Meditations on Class Solidarity and "War of the Worlds" and Such Like

I have a movie playing on the TeeVee, an Australian picture called "Occupation" that is a variation on the perpetual theme of Alien Invasion which of course is the premise of H. G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds" of 1897-1898.

British imperialism was the subtext, particularly how Britain acquired and ruled its empire. It wasn't very nice, was it? In fact, it was bloody and cruel. From the point of view of those subject to the Empire, especially during the initial phases of conquest, the Brits and their mercenary "allies" were no different from, and perhaps in some ways worse than, the Martians so focused on destruction as they made their way across Britain and the globe. 

The question arose: what made them do this? Why? The theory after the fact was that Mars was a dying planet suffering from resource depletion and climate catastrophe, and perhaps overpopulation. 

The Martians saw the Earth as the ideal place for conquest and resettlement as the natives were so technologically backward, divided and unable to resist effectively -- if at all.

And indeed, the Earthlings were clearly losing the "war of the worlds," and in a sense weren't even fighting in part because they were unable to do so in any way that would protect and preserve their autonomy. This was an allegory for the progress of the British Empire in its global conquest of peoples and territories through force of superior arms, technology and a determination to simply and thoroughly exterminate and destroy anything and anyone who got in their way. Any survivors would be subject to enslavement and pillage.

Earthlings of course fight among themselves as much as or more than they resist the aliens. That's how it normally goes with these things. Yet ultimately, in every one of these Invasion pictures, the remnant humanity is victorious over the seemingly invulnerable alien hordes, and life, such as remains of it, returns to normal.

Or something.

The Earthlings fight among themselves, but sometimes as they do, they become aware of their common interest, solidarity against the invading All-Powerful Aliens, and despite themselves, they learn to work together against the common enemy. This process typically takes a long time, and sometimes it never comes. If they cannot become one another's allies, then the game is lost. The Martians win. Ah, but not forever, as the tiny Earthling remnant is always sufficient -- well, usually -- to overcome the power of the invaders. This story is so common as to be a trope. 

Another common trope is that the remnant humanity becomes allied with the invaders, and that's what happens at the end of "Occupation." Mankind and the Martians learn to live together on the Earth, so no more War of the Worlds. 

Is that a hint of socialism? Perhaps. 

Learning to live together is one of the prime directives of most socialist movements. There's a utopianism underlying the ideals of a socialist future, but at the same time, the community, the kind that already exists, is the model of the socialist ideal. Only larger. The joining of former enemies in common cause. The understanding that common effort can produce magnificent results that serve the common interests of the People rather than a small coterie of super-rich whose interest is not that of the Masses. That coterie is more likely than not to ally with the Martian Invaders, particularly if doing so will ensure their lasting benefit and survival.

This was one of the ways that British Imperialists acquired and maintained their Empire -- ally with a faction of the native rich and powerful and destroy any competition. It worked so well that other imperialists adopted the same tactic.

It's always hard to resist and counter this determination to conquer. 

And in "War of the Worlds" it took an Act of God -- in the form of a disease bacteria against which the Martians had no resistance -- to slay the dragon. 

In actual fact of course, spreading disease and famine and so forth to vanquish the natives was another of the many tactics employed by the British to obtain and hold their Empire.

What ended it was two world wars that saw the collapse of the Upper Classes through attrition and their inability to raise sufficient funds in their customary ways to maintain their grip on overseas territories. Empires are costly, no matter the loot extracted from the conquered peoples. Once India became more of a financial burden than not, the game was up.

Cleverly, though, the imperial strings are still being pulled through the advent of the Commonwealth. Which finally itself is dying a slow and tortuous death.

My Irish ancestors might be amused. I don't know. Ireland is now said to be one of the richest nations on earth, fiercely proud and European -- and surprisingly diverse and welcoming and functioning -- while Britain is in the process of domestic governing and societal collapse. Haw haw. 

Are we witness to end stage imperialism, finally? Hardly. The US has become the inheritor of the Anglo-Imperial mantle, and the US Empire, while apparently struggling, is actually expanding as American "interests" force their way into more and more overseas territories and endless wars are conducted to ensure US power is strengthened.

The internet has long maintained an Imperial Collapse Watch on the erroneous premise that US imperial overreach will cause its immanent collapse. Um, been waiting many decades. The collapse just never seems to come, does it?

Many errors, yes. But collapse? No.

Physical power is matched or exceeded by immense US financial clout. Sanctions against Russia though seem to have no effect and in fact may be backfiring. Hard to say. At any rate, the conflict over Ukraine, "proxy WWIII" as a correspondent puts it, appears to have no objective beyond depopulation and destruction of this borderland between Russia and Nato. Both sides are cooperating in that objective. Interesting. 

