In The Absence Of Truth —

In Nordafrika stürzt ein Regime nach dem anderen, in Libyen hat der Bürgerkrieg gegen Qadhafi angefangen, und Europa scheint vor allem von der Sorge geplagt zu sein, wer denn nun, wenn nicht Qadhafi, die Ströme von afrikanischen Auswanderern zurückhalten soll.

Dasselbe Regime, das keine Sekunde zögert, bevor es seine eigene Hauptstadt bombardiert, steht seit Jahren im Dienste der europäischen Grenzsicherung; mit derselben mörderischen Entschlossenheit fängt es afrikanische Auswanderer ab und setzt sie an seinen Südgrenzen, mitten in der Sahara, wieder aus, mit dem sicheren Tod vor Augen.

Das Entsetzen in Europa über Muammar Qadhafi ist, wie jedes echte Gefühl der europäischen Bürger, die reinste Heuchelei. Dieselben mörderischen Qualitäten dieses Regimes, die heute die guten Bürger so erschrecken, waren bisher die Qualitäten, die es zu einem unersetzlichen Verbündeten machten. Das mörderische Handwerk der Flüchtlingsbekämpfung hat den guten Bürgern genau den Schlaf behütet, aus dem sie jetzt jäh erwachen.

Die Bevölkerung Nordafrikas ist endlich erwacht, und beginnt, sich ihrer Bedrücker zu entledigen; alle die, die nicht lange nach Gründen suchen müssen, um sich für Europa das gleiche zu wünschen, können sich, wie wir finden, getrost hinter der Forderung versammeln, dass die Grenzen sofort, und für alle, aufgerissen gehören.

Wir sehen nicht ein, warum der massenhafte Mord an afrikanischen Auswanderern in der Sahara und im Mittelmeer nicht genauso schrecklich sein soll wie der massenhafte Mord von Aufständischen auf den Strassen Tripolis.

Dieses Regime wird, wie wir hoffen, seinem Schicksal entgegengehen, und seine europäischen Verbündeten eines Tages, hoffentlich, auch.

In denen, die die Revolten in Nordafrika in Gang gesetzt haben, erkennen wir uns selbst wieder; und wir sehen nicht, wieso die Schengener Grenzen zwischen uns stehen sollte. Unsere eigene Passivität, die bereits ohnedies zwischen uns steht, ist schon unerträglich genug.

Die revolutionäre Tendenz, die auch in Europa ohne Zweifel demnächst ihren Kopf heben wird, wird sich entweder als tätige Solidarität mit den Aufständischen und Auswanderern jedes Landes begreifen, oder sie wird nicht sein.

Die Grenzen auf, für alle, und sofort. Schluss mit dem europäischen Grenzregime. Diese Welt muss unser sein.

Prospects for revolution in the Middle East, as we have seen these days, hinge on how the armed forces are behaving. The Army, the most potent player in these fields for decaeds, if not for centuries, has retained the last decisive say on what is going on in the state.

These days, the Army is reluctant to step in directly and topple governments. They’ve seen this so often, and what has come out of it, that they would prefer not to, except for, of course, if need be.

1. The Army is the protector of the state. In some ways, the Army is the state, its core and embodiement. In some cases, there is nothing around resemembling a state a lot, execeot for the Army: look at Lebanon, where the Army is the sole pride of everybody.

Of course, this Army has never really a fought a war, as it would stand no chance; it would not put up much of a fight against, say, Israel or Syria. Oh wait, it has tried them both. That is probably the reason it prefers not to talk about it.

But the pride of the Lebanes army is not so much its role in defending the country, but its unique role in the civil war. It managed to come out of it nearly alive (hadn’t it be for Mr. Aouns adventure against Syria). Yes, that is right. The Lebanese Army has managed to have a civil war ravage its country for 15 years, without intervening (except, well, for another of Mr. Aouns ill-fated adventures). It couldn’t intervene, because otherwise it would have fractured. So, basically, its source of pride is that it managed not to fall apart too badly in a 15-year long civil war, including invasions from Syria, Israel and the PLO, by simply not doing too much. Everybody takes great pride in that fact. The Lebanese Armed Forces are recognized as the true embodiement of Lebanons unity.

