This morning we've learned via Al Jazeera TV that the Mubarak government has unleashed their secret police and thugs onto the peaceful people that have been gathered for days in the city square. There can be no doubt that despite milk-toast words about "democracy" and the "rule of law" from Obama, the U.S. has likely told Mubarak to take whatever steps are necessary to "regain stability" in his country. This would be the signal to use violence to disperse the people and to create division and fear as a strategy to quell the protest movement. (Later this afternoon I heard a U.S. State Department public relations spokesman say that Hillary Clinton had called the "new" V-P of Egypt and told him that an immediate investigation was needed to prosecute those responsible for unleashing the thugs on the peaceful protesters. The media leaped to challenge that remark but he just repeated it and went on. This clearly indicates to me the total lack of seriousness with which the U.S. government views this incident.)
One news report said that Mubarak had sent out Oil Ministry workers, members of his political party, and state police into the square to beat up the pro-democracy crowd. MSNBC has reported that Obama had earlier sent a U.S. official, who has a long-time relationship with Mubarak, to meet with the Egyptian president and help guide his actions. There is no doubt in my mind that Mubarak would not be taking these hostile actions without the behind-the-scenes support of the U.S. military empire. Of course the U.S. must publicly call for peaceful resolution by renouncing the use of violence. But as Martin Luther King, Jr. used to say, the U.S. is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.
Let's see if the U.S. administration and Congress immediately pulls the plug on weapons grants/sales to the Egyptian government. Mubarak's government is the second largest recipient of weapons from the U.S. (just behind Israel) in the world. It is the U.S. weapons that have essentially kept the Egyptian people under control for 30 years. Where has the U.S. outrage been over torture and failed democracy during those brutal years?
Ben Wedeman of CNN tweeted:
bencnn White House issues pale, weak statement on situation in Cairo. Imagine if Tahrir were in Tehran. #Jan25 #Egypt
UPDATE: Just to illustrate my point further how the corporate oligarchy works and thinks, here is a very instructive comment from the war criminal Tony Blair. In an interview with CNN, Tony Blair, former British prime minister and currently an envoy to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, defends President Mubarak, calling him "immensely courageous and a force for good."
Mubarak said that to quit now would cause Chaos in Egypt and that he has a duty to stay and lead them so that Egyptians don't kill Egyptians.
ReplyDeleteAs if his secret police and other state terror goons haven't under his rule, been doing exactly that, Egyptians killing, torturing, imprisoning and impoverishing Egyptians. For decades. His Fellow Satrap, Nouri al Maliki of Iraq, vowed not to run again in '14 because "the mark of non-democracy is a ruler being in power for 20 or 30 years". BBC translated it as the same message, slightly different words. I'm winging it here.
He left out the part about being backed up in that perpetual presidency game by the storm-troopers of the Friendly Neighborhood Empire. "killing their own people" doesn't go without saying but he did go without saying that too. By the methods used by anthropologists to measure the turning point when a culture becomes a nation, it's when the leaders of the culture reach a power-level where they can kill other members of their own culture without being punished by any law, and they become a Civilization when they can get other people to do it for them.
Of course that's just my take on it. It very admirably distills down the two books on sociology in my high school curriculum.