Class solidarity? So far only among the plutocrats and overclass.

Will it ever be revived among the Lower Orders? That remains to be seen, and I'm afraid I won't see it before I shuffle off this mortal coil.

British

I started a post yesterday in which I attempted consideration of US Independence Day vis a vis the Current Crisis of Britain as a consequence of the Chaos following the Brexit vote -- seen through the lens of my newly found British ancestry. Well, not surprisingly, it didn't work and I never completed the post. It may languish in draft form for the foreseeable future, or maybe I'll just delete it.

This post will take something of a different tack.

Today marks my father's 115th birthday. He was always very proud that he was born on the 5th of July (1901), as that made him a patriotic child of the new century. His birth, he thought, marked the transition from what used to be to what would become -- the Future in other words.

My father considered himself to be Irish-American through and through. His father was the son of Irish immigrants who arrived in the United States in 1850 -- or thereabouts. This date contrasts with the story I was told about them, but that's another story...)

Actually, I haven't found the immigration date of my father's grandfather James, but James's parents (Alexander and Mary) arrived in 1850 along with several of their children and in-laws. James is not listed among them, nor are a couple of other of their children. I'm assuming they were still in Ireland and came over later, probably in 1852 or so. Family histories are murky about dates and such. At any rate, James, my father's grandfather, got to the US somehow at some date, and after settling into Iowa (his parents and siblings, after a relatively brief sojourn in Ohio where there were uncles and cousins, moved to Iowa in 1856), he acquired farms and land in Scott County, outside of Davenport. James married Alice (also an 1850s immigrant from Ireland) and they started a family on the farm. Alice died shortly after my grandfather's birth in 1869). James married again three years later, to a woman named Margaret -- who was also an 1850s immigrant from Ireland -- and they had one son together. As time passed, James retired from farming and moved upriver to Clinton, where his son (my grandfather William H) had a law office and James's daughter Katherine (also spelled Catherine) had lived for some time with her husband -- who was also descended from Irish immigrants.

My father's mother was German-American. Her mother, Veronica, was said not to have spoken English. Her father, Reinhold, did speak English, though his accent was said to be heavy. My father never knew Reinhold, his grandfather, because Reinhold died in 1901, two weeks after my father's birth. My father had little to say about his mother Elizabeth Veronica. She died in 1940, about a year before my father's father William H died, so I never knew either of them as they were long dead by the time I came around (in 1948). I heard some things about Elizabeth, my grandmother, specifically about how she faced prejudice during WWI, because of her German ancestry. My father indicated that her family were well-off enough to get through that difficult period, but he seemed to resent the fact that his mother had had to face the cruelties of American xenophobia at all. It seemed to affect him, though, in that he essentially buried his own German-American ancestry, rarely mentioning it, and typically focusing on the fact that he was Irish-American, and that's what he passed on to me. I therefore was Irish-American as well.

Yes, well... but what about my mother?

She claimed not to know much about her ancestry, but from what she did know of it, she claimed an aristocratic lineage. What she liked to say was that she was "a direct descendant of Marie Antoinette!" With a toss of her auburn haired head to express the exclamation point. Well, no, I don't think she was actually the sad French queen's descendant, but when I looked into her ancestry, I found it led back -- and back and back -- to the Drakes in England. Through the Drakes, she may indeed have had some tiny fraction of English royal blood, though I found no direct connection with English kings and queens.

I had long thought that her grandmother Ida was an immigrant from England. This was because my sister had had one encounter with Ida when she came out to California to visit from her home in Indiana -- where my mother had been born in 1911.

My sister said she thought that Ida was British because she spoke with an accent and had "that demeanor" about her.

Well, it turns out that Ida was not from Britain. She was born and raised in Indiana. Her father was from New Jersey, though, where his family had been since the 1600s. Their ancestors, in turn, were from England and it is through them that I found the connection with the Drakes.

There was also a connection with a New Jersey character named "Princess Snowflower," the daughter -- or perhaps the sister -- of "King Nummi," the "last of the Lenni-Lenape Indian chiefs of Cape May, New Jersey." Princess Snowflower was -- apparently -- my mother's grandmother's great grandmother. Got that? Good.

There is some dispute over whether "Princess Snowflower" was actually an Indian Princess at all, however. Some accounts say that the story of "Princess Snowflower" was made up in the 19th century to romanticize the history of a girl -- who was actually a descendant of someone who came over on the Mayflower. You would think her actual ancestry would be romantic enough, but apparently not.

I don't know what to believe about it. It's just another data point. At any rate, through her female line, I found nothing but English ancestry -- except possibly for "Princess Snowflower."