What, one may ask, is that Army good for? Well, in 1974 it massacred some destitute fishermen in Saida. And it fought only recently a year-long battle in some Palestinian shanty towns (dwarfing, in effect, Israels infamous battle of Jenin). The Armed Forces, basically, are grotesquely over-equipped riots-control forces. They are good for only one thing, domestic urban warfare. They are instruments for class warfare and little else.

But maybe Lebanon is too weak a state to serve as a good example. Take Syria. Syria really is a regional power. The wonders its Army did include losing the Golan twice, deposing the government (also twice), controling neighboring Lebanon for 15 years, and one resounding military victory over the Syrian city of Hama (some 10.000 dead, at least). They also shied away from trying their luck against the Turkish Army in 1998, expelling the PKK forces instead, and from a military adventure in Jordan in 1970. Oh, but they waged relentless war in Lebanon against the PLO, that is until their Palestinian brigades defected to Arafat.

2. Syria lost the 1973 war when among the conscripts word went round that the leadership was withdrawing its Republican Guard elite units form the front. This rumor caused the front to collapse, instantly, because every conscript held it possible that the leadership already had decided the war was lost, and refrained from withdrawing the regular army made up of conscripts, preferring instead to sacrifice them. (This mass defection was in some ways a precursor of the 1991 soldiers uprising in neighboring Iraq, which was put to death with help from the U.S.)

Shall we go into the details of the military putsches and wars of aggression of Iraq? It may be helpful to remind us that Baathist Iraq also employed two types of military, the regular forces and the Republican Guards. The Iranian regime, in the Iraqi-Iranian war, quickly learned why that is of such importance: they hardly would have survived their own Kurdistani campaing in 1981, against Leftist forces in Iranian Kurdistan, had they releid on the regular Army, made up of conscripts.

Or shall we, for a moment, think of Algeria, where the military proved so vital for upholding the constitution, by fighting a prolonged civil war against Islamist forces, including letting them massacre the population of whole villages, in broad daylight, in plain sight of Army barracks and checkpoints, and even surveillance helicopters, without stepping in? Everybody knows what an Army is capable of doing, and letting happen, if it serves their purpose: guarding the survival of the state, and that is ultimately: of the Army itself.

All this, of course, is not restricted to Arab countries. Portugal, Spain, the Latin American states show some of the same traits. But it is revealing that all states proudly proclaiming to be „Arab Republic of So-and-so“ feature them as a standard, and for decades everybody took them as standard, so that one may wonder what the word Arab stands for, except for a certain kind of dysfunctional military powerplay that is deeply connected with the political concept of „Arabism“ (3uruba).

Evidently, in the Arabist school of thought, what makes an Arab country Arab is not a shared ethnicity (there is no such thing), or a common descent from a people called „Arabs“ (that is patently absurd), or a common language (try to talk Maghrebi to a Syrian, and you’ll see what that is), or a shared history (which is, by definition, gone by; and hasn’t been very much shared, in these cases).

„Arabism“ relates not an ethnicity, but a way of thinking deeply formed by closed and military-dominated societies that seemed to abhorr change and prefer stability over freedom. That has never been natural, let alone innate to the „Arab people“, rather it was forced upon them. And that is about to crumble. When some day Arab will designate nothing more than a standard language people learn at school, there will be no more need to call states „Arab state“. (Try „Romance republic of France, for once, and shudder; or better yet, „Germanic Kingdom of Sweden“. Chills your blood, I should say.)

