake themselves. Having been objects of history, they become its agents. Marching in their millions, reclaiming public space, attending meetings and debating their society’s future, they discover in themselves capacities for organization and action they had never imagined.

…

After all, revolutions are not just about changing institutions. Most profoundly, they are about the dramatic remaking of the downtrodden. Revolutions are schools of profound self-education. They destroy submission and resignation, and they release long-repressed creative energies – intelligence, solidarity, invention, self-activity. In so doing, they reweave the fabric of everyday life. The horizons of possibility expand. The unthinkable – that ordinary people might control their lives – becomes both thinkable and practical.

…

Participants repeatedly describe how their fear has lifted. “When we stopped being afraid we knew we would win,” Ahmad Mahmoud told a reporter. “What we have achieved,” proclaimed another, “is the revolution in our minds.” The significance of such a revolution in attitudes is inestimable. But such shifts do not happen at the level of consciousness alone; they are inextricably connected to a revolution in the relations of everyday life – by way of the birth of popular power. And these new forms of people’s power and radical democracy from below have emerged as steps necessary to preserve the Revolution and keep it moving it forward.

…

What the coming weeks will bring is still uncertain. But Mubarak’s folly has triggered an upsurge of workers’ struggle whose effects will endure. “The most precious, because lasting, thing in this ebb and flow of the [revolutionary] wave is . . . the intellectual, cultural growth of the working class,” wrote Rosa Luxemburg.

In Tahrir Square and elsewhere thousands of signs depict Mubarak accompanied by the words “Game Over.” For the workers of Egypt it is now, “Game On.”

February 13, 2011

Pågat Under Fire: A Citizen Suit Against the U.S. Department of Defense to Save an Ancient Chamorro Village

Environmental Law Program Colloquium Series

William S. Richardson School of Law

Please join us on Tuesday, February 15, 2011 in the

Moot Court Room during the Lunch Break (12:45 pm – 1:45 pm)

Matthew Adams, Sr. Managing Associate, SNR Denton

and Carl Christensen, Visiting Professor at Law

Pågat Under Fire:

A Citizen Suit Against the U.S. Department of Defense to Save an Ancient Chamorro Village

On November 17, 2010, the Guam Preservation Trust, We Are Guåhan, and the National Historic Trust for Historic Preservation filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court of Hawai‘i challenging the selection of Pågat, an ancient Chamorro village, as the site of a proposed firing range complex. The decision is part of the Guam and C.N.M.I. Military Relocation Final Environmental Impact Statement, which was prepared by the U.S. Department of Defense and released on July 28, 2010. The relocation, also known as the “Buildup,” involves the transfer of 8,000 U.S. Marines and their dependents from a U.S. base in Okinawa to Guam. Matthew Adams is a Senior Managing Associate with SNR Denton, the firm representing Plaintiffs through its pro bono work, and has experience in advising and litigating various environmental issues. Professor Carl Christensen is local counsel for Plaintiffs and teaches Historic Preservation.

Please join us or if you are unable please tune into our Livestream Channel (http://www.livestream.com/uhrichardsonelp)!

David M. Forman

Assistant Faculty Specialist

Environmental, Health Law Policy & Ka Huli Ao Programs

P (808) 956-5298 | F (808) 956-5569 | E dmforman@hawaii.edu

February 13, 2011February 13, 2011

People & Power – Egypt: Seeds of change

Al Jazeera produced this excellent documentary about the April 6 Movement, the youth organization behind the revolution in Egypt. The small group of disciplined and sophisticated leaders were the spark. Getting training from the Serbian nonviolent youth movement, they applied classic nonviolence organizing principles with new technological tools. The rest is history.

February 13, 2011

Woman to Woman in Afghanistan

Ann Jones wrote an interesting article in The Nation about the deployment of Female Engagement Teams as part of a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan:

The American military had been engaged in Afghanistan for almost eight years before anyone seemed to notice the effects of the occupation on nearly half the adult population, which happens to be female. George W. Bush had famously announced the “liberation” of Afghan women from the Taliban and let it go at that. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton points to women’s progress on paper and in public life in the Afghan capital as reason to continue the war, lest those gains be lost. But among most Afghans, especially the nearly 80 percent who live in rural areas, the effect of the American military presence has been to replicate for women the confinement they suffered under the Taliban. Given cultural rules against mixing the sexes, Afghan men lock up their women to protect them from foreigners; and the American military, an old boys’ club itself, feels comfortable enough with that tradition to honor it.