My mother's father's side provided some roadblocks, however.

My mother didn't know much about her father as he was killed when she was five years old, and she was raised by her mother and step-father. They didn't have a whole lot to say about her biological father.

I was able to find out a lot about him through Ancestry.com and various newspaper archives, none of which provided a flattering picture, but I ran into a roadblock tracing his ancestry. I could find nothing regarding his paternal ancestry prior to his grandfather who was apparently born in Virginia in 1798. Where the parents came from is something of a mystery. Possibilities include England, Ireland, Scotland, France or even Spain.

My mother's father's mother, however, was much easier to trace, as she was a descendant of the Lawrences of New England -- which would make her heritage English quite solidly.

If my mother's mother was (mostly) British, and my mother's father was (mostly) British, that would make me at least half British wouldn't it? Kind of puts the kibosh on my Irishness, no?

It's definitely disorienting.

I never had much regard for the British, and the current hoo-hah over the Brexit vote is kind of funny, actually. My Irishness makes me instinctively suspicious of British motives and actions -- there is little reason to believe much of what is presented as "truth" by the British because they lie. It's part of the culture. Who knows, maybe it's genetic.

Consequently, much of what we're told by the British is probably false, and the spectacle surrounding the Brexit vote is likely mostly phony and for show. That Tony Blair is being resurrected to explain is a sure sign of duplicity at the least.

There's also been some chatter-- yesterday at any rate -- that proposes the American Revolution was somehow a "mistake." Would things have been better if it had never happened? Possibly, who knows.

But it did happen, and here we are.

So many things that might have been never were and won't be because of what actually happened.

There is more and more speculation that Britain will not actually leave the EU, but that the kingdom itself may break apart. The breakup of the British Isles into component parts is somehow pleasing to an onlooker like myself, almost as if it were inevitable like the break up of the Soviet Union and so much of Europe following the collapse of the world that used to be. The EU has not been a pleasant replacement, far from it. So the EU may collapse as well. Led by the Brits.

If that were to happen, it would eventually mean the end of the USA as we've known it, wouldn't it?

Ah, that remains to be seen, but if it happens...

Authorities Detained and Questioned Over 60,000 Individuals at British Airports Under Terrorism Statutes

Just saying.

It's fine to focus attention on one individual who was detained and questioned by British authorities at Heathrow last year, but without a recognition of how often British officials use their detention and questioning authority at ports of entry and transit, what happens to an individual lacks context.

Of course, sometimes that lack of context is deliberate.

According to varying reports, between 60,000 and 70,000 people were detained and questioned at  British ports of entry and transit during the 2012/2013 period studied. Most of these incidents required less than an hour for resolution while some 40 or so required 6 hours or more to resolve. There were as nearly 700 detentions (one assumes longer than 9 hours, the length of time British authorities can hold someone without actually arresting them).

There has been extensive reporting regarding what's been characterised as the overuse of Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act of 2000 -- which has led to tens of thousands of travelers being detained and questioned under the Terrorism Act, even if there is no reasonable suspicion that they are terrorists.

Understanding how often and how broadly this statute is applied aids in understanding what needs to be done about it.

A "journalist exception" is probably not the answer.

The Nations and Their Future -- The New Imperialism

There seems to be no escaping the New Imperialism that is being created as we write and debate about these things endlessly. The New Imperialism is global rather than regional, it seems to involve all the major nations (as in the G20) as almost equals, but as subsidiaries to the transnational corporations that are demanding and getting freedom from law and justice as they were once conceived and are asserting an independent "right to rule" without hindrance by government. Further, they demand that governments -- to the extent they are permitted to exist at all -- become the enforcers of corporate will against the interest of the People.

The nation-state as we have known it for the past several hundred years may disappear as a functioning governing body -- certainly national sovereignty will disappear as it is already doing -- in the interests of corporate hegemony, but what, exactly, will take its place (perhaps something like sports teams, many of which already have global followings) is anybody's guess.

I argue that the nation-states as we know them today are the legacies of imperial constructs of yore; they are not for the most part coherent geographical or common human interest groupings. They are at root arbitrary creations intended to instill loyalty to a distant ruling elite through nationalism.

They can disappear almost as quickly as lines on a map can be erased.

Europeans found that out for themselves as the first the Soviet Union and then the imperial constructs of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia fell to pieces, the latter not without considerable bloodshed and destruction.

If it could happen there, it could happen anywhere it becomes useful to certain interests -- not always popular ones -- to dissolve the larger nations and carry on with the "liberated" pieces. That's how the dissolution of nations has been sold, as "liberation" for... someone.

But anytime "liberation," "liberty" or "freedom" is placed up for bid, I always ask, "Liberty for whom to do what?"