(Lebanese civil war has been faught, in part, about the concept of Arabism of Lebanon, which was supposed to imply: standing „faithful to the Palestinian resistance“, orientation towards Syria and Egypt, and support for some vague state socialist cause. Arabism is a political concept deeply entrenched in the conflicts of pre-1968. And after 2003, you could, if you would, hear a lot of arabic-speaking Iraqis saying that they are no longer part of the Arab world, and did not desire to be. What they meant to say was exactly that.)

3. These days, the last vestiges of Arabism have started to crumble. After 2011, things will not be the same any more. There are three possible roads at hand:

a) A civil state, where the armed forces are firmly under civilian control. The center of the state is not within the armed forces but within society. This requires a degree of popular sovereignity where people will voluntarily and readily sumbit to social domination, as is the case in Europe or North America. As this requires a degree of capitalist developement and integration of the whole population into the cycle of value production, it is not a viable option for all but a few countries; because, from the nature of capitalist wealth, it can not be shared universally, but is rendered utterly worthless (as it ultimately is) whithout witholding it from most of mankind. The Middle East could enter the circle of these precious few nations, or at least parts of it could.

b) A resistance state model as propagated by Iran and Hizb Allah, and envisioned by the Muslim brotherhood. Some Leftist circles are allowed to take part in it, too, as long as they will be needed and don’t get in the way (PFLP in Ghaza, Reformists in Iran; the CP cadres in Lebanon, as long as the weren’t killed in 1987 by Hizb Allah. This glorious role is what the Islamo-Left is vying for.). In this model, the army will be supplanted and eventually absorbed by „the resistance“, which is a universally empowered set of organizations encompassing all areas of society. A „resistant“ lifestyle is one who is aimed at giving „the ultimate sacrifice“, a „resistant“ society is one which is not absorbed by petty day-to-day affairs as music and extramarital sex (which need to be, therefore, ruthlessly suppressed), but filled whith holy earnest, and also aimed at the ultimate goal: death in the way of god.

This model solves, in a way, the antinomies of army and society, as it solves the contradicting aspects of that one tormenting question: which one is there to serve which one. It solves it the same way as Ernst Röhms thoughts on absorbing the Reichswehr into his S.A. took up Friedrich Engels‘ thought on peoples militia.

Today, Lebanon is firmly in the hand of the proponents of the „resistance“ model, to which a repentant Michel Aoun himself has been brought to convert. We see the Nasserists-in-disguise in Egypt already touting the very same idea, without bothering that this will empower the Islamists.

c) A revolution based on workers councils, the anti-state dictatorship of the proletariat, and the abolision of state, nation and military altogether. Also a solution, and one that doesn’t need an external enemy, and an enemy within, to thrive, and no war to be fouhgt, either. Of course we are hoping for that solution, but the good guys are not the ones with the big guns.

4. These decisions are posing themselves before hte background of a wider inner-Arab and inner-Muslim civil war. This civil war has raged for more than 30 years, in one form or another. In this civil war, it appeared that two currents (and two competing elites) were fighting for power, a nationalist and an Islamist elite.

But by closer look, a strange dynamic is reveiled behind that seemingly simple competition. The two currents represented two possible answers to the same crisis of capitalist modernization.

The nationalist regimes, whos main pillar has been the army, have tried since 1945 to drag there societies into capitalis or state-capitalist modernity, with all the came with it, the administrative, top-down way. For a short time in the 1960s, they seemed o succeed. But at the end of the 1960s, the crisis that came around 1968 put an end to the early euphoria.

We see 1968 as an international proletarian uprising against capitalist modernization; we know that there may be differing views, but we chose to ignore them.

National, and anti-imperialist, formation and developement after 1968 has never been a self-evident truth any longer, but was embattled by ten years of unceasing crisis. These battles, and the crisis the created, lifted the whole thing to another level, where a different solution was to be found. At this stage, another enemy emerged to modernist nationalism, a competing attempt to solve the crisis of nationalist-capitalist modernization.