But after Gen. David Petraeus resurrected the edicts of counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare from the ash heap of Vietnam and inscribed them in the 2006 US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, they appeared in Afghanistan as holy writ, reinforcing famous “lessons learned” from Iraq and exalted to the level of “strategy.” COIN tactics (for that’s all they are) call first for protecting the “civilian populace” and then “rebuilding infrastructure and basic services” and “establishing local governance and the rule of law.” American commanders, saddled with nation-building, doled out millions of dollars in discretionary funds intended for short-term humanitarian projects to build roads (which unescorted women can’t use) and mosques (for men only) before anyone suggested that women perhaps should be consulted.

In February 2009 Marine Capt. Matt Pottinger set out to do something about that. He helped organize and train a team of women Marines to meet with Afghan women, just as male soldiers had been meeting with Afghan men for years to drink tea and discuss those ill-conceived “infrastructure” projects. A handful of female Marines and a civilian linguist, led by Second Lt. Johanna Shaffer, formed that first Female Engagement Team (FET). Its mission was a “cordon and search” operation in Farah province that included “engaging with” Pashtun women and giving them some “humanitarian supplies”—known in COIN jargon as PSPs, or Population Support Packages, which might contain anything from a crank radio to a teddy bear—to earn their “goodwill.” That’s the point of protecting the populace—to win them over to our side so the forsaken insurgents will shrivel up and die. These tactics failed miserably in Vietnam, and they appear to be failing in Afghanistan, but with counterinsurgency as our avowed “strategy,” Pottinger’s idea of engaging the hidden half of the populace was way, way overdue.

The article points out an important similarity between Afghan and American military women:

The American and Afghan women had things in common, but these seemed harder for the Americans to see. Just as Afghan women routinely endure physical abuse, several women on other FETs told me that physical abuse at home had driven them into the military, unaware as they were of the huge incidence of abuse and rape within the armed forces. As a Marine lieutenant, Claire Russo was raped by a fellow officer and so brutally sodomized that the physical damage is beyond repair. The Marine Corps, knowing this was not the man’s first offense, declined to take action against him. Russo took the case to a criminal prosecutor, and her assailant, Capt. Douglas Dowson, was sentenced to three years in a California prison. After that, in July 2006 at a special ceremony at Camp Pendleton, Russo received an award from the San Diego County district attorney as a “citizen of courage” plus accolades from public officials all the way up to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who hailed her “resilience and resolve in the face of crime.” Her three-star commander said that in pursuing her case despite potential backlash, she “exemplified” the Marine Corps values of “honor, courage, and commitment.” To explain her dedication now, as a civilian adviser, to creating new FETs for the Army, Russo says, “The Marines leave no ‘man’ behind—unless you’re a girl. I was through with the corps, but I wasn’t through serving.” She serves today as a muscular, formidably fit civilian with a very large handgun always tucked in her belt.

In November 2009 the commanding general of the International Security Assistance Force Joint Command signed an order calling on military units to “create female teams to build relations with Afghan women.” Pottinger, Jilani and Russo write, “This order…reflects the considered judgment of command that FETs are an important part of our evolving counterinsurgency strategy.” That’s a legitimate argument for creating FETs of full-time, fully trained, professional female engagement soldiers to execute the clear-cut mission of bringing security to “the populace.” That is, if you subscribe to the American occupation of Afghanistan at all—as I do not—and to the magic of counterinsurgency, which lately has been losing out as the tactic du jour to the more macho “kill or capture.” But the commanders who blather about counterinsurgency yet fail almost entirely, and contrary to direct orders, to engage half the populace give the game away. To most of the military establishment, the FETs are not “an important part” of US strategy at all. Far from it. But American women meeting Afghan women may be the start of something more important than that.

Meanwhile, during a visit to the Marine Corps Base Hawaii, the head of the Marine Corps announced that the Corps will be downsized:

The new commandant of the Marine Corps revealed during a visit to Marine Corps Base Hawaii yesterday that the size of the Corps would drop to 186,800 from 202,000 after the U.S. pulls out of Afghanistan.

However, with the frenetic pace of base construction in Afghanistan (Col. Ann Wright reported that there are more than 400 military bases in Afghanistan), it seems that the U.S. has no plans to leave that country any time soon.

February 12, 2011

Mubarak regime falls, but what will be the legacy?

Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak has been toppled by a people’s power revolution. Al Jazeera reports:

Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president, has resigned from his post, handing over power to the armed forces.

Omar Suleiman, the vice-president, announced in a televised address on Friday that the president was “waiving” his office, and had handed over authority to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.

Suleiman’s short statement was received with a roar of approval and by celebratory chanting and flag-waving from a crowd of hundreds of thousands in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, as well as by other pro-democracy campaigners who attending protests across the country.