I've never been a great nationalist. I'm more a tribalist. As I've argued in the past, de-tribalization is a prerequisite for the institutionalization of nationalism, and not everyone, even in the most nationalistic environment has actually been de-tribalized. The irony of forced de-tribalization -- which is often what takes place in the effort to forge a national identity -- leads inevitably to re-tribalization, perhaps differently aligned (for example, new-tribal groupings based on professions or neighborhoods or something similar)  but they are still socially the same thing.

I think of my Irish and German ancestors as strongly tribalized before they emigrated from the Old Countries in the mid-19th Century, and I believe they maintained their tribal identities when they got to this country. Their tribalism dissipated a bit as the generations wore on, and some individuals became highly nationalistic as an alternative to maintaining close tribal ties. But the essence of the tribalism they brought with them is still operating -- whether on the surface or below it. We see the same phenomenon among all sorts of peoples here and abroad. Organizing into tribes is human nature; it is how human society is designed to operate. Denouncing tribalism as some sort of mindlessness or inferior social structure is absurd; not only is it human nature, tribalism will assert itself no matter what "rational" argument is made against it.

As we've witnessed empires and larger nations dissolve during the past several decades and generations, we've seen a concomitant reassertion of tribalism. At the same time that nations and empires have dissolved, we've seen the rise of predatory corporations, some of them apparently organized specifically to loot and pillage the carcasses of the former republics and Imperial provinces.

Does this mean that we will ultimately see corporate brands and logos replacing national identities?

That's certainly been the view of many futurist and science fiction writers for decades, and we seem to be coming ever closer to that reality.

The future-present is not to be found in 1984, in other words, it's Blade Runner.

Or something else again.

I mentioned over at Ian's place the other day that he's apparently advocating for a New Imperialism based -- I think -- on the premise that there can be a "good" global authority that will act in the best interests of humanity as a whole and the planet. On a mission from god? I don't know, all I know is that the British and other European empires were constantly defended on the basis of "mission" -- a mission that was by definition "good" and was often argued to be God-given. The colonized peoples were simply too immature and irresponsible to be allowed to continue governing themselves; they had to be taken in hand by their Betters and put on the right path, much as British children were schooled in the fundamentals of knowledge and deportment. Well, some of them were, others were cast aside. Much as surplus colonized peoples were routinely disposed of.

But we won't go into that aspect of Imperialism right now.

The point right now is that I see us entering a New Imperial age, dominated once again by the private exploitative and extractive interests of corporations, for which governments are instituted and enabled as a means to enforce and enable the smoothest extractions possible. As in the past, unless thwarted somehow, this will not end well, as inevitably corporate wars for dominance will overwhelm every other interest at all.

A question for further consideration in this series is whether there truly can be a "good" Imperial overlord.

At the moment, I think not, but there are counter examples... aren't there?

The Nations and Their Future -- a continuacion

I've argued in the past that de-tribalization is a necessary per-requisite for the adoption and sustenance of nationalism. Tribal societies do not -- on their own -- become "nations" (though some American Indian tribes are called "nations" in both law and custom. The one I'm most familiar with is the Cherokee Nation, but that's another story for another time.)

My premise for this series is that what are known as nation-states today are a concept and construct of Imperialism, dating back at least to Rome, and probably to well before the advent of the Roman Empire. The purpose was to establish local/regional loyalty to the distant Palace or to the Crown. The Nations might begin as Imperial Provinces, but over time the Provinces assume quasi-autonomous status and eventually, if they aren't absorbed by another Empire, they become independent of the Imperial thrall, nation-states, yet they still may be loyal to the ideals of the former ruling power.

As the Western Roman Empire disintegrated, the ruling concepts were maintained in the East, and periodic revivals of the Roman Imperial idea would occur in the West. While the disintegration of Roman rule in the West opened Europe to invasion and conquest by tribalists who had been kept outside the gates, as it were, by Roman Legions, and thus opened Europe to de-nationalization, re-tribalization in many respects, the Roman idea was never actually lost. Many of the elites of the conquering hordes from the East had already been Romanized before the fall of the Imperial state, and most of the conquered peoples were as thoroughly Romanized as any in the Empire.  The Church, too, preserved, protected and defended the Roman ideals of governance, pomp and state.

Consequently, while re-tribalization did occur subsequent to the end of Roman rule in Western Europe, there was also a counter influence tending toward de-tribalization and nationalism -- a counter influence that eventually triumphed with the establishment of nation-states more or less derived from and patterned on Roman prototypes. Of course the hundreds of years that this process took meant that very little of the nationalism that emerged in Europe after the reintroduction of the nationalist concept (beginning, I would say, in the 16th century, but accelerating in the 18th and reaching a climax in the 19th century with the unification of Germany and Italy) looked like "Rome." And yet, without the influence of the Roman Empire, nationalism might not have taken root in Europe at all. For Europeans, it seems to me, are at root as naturally tribal a people as any on Earth.