Nationalism increasingly took to the free market instead, to deregulation and what has been called economic liberalization. It kept, so to say, its standing army, but let the world market replace the national command over economy. Faced with crisis and uproar at home, it allied with world market, against domestic opposition.

Islamism, which touts that „Islam is the solution“, is far from being a medieval relict that soon will be worn down by modernity. It is thoroughly a product of capitalist crisis, and in earnest an attempt to solve it. (Remember fascism, which also was an attempt to solve crisis.) It is downright a product of what we call the modern age, to the point that one even may call it part of a post-modern age (what ever that may be; maybe the age after 1968.).

The way Islamism believes to solve that crisis is deeply related to that concept of muqawamah, or resistance, as it is used by Hezb Allah and by Muslim brotherhood.

5. In the dictatorial-modernist constellation, state and ultimately the Army are the guarantees of order, and developement. State is something which is standing above society, not an organic part of it, or, as in „developed“ societies, its very own political organization. Society is not yet conquered, not yet wholly subjected to the logic of Capital. State appears as a stranger to society, its uppermost ranks as „state class“ (ahl al dawlah).

Modernization is the process of subjecting the population to their role as mere members of a nation, and dispossessed labor force. Its role is nothing else than to repeat and organize the process of Originary Accumulation, creating a society of classes, and at the same time homogenizing that newly dispossessed masses, creating a political society whose very organization that state itself will be.

It is crystal clear that this program, a logical conundrum in itself, cannot materialize. The Arabist elites, who knew this very well, started to react whith growing despair th the first signs of these contradictions engulfing them.

(Just the same contradiction the Soviet Union and its state party experienced in the crucial formating years: you cannot command the voluntary loyality of the masses, and at the same time subject them to the horros of capitalist modernization, dispossess them, displace them, and kill them en masse if they rebell. The trotskist tendency stands out as a tragic and sometimes unvoluntarily comic example of the impossible situation you get into by not acknowleding that simple contradiction.)

Against the ever-floating, ever-unsteady will of the real people, the Army was the guardian of the people, as they should be; the ideal people, patriotic, disciplined, and loyal to a state and a cause that tokk away everything they had. The Army, therefore, could not let those very people have a say; it could not be content with its early role as a protector of the constitution, but it needed to step in directly, and govern itself; thus setting itself in sharp contradiction to their own design th guard the emergence of a modern, capitalist society governed by „popular sovereignity“.

That is what we call state of emergency, although its foremost thinker, the German jurist and fascist Carl Schmitt, descibed it with the German term „Ausnahmezustand“, exceptional state. Carl Schmitt firmly tied this concept to the concept of sovereignity by declaring that sovereign, or the Sovereign, is he who can declare state of emergency.

Therefore, we must conclude that the Sovereign of the Arabist state, the embodiement of its unity, the protector of the constitution, and the one who really could declare state of emergency has been the Army, standing above the state just as the state stood above society; or rather, its the Free Officers organization, its innermost core, its quasi-Mamluk soul. And it is from there that we start to take a look on how Islamist thought is different from Arabist.

6. The political concept of muqawamah centers around the concept of jihad, which means effort. It aims at subjecting all of society under that effort, at re-organizing it around that effort. Muqawamah or jihad are not perceived as a seperate entity beside society but as its structure, its uniting and synthetic principle, its raison d’etre. Muqawamah (Resistance) against the external and internal (and eternal) enemy is not meant to by a way of politics but a way of live.

This political-social current therefore is in need of an enemies, and above all an eternal enemy who is behind them all. It would never have seen the light, were it not for the effort of Arabist dictatorships effort to unite society against the external foe, inject it with paranoia against the traitor within, and permanent fear of the machinations of the mighty few, which it tried to stick to the anti-Semitic narrative, and its anti-Zionist form deeply embedded in any anti-imperialist ideology.