This is a great victory for the Egyptian people, but the struggle is not yet over. What form the new government takes will be hotly contested. And as Filipino anti-bases activist Corazon Fabros reminds us “Closer to, but not yet. The U.S. military aids must stop or it will be more of the same … just like in the Philippines…” She shared the following article by Malaysian scholar/activist Chandra Muzzafar:

THE EGYPTIAN REVOLUTION: THE TRIUMPH OF HUMAN DIGNITY

by Chandra Muzaffar.

The people of Egypt have won a great victory. They have defeated a dictator. They have ousted Hosni Mubarak.

Mubarak fell at the feet of people power. The Egyptian people showed tremendous courage in their struggle against the dictatorship. They persevered against great odds. Their sacrifice was monumental. According to UN sources, in the course of their 18 day protest against a President who had misruled for most of 30 years, some 300 hundred people died at the hands of hoodlums and thugs serving the Mubarak regime.

While thugs targeted the people, it is remarkable that those who fought for justice, freedom and dignity were largely non-violent. Simply put, it was a peaceful revolution— a revolution that had as its epicentre, Medan Tahrir, Liberation Square. The revolutionaries, as commentators have observed, were civil and courteous.

At the forefront of this revolution were young people, in their twenties and thirties. It was their idealism which was the fuel of this revolution. They utilised the new media to the hilt to mobilise and galvanise the masses.

The Egyptian Revolution was, in a sense, inspired by the Tunisian Revolution of 14th January 2011. Tunisians— again many of them young men and women— showed Egyptians and Arabs throughout West Asia and North Africa (WANA) that when human beings overcome fear, a hope, a distant goal, is suddenly transformed into reality.

Because Egypt is the heart of the Arab world, its Revolution, the Revolution of 11th February, will have a tremendous impact upon ordinary men and women in the region. It will give them strength and confidence. It will empower them. The Egyptian Revolution will become the beacon that inspires the masses to stand up against corrupt, greedy rulers who betray the trust of the people. It will become the banner around which will rally all those who cherish their dignity and independence and refuse to submit to foreign dictation and dominance that has been the curse of WANA. In this regard, the Egyptian Revolution will undoubtedly provide fresh impetus to the noble Palestinian struggle for self-determination..

By a strange coincidence, the Egyptian Revolution happened on the same day as Iran’s Islamic Revolution. It was on the 11th of February 1979 that the Islamic revolutionaries in Iran proclaimed victory after the military declared its neutrality and the revolutionaries took over public buildings and the Iranian State Radio and Television. 11th February is celebrated as a national holiday in Iran.

The powers-that-be in Tel Aviv, Washington, London, Paris and other Western capitals would not like to be reminded of this historical coincidence. It is a coincidence that will also send a shiver down the spine of many a monarch and president in the Arab world. More than this coincidence, both Revolutions succeeded in harnessing the energies of millions of people in their respective countries. The Egyptian and Iranian Revolutions — some would argue—are the two most broad-based revolutions in human history.

At a great historical moment like this (I am writing this article a couple of hours after Vice-President Omar Sulaiman’s announcement over Egyptian Television that Mubarak is stepping down) we should recall the other illustrious revolutions in history— the French Revolution of 1789; the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and the Chinese Revolution of 1949. There have also been people’s movements in recent decades that have succeeded in overthrowing dictatorial regimes that had lost credibility with the people. The people power movement in the Philippines in 1986 and the mass movement against the Indonesian President Suharto in 1998 would be two examples from Southeast Asia while the series of uprisings in Eastern Europe in 1989 would also testify to the power embodied in the people.

Revolutions and popular uprisings, however idealistic and altruistic its leaders and participants may be in the initial stages, do not always deliver on the freedom and justice they promise. There are many revolutions that have betrayed the people.. We do not know how the Egyptian Revolution will unfold in the coming days and months.

But for the time being, the people of Egypt, and indeed the people of the world, have every right and reason to celebrate. We have just witnessed the liberation of the soul of a nation. We have just embraced the triumph of human dignity.

Dr. Chandra Muzaffar is President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST) and Professor of Global Studies at Universiti Sains Malaysia.

Malaysia.

12 February 2011

February 10, 2011

For Egypt, this is the miracle of Tahrir Square

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2011/feb/10/egypt-miracle-tahrir-square

For Egypt, this is the miracle of Tahrir Square

There is no room for compromise. Either the entire Mubarak edifice falls, or the uprising is betrayed

Slavoj Žižek

Thursday 10 February 2011 20.30 GMT

One cannot but note the “miraculous” nature of the events in Egypt: something has happened that few predicted, violating the experts’ opinions, as if the uprising was not simply the result of social causes but the intervention of a mysterious agency that we can call, in a Platonic way, the eternal idea of freedom, justice and dignity.