But being de-tribalized, they could be and were subject to nationalism, which is a form of enforced loyalty to a nation-state rather than to a tribe, nationalism which under certain conditions can become an impetus toward Empire.  Which was certainly the case in Europe from the 16th Century to the 20th until the whole enterprise exploded in World War II.

It was the End of Empire(s), something that is still assumed to be under way today, but I suggest that we're seeing essentially the opposite today, a reversion to Empire, but it is perhaps taking place under such an unfamiliar guise that it goes unnoticed or is not seen for what it is.

The key to re-Imperialization has been the numerous trade agreements that basically subvert and in many cases eliminate the concept of national sovereignty except to the extent the nation-state is loyal to a distant legal framework -- in effect, loyalty to a Palace and Crown, only now we're not dealing with crowned heads and their governments, we're dealing with corporate heads and their boardrooms. Much of the initial thrust during former Imperial periods was, of course, a product of the same institutions: corporations and their boardrooms, supported and defended by the Palace and Crown. The nation-states that emerged from post-imperialism remain in place, not as independent and sovereign entities but as dependencies of the sovereign corporations which assume the positions of the Imperial Palaces and Crowns of yore. The nation-states are not simply dependencies, they are factories of loyalty to their corporate overlords as well, much as was the case during previous periods of Imperial ascendency.

We're not quite there yet, but that's the trend I see emerging, and just as former Empires were imposed on both willing as well as unwilling subjects, I see a remarkable and somewhat unseemly tendency among some of those who should know better to pledge their loyalty and encourage the loyalty of others to the emerging corporate empire(s). It is as if reversion and devolution has taken hold of their minds.

Of course, I realize that a big part of my view of these trends -- and my revulsion -- is due to my age and the fact that I was socialized during the Post War de-imperialization period. To see a younger generation adopting a re-imperialization framework, and to see it happen through corporate entities which control governments, and to see it passed off as a Good Thing, is disheartening at best.

A counter movement is under way, in opposition to this trend toward corporate imperialism, but at this point it seems incredibly weak and powerless. The anti-globalist movement is certainly large, but because its foundations are for the most part based in the "non-violence" teachings of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, it seems to be getting nowhere. Of course King and Gandhi didn't seem to be getting anywhere for a long time, either, so I don't put too much emphasis on the ultimate weakness or powerlessness of the anti-globalist movement. We can't say yet whether "people power" will be unable to thwart this new imperialism.

On the other hand, we might ask what are the positive goals of the anti-globalists; do they ultimately want to revert to a status quo ante, a return to nation-state sovereignty as it was conceived post World War II, or do they envision something else? If something else, what?

That's where I'd like to carry this consideration next time.

To be continued...

The Nations and Their Future

I've compared the period we've been living through for the last few decades to the transition of the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire.

The parallels are far from exact, of course, but my argument has basically been that the Republic of Our Founders has gone extinct. It is not revivable at this point, any more than the Roman Republic could be revived post-Augustus. Of course, the Republican forms continued long after the expiration of the substance of those forms. There was a Roman Senate (in Constantinople) eight hundred years after the advent of Augustus, and it would last in Rome itself almost as long. But it was an institutional survival with no useful function or -- more particularly -- no useable authority.

Elections continued to be held for Roman state and local officeholders, but they were meaningless as well. The Empire was run from the Palace based on the Palatine Hill in Rome, but it could be anywhere the Emperor designated and was moved periodically, by a large bureaucracy under the direction of the Emperor and whoever controlled him.

The Massacre at Cairo Reminds Me A Bit of the Amritsar Massacre of 1919

The British seemed to have no conception of what they had done that April day in Amritsar, Punjab, when some 1,500 of their Indian subjects were killed or wounded in a massacre that shocked the conscience of the world and galvanized the Indian peoples against the British Raj.

Instead, it didn't seem to the British they'd done anything wrong at all; the Wogs were told that public assembly was forbidden. They knew they were breaking the direct order of their British overlords. What did they think would happen to them, hm? Besides, there were reports that some of the insurrectionists were armed and prepared to do battle. Can't have that.

So. They were shot down in their multitudes, nasty bit of work, but it had to be done. Otherwise the Wogs might forget their place and get above themselves, you see?