The eternal foe are, of course, the Jews, and the self-proclaimed Jewish state. The external foe is every imperialist or sub-imperialist enemy of the day, and the internal foe ist of course everybody who, for any reason whatsoever, fails to totally submit to the common, yet totally mad effort.

That invaluable heritage the Islamists tool from Arabism. All they needed to do was change the construed „identity“ from Arab to Islamic, and all the contradictions Arbaism had caught itself in seemed to be resolved. This receipt proved to be irrestistible to many (yet totally mad).

Sovereignity is no longer ascribed to the Army, not to the people (as has been the ultimate yet elusive aim of Arabist modernization), but to God; who, of course, is not present; so, for all practical purposes, Man is his vicegerent on earth; but of course this rule is bound to submission under Gods will. And of course, and not very different from Thomas Hobbes, Islamism had its own moments of „quis iudicabit“: who shall determine what the will of God is commanding?

Khomeinis theory of vilayat e faqih has little appeal to Sunni Islamists, for obvious reasons; his practical solution of how Islam should supersede state, however, has had. Khomeini and his following created, during the Islamic counterrevolution, a parallel state, if you like; a state beside and above the state, guided by separate authorities which were not responsible to „the people“ and the state: the Basij, the Pasdaran, the Supreme Leader. This structure reserved the right to decide on matters of exterior policies, war and peace; it retained, basically, all the rights reserved as arcane rights of the Sovereign in classical theory of state.

In Lebanon, we can watch the inner logic of this unfolding over time. There, this structure is called Hizb Allah (after an Iranian model). It set up a parallel armed body, beside the Army, and to this day managed to keep it from being disarmed and incorporated into the Army. Not even their closest allies have brought them to promise anything more than unifying Army and „Resistance“ under the same command (as it is, by the way, in Iran). The representatives of the party of God see, however, no reason to be silent about their intent to unite both under the command of the „resistance“, as it already has been achieved in Iran

7. Muqawamah, that is the new formula for achieving what no Arab regime has achieved: total submission of the people. Muqawamah serves as a replacement for „popular sovereignity“. It is, in some way, a solution to the problem of sovereignity; not the Army, but the „resistance“ is sovereign. And the „resistance“ is supposed to be not differne from the people, but their embodiement; provided they don’t fail to succumb to it. If they do, they will serve as an unwilling example of the enemy within, which is to be eradicated.

This wholly mad, yet wholly logical model is viable only under certain economic circumstances: the failure of capitalist modernization, and yet the possibility to get by without it. the Iranian regime would not have survived without the oil.

And it would not be viable without being firmly grounded, or appearing to be, in Islamic religion. The traditional Islamic concept of jihad serves as an ideological linkage between the hard effort of society as a whole, against the enemy without, and the individual effort against the inevitable reluctance within the indivual to submit to that cause (the old ethical concept of greater jihad).

Without the heavy dead weight of centuries of Islam, there would not be a ready solution, no way to tie up the ends of that problem of social synthesis; in that way, it is true that „Islam is the solution“. The classical figures of Islamic thought provide Sovereignity with a way to uphold itself, in its deepest crisis, and to escape its abolition.

8. In Egypt, the epicenter of Arabism, we see today how a peoples revolution interacted with the military rule of the Free Officers, and that it could force upon them the decision to undo very much of the state it has build as a disguise to its rule. We see how it has been forced to revert to openly revert to its initial stages, as a sovereign ruler; not in front of an hostile population, but rather of a population that chose to compell them to start all over again.

The deep inner weakness of the movement of January 25th is revealed by the fact that it did not chose to profess itself as the counter-Sovereign, but to compell the Army to fulfill that role. It is as if the movement felt it was not strong and coherent enough, and shared no common concepts of what sholud be done and how it should go further.

It left, for the time being, the old Arabist order intact, and the Army in ultimate control; but in how far that control is a mere facade is to be seen. The Army has been forced to do it; it is to be remembered that the French Revolution started by the people forcing the King, the Sovereign, to do certain things. It was not for long after that that his head came off.