The uprising was universal: it was immediately possible for all of us around the world to identify with it, to recognise what it was about, without any need for cultural analysis of the features of Egyptian society. In contrast to Iran’s Khomeini revolution (where leftists had to smuggle their message into the predominantly Islamist frame), here the frame is clearly that of a universal secular call for freedom and justice, so that the Muslim Brotherhood had to adopt the language of secular demands.

The most sublime moment occurred when Muslims and Coptic Christians engaged in common prayer on Cairo’s Tahrir Square, chanting “We are one!” – providing the best answer to the sectarian religious violence. Those neocons who criticise multiculturalism on behalf of the universal values of freedom and democracy are now confronting their moment of truth: you want universal freedom and democracy? This is what people demand in Egypt, so why are the neocons uneasy? Is it because the protesters in Egypt mention freedom and dignity in the same breath as social and economic justice?

From the start, the violence of the protesters has been purely symbolic, an act of radical and collective civil disobedience. They suspended the authority of the state – it was not just an inner liberation, but a social act of breaking chains of servitude. The physical violence was done by the hired Mubarak thugs entering Tahrir Square on horses and camels and beating people; the most protesters did was defend themselves.

Although combative, the message of the protesters has not been one of killing. The demand was for Mubarak to go, and thus open up the space for freedom in Egypt, a freedom from which no one is excluded – the protesters’ call to the army, and even the hated police, was not “Death to you!”, but “We are brothers! Join us!”. This feature clearly distinguishes an emancipatory demonstration from a rightwing populist one: although the right’s mobilisation proclaims the organic unity of the people, it is a unity sustained by a call to annihilate the designated enemy (Jews, traitors).

So where are we now? When an authoritarian regime approaches the final crisis, its dissolution tends to follow two steps. Before its actual collapse, a rupture takes place: all of a sudden people know that the game is over, they are simply no longer afraid. It is not only that the regime loses its legitimacy; its exercise of power itself is perceived as an impotent panic reaction. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice but goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. When it loses its authority, the regime is like a cat above the precipice: in order to fall, it only has to be reminded to look down …

In Shah of Shahs, a classic account of the Khomeini revolution, Ryszard Kapuscinski located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroads, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman withdrew; within hours, all Tehran knew about this incident, and although street fights went on for weeks, everyone somehow knew the game was over.

Is something similar going on in Egypt? For a couple of days at the beginning, it looked like Mubarak was already in the situation of the proverbial cat. Then we saw a well-planned operation to kidnap the revolution. The obscenity of this was breathtaking: the new vice-president, Omar Suleiman, a former secret police chief responsible for mass tortures, presented himself as the “human face” of the regime, the person to oversee the transition to democracy.

Egypt’s struggle of endurance is not a conflict of visions, it is the conflict between a vision of freedom and a blind clinging to power that uses all means possible – terror, lack of food, simple tiredness, bribery with raised salaries – to squash the will to freedom.

When President Obama welcomed the uprising as a legitimate expression of opinion that needs to be acknowledged by the government, the confusion was total: the crowds in Cairo and Alexandria did not want their demands to be acknowledged by the government, they denied the very legitimacy of the government. They didn’t want the Mubarak regime as a partner in a dialogue, they wanted Mubarak to go. They didn’t simply want a new government that would listen to their opinion, they wanted to reshape the entire state. They don’t have an opinion, they are the truth of the situation in Egypt. Mubarak understands this much better than Obama: there is no room for compromise here, as there was none when the Communist regimes were challenged in the late 1980s. Either the entire Mubarak power edifice falls down, or the uprising is co-opted and betrayed.

And what about the fear that, after the fall of Mubarak, the new government will be hostile towards Israel? If the new government is genuinely the expression of a people that proudly enjoys its freedom, then there is nothing to fear: antisemitism can only grow in conditions of despair and oppression. (A CNN report from an Egyptian province showed how the government is spreading rumours there that the organisers of the protests and foreign journalists were sent by the Jews to weaken Egypt – so much for Mubarak as a friend of the Jews.)

One of the cruellest ironies of the current situation is the west’s concern that the transition should proceed in a “lawful” way – as if Egypt had the rule of law until now. Are we already forgetting that, for many long years, Egypt was in a permanent state of emergency? Mubarak suspended the rule of law, keeping the entire country in a state of political immobility, stifling genuine political life. It makes sense that so many people on the streets of Cairo claim that they now feel alive for the first time in their lives. Whatever happens next, what is crucial is that this sense of “feeling alive” is not buried by cynical realpolitik.