So it seems to be in Egypt as the military scrambles to justify its massacre of pro-Morsi demonstrators in Cairo as something that simply had to be done. There have been reports and videos made available that seem to show individuals in or adjacent to the crowd firing on security forces, or at least firing weapons, as it is not entirely clear who they are firing at or when, exactly, the videos were acquired. However, how this justifies the killing of more than 70 demonstrators, and the injuring of many hundreds, even up to 1,000,  including shooting many of them in the back, remains something of a mystery.

That the Egyptian military doesn't see anything wrong with it, because after all, they claim they were fired upon and under the circumstances they had no choice but to fire mercilessly into the crowd. No choice at all. There have been reports, after all, of one or two soldiers killed and some few wounded in the melee. Can't have that. There's been a "coup" (that's-not-a-coup) and Morsi has been deposed. His partisans are free to go home and sit quietly until the security forces come to round them up. This is how a peaceful political transition works in the post modern world. Time to get with the program.

Whereas the Amritsar Massacre galvanized and solidified opposition to the British Raj in India, it is widely speculated that the Massacre at Cairo will trigger all out civil war in Egypt. While the British motivation was simply to intimidate and terrify the Natives into submission and compliance, there are many advocates of the Neo-Liberal program who are eager for civil war in Egypt, though from what I've been able to glean, the Egyptian People are not and will do everything they can to avoid it.

Civil war -- in Egypt or anywhere else -- is a neo-liberal profit center on its own account, and a civil war that consumes an adversary of Israel is a bonus. Oh, yes, it's all but foregone that Israel has been busy meddling in Egypt just as it clearly has been meddling in nearby Syria's civil war.  Such things are seen as part and parcel of the Israeli national interest.

Speaking of "interest," it's been interesting, no, it's been fascinating, to see how media is literally tying itself into knots reporting on this incident without actually calling it what it is. For a time, the Guardian was even running a headline that referred to the unpleasantness as an "alleged shooting." By the time they acknowledged that the "alleged" perhaps did take place after all, they had shifted to calling it a "massacre" in scare quotes, much as a good deal of the American media calls the military overthrow of the elected government of Egypt a "coup." In quotes. It's the old "Some people say" gambit. And it looks really stupid and really ugly, but there you are. Or rather here we are, since none of us can really escape the nonsense or the ugly. It permeates everything.

It can't be a coup, you see, as opposed to a "coup," because if it is a coup then the United States is legally obligated to cut off funding to the Egyptian military which precipitated the "coup" and thus deny it the financial wherewithal to complete its mission. Good heavens! Can't have that! Round and round it goes.

We are supposed to work up some kind of Two-Minute-Hate against the Muslim Brotherhood, but it's not really working out too well. One of the excuses for hating them was supposed to be that they were sending fighters to Syria to join the rebels against the Assad regime in the Syrian Civil War. That excuse fell to pieces, though, in the face of American government's announcement of support of the same rebels. Oh. That. Well. Who's to say who's right? Hm?

Then there was the aborted attempt to make Morsi into the latest New Hitler by claiming he was "consolidating power" and attempting to institute an "Islamic" regime thereby. That is what is said to have precipitated the round of Tahrir Square demonstrations that led to the military overthrow -- accurately called a coup -- of the elected government of Egypt, the abrogation of the constitution, and the replacement of the Morsi government with lackeys of fascism, imperialism and neo-liberalism.

Essentially, the chief technocrats and operators of the Mubarak regime have been brought back and reinstalled in positions of power. Oddly enough, as much as many of them disliked the course Morsi was on, reviving the Old Pharaoh's regime is not quite what the People wanted.

So far as I can tell, the elected government of Egypt got into trouble when it disrespected the financiers and the financial interests that wished to make Egypt into another profitable colony. They were basically told to pound Giza sand, and so they set out to make life as miserable for the Egyptian people as possible by cutting off sources of financing for much of anything the Egyptian government might want to do on behalf of the People.

There was no cut off of funding for the military of course. And when Morsi arrogantly set out to cleanse the military of corrupt officers and to reform its operations, the military dug in its heels and said "No you won't!"

This stand off led to public demonstrations on behalf of the military -- which controls most of what is left of the Egyptian economy and thus is a primary source of jobs and income for millions of Egyptians -- which grew as more and more economically distressed Egyptians joined in protest against the economic squeeze middle and upper class Egyptians have been under thanks to the anti-neo-liberal policies of the Morsi government.

This is how I understand the situation, but as an outside observer, I may well have it wrong. At any rate, the coup was almost inevitable once the crowds in Tahrir grew large enough, and the intransigence of Morsi and his government became clear.

Now it may well be a matter of a protracted civil war.

It would be, after all, almost another 30 years of struggle after the Amritsar Massacre before the British were finally expelled from the Indian subcontinent. And even then, Amritsar would be the scene of numerous disturbances, culminating in an Indian Army military operation under Indira Gandhi at the Golden Temple itself in 1984 which led to her assassination some four months later. Oh. Well.

When will they ever learn...





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Not to forget, Egypt was under British rule from 1882 until 1952. The British influence on the Egyptian military is strong as it is in many other outposts of the former British Empire. I seriously doubt the Egyptian military sees anything wrong with what they did when they massacred pro-Morsi demonstrators any more than the British saw anything wrong with what they did at Amritsar.


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This is testimony -- which I believe is authentic -- posted at the Guardian this morning:

wahdamisrya

09 July 2013 3:28am

On saturday at around 6.30pm nine F16 zoomed over rabiya. I was there, i guess it was their warning to us before the attack.

When i think that i could probably have been there because I was walking with the protestors as they went from rabiya throug taran street towards the republican guards. I wanted to join them but I had my neice with me and she had grown sleepy, it was around 9.30pm.

Men their wives and their kids went. The Egyptian media which excells in its lies asks how babies would be around at dawn, the answer is that that is what rabiya is made of, its a little city with babies and children running around waving the Egyptian flag. The protest is a peaceful one, there has never been talk of violence, they actually sell t shirts in rabiya with the words legitimacy, no to violence.

A second year med student came out and spoke about how they arrested him and prevented the ambulance he was in to reach the field hospital.

The manager of the field hospital Dr. Hisham Ibrahim says that they were in the second unit of the fajr prayer, it was during the prayer that they were attacked and that his hospital received 400+cases in the first three hours. So far 70 are dead and over 1500 injured amongst whom there were 6 women dead and four children according to the medical syndicate. The youngest is 6 months old.

The injured according to a lawyer were being prevented from taking a copy of their medical report and to leave the hospital had to sign a paper that the armed forces had nothing to do with it. The scenario similar to the one of the day of the camel.

It has gone beyond Morsi now, if muslim soldiers can shoot tear gas then bullets at people during fajr prayer then how can they ever be trusted again?

However some would not follow the orders since bullets were found unshot emptied on the ground.

I do not understand bullets but what bullet cracks a mans head open? The pictures haunt me, what soldier would shoot unarmed civilians in their backs during prayers?

So Baradei, is this the democracy you have been tweeting about for a year? The word of power and God help the dissenter.

Its gone beyong Morsi now, the tamarud and police and army have turned every Free Egyptian into a Morsi, we are all Dr. Morsi, he said that all he wanted was that the people wiuld have the will and freedom to rule themselves, I know that we do.

Of course it's the InterTubes so you never really know, but damn... powerful stuff.

---------------------------------------------------
Picking them off like flies:

Emad-Eldin Elsayed put this video up on the YouTubes yesterday. Egyptian Army sniper picks off members of crowd from nearby rooftop while colleague appears to be using long-lens camera to photograph the action, or perhaps to target selectees:

Disturbing

James Steele, Operator

Well, not in the sense that one didn't know that these things -- and much worse -- were going on during our continuing warriorism in the wastelands of the former Turkish Empire, but in the sense that another name and face have now been put to a throughline of atrocity that characterizes so much of the American Imperial Ambition. From the get go.

Many Americans, of course, will claim not to have known about any of it, and not to believe it now, for the simple reason that America is Good and Doesn't Do These Things -- unless necessary. You understand.

Therefore, the Wogs (Must) Deserve It.

What I saw, though, in this BBC/Guardian co-production (apart from the use of so much unrelated and uninformative video) was something I doubt many Americans are even remotely conscious of:

Steele and his ilk are operatives throughout the American corporate-government realm. So far as I can tell, they don't actually run things themselves; they carry out the directives of and report back to their Betters -- who are actually in charge. It was very obvious who was who during the Bushevik Reign, but it's not so much so now.

The exception to this rule is in the American prison industry and their gulag offshoots -- where the ilk does run things, and in many cases, they are free to do whatever sadistic shit they want. And they'll lie about it, too.

While it doesn't touch on America's domestic imprisonment industry, focusing instead on the development of Iraqi interrogation centers and death squads modeled on previous counter-insurgency wet work done in the fields of Vietnam and Central America under the guidance of Steele and people like him, Americans should long ago have come to the realization that this sort of thing comes from domestic American experience with prisons and prisoners. It has never been confined to "over there" somewhere in wartime.

Brutal interrogation -- torture -- has long been routine in America's domestic law enforcement practices. False confessions. Summary execution. Round ups of the innocent. Intrusive and constant surveillance. Property seizures. For all I know, "disappearances" as well. This is going on domestically and has been going on for many years. There has long been a synergy between what goes on domestically and how these things are done overseas by client states. None of it is happening in isolation or in a vacuum.

It's all linked together.

What's revealed in the BBC/Guardian production is actually not that much, and strangely a name that is strangely never mentioned in it is John Negroponte, perhaps the pre-eminent American Lord of Darkness, of torture and death squads. Once he was assigned to Iraq, the wet work commenced in earnest. Everyone knew it, too. Many cheered.

But putting other names and faces to what was happening Over There is useful. The bloody business of the day wasn't some aberration, it was intentional. Considered necessary. Effective. For a time at any rate.

The scale and the style may be somewhat different domestically. There are far more domestic prisoners, after all, most of whom are simply warehoused and rarely used for interrogation purposes since few of them have any information the government needs or wants. There have been exceptions, however. Round ups and street justice ("") are typically confined to particular jurisdictions and wards therein, generally neither witnessed nor even recognized by most people. Out of sight, out of mind.

Unless of course the Authorities want their cruelties and brutalities and their occasional street executions to be seen and appreciated by the rest of the herd -- in which case very public displays are made. This happens all the time, but many people don't seem to understand the deliberate nature of these displays. They are intended to induce fear leading to submission and cooperation. They generally do it well.

The problem is that eventually people become so inured on the one hand and fed up on the other that they revolt. Revolts that can lead to revolution. Ultimately, for example, even the client officials in Iraq revolted against the American intrusion, just as the Afghan clients are doing. Empire done so bloodily and brutally cannot last. The British should have learned this back in the day, but apparently they still believe they can impose their rule by main force forever, particularly if it is done through their far more brutal and bloodthirsty American proxies.

It doesn't work.

1919?

1919 Egyptian Revolutionary Flag

[Reports say Mubarak is to hand over power to the military today/tonight (Egypt time), conceivably within the hour -- 11:00AM 02/10/11]

[That didn't go well. When the Old Fossil finally got around to addressing the people, he essentially said that he wasn't going anywhere, that he would serve out his term no matter what, but he was -- sort of -- delegating some authority to his VP, and everything would be fine, go home, Revolution's over, mkaybai, thx. The crowd in the square became furious. Where it will all lead, nobody knows... Stay tuned.]

http://www.youtube.com/user/AlJazeeraEnglish

Egyptians are recalling their Revolution of 1919 as the closest model to what's going on now, though of course there are vast differences. Egypt and the Middle East have changed a lot since then after all, but the spirit of the era seems to remain.

From a personal perspective, of course, I see what's going on Over There through my own narrow lens, based on limited cultural knowledge and a long time fascination with the Pharaonic Age. To my gimlet eye, what's been going on -- there and to an extent here -- is somewhat related to events in ancient Egypt, especially the revolutionary and counter revolutionary period surrounding the Pharaoh Akhenaten, whose sculptural portrait I often use to illustrate Barack Obama.

Every time I see the Old Fossil Mubarak on the TeeVee, I am reminded of Pharaoh; then his ministers seem to be modern day avatars of the perfumed flatterers and sycophants who populated the Court when time was. Of course, they are probably not following the Pharaonic model at all, they are probably more inclined to follow the Ottoman model. With a dash of Antiquity for history's sake. But they are such anachronisms, and so out of touch with the People and their legitimate grievances and demands that they may as well be living in an earlier era. One that has long past.

So. 1919.

Yes, well.

Egypt was nominally still part of the crumbling Ottoman Empire until 1914, but it had been under British "protection" since the 1880's. This meant British occupation and rule by the British consul-general through the native Khedive. Understandably, the Egyptians as well as the Sudanese to the south were not amused. British authority was often imposed with surpassing brutality and gross abuses of the most basic human rights, dignity and justice.

During WWI, British authority was imposed on Egypt and Sudan in typical British fashion. The people chafed under the British lash and after the Armistice, they demanded their freedom. When Britain -- as was its wont -- said "no," the people rose up, utilizing the tactics of civil disobedience pioneered in India by Mahatma Gandhi.

Needless to say, Britain had a serious colonial problem on its hands, particularly after WWI, as the aspirations for self-determination of colonial peoples all over the world ran up hard against the British Imperial need to preserve the tattered remnants of the Empire.

After continuous disruption in Egypt during 1919, a British commission recommended "sovereignty" for Egypt in 1921. Provisional independence was granted in February, 1922. This semi-autonomous regime (Britain controlled Egypt's external affairs and the Suez Canal) endured, more or less haltingly, until the 1952 Revolution that overthrew the previous rotting regime and secured full independence for Egypt under Nasser who, in 1956, nationalized the Suez Canal.

That's the Cliff Notes version. There's lots more:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_Revolution_of_1919

(Wikipedia just skims the surface, though more completely than I do.)