In part II we will deal with how the Armed forces of the original Arabist model developed, in Syria and Iraq; how its developement was, all over the Arab world, intervoven with the development of State in general; and how it interacted with the aspirations of both the bourgeois and the proletarian class.

More on Occupied London and contra-info.

We would love to see Syntagma turned into Tahrir, and Europe in turmoil.

I am writing a lnbghty bit on the Army and its role in the state. It is going to take a while. I found out that i need to delve a bit into some things we took for granted in theory of the state.

It will be a strange bit of reading, in the end. Or at least we hope so.

News from Egypt are dire. So called pro-Mubarak demonstrators have entered the scene, wielding clubs and whips, and allegedly also firearms, and attacking the protesters at Tahrir square.

These are the thugs of the old regime. These are the pillars of the system, the plainclothes men with the batons, and the men without faces, without traces that are manning the death squads, that are running the torture facilities in the prisons.

Ordinary people. Members of unions, public employees. These are what any regime is ultimately made of.

The army (later these days I will try to analyse the role the army is playing in these days) let these people in. It knows perfectly well why it did this.

The revolution is over, it is enough: that is what the army is conveying. From now on, the army is the enemy.

If you give Mubarak time till the end of his term, he will not sleep till he got his revenge. You got the beast by the neck, kill it, or it will bite you. This is no longer a war of choice, you can not go back now, the dice are rolled.

This other effort yet, Egyptians!

The first Sysnagogue in Tunisia has been burning. This may serve us all as a warning of things to come.

1. People on the street are pointing their fingers to the remnants of the Ben Ali regime, arguing that his thugs would have an interest in derailing the revolution, and defaming it. They wanted, they argue, to spark a civil war.

Now, we don’t know who did it; but one thing is for sure: things like that are probable to happen again, and far worse.

That is not the same as to claim that there had been anti-semitic undercurrents in the Tunisian revolution. Though we know that there is indeed such an undercurrent in Tunisian society, as in all Arab societies and, indeed, all capitalist societies, it has been remarkable, especially in Tunisia, how much this current has been sidelined by the protests.

The Tunisian revolution taught the people that they, themselves, can make history, and that may have, to a degree, sapped the source of power of the abundant and omnipresent conspiracy theories that lie at the heart of anti-semitic thinking. Anti-semitism, today, may be at an historic low-point in Arab societies.

So why then, now, these arson attacks? And why the warning of more to come?

2. Every Arab regime has a vested interest in the stability of every other Arab regime, regardless of its character, because of fear of exactly that which is happening today: a chain reaction of uprisings. Every regime stands to lose a lot, even everything, if anywhere in the Arab world democracy is allowed to flourish.

And not only that. Every Arab regime is bound to exploit every weakness of all its neighboring regimes. This is not because of the innate wickedness of a certain regime but because of rational mistrust: no ruler can be sure some other ruler is not trying to harm him, by supporting so-called opposition groups. And so, prophylacticly, every Arab ruler is bound to operate secret-service operations with so called opposition groups from neighboring countries.

This works not only with Arab regimes, to be sure, but in the whole wider Middle East and everywhere in the world; but because of its strange interdependence with the basic solidaraity of Arab regimes, it has a quality of its own in the Arab world. The Arab regimes are basically hostile brothers.

Now, wh could have seen in the Lebanese Civil war, and indeed even today in Lebanon, that whenever a so called power vacuum exists, things tend to head to civil war, not only because of their own weight, but because every neighboring Arab regime will rush to have a stake in the game, and run their own militia on the ground, and try to out-maneuvre eyery rivaling regime; and so, even if the Lebanese war lords at some points really had wanted to make peace (which they did), their principals, or allies, be it Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Saudia would not have let them.

3. The same holds true for Iraq after 2003. The neighboring countries (Arab and non-Arab alike) all had an interest in not letting transition to some kind of democracy happen smoothly; and not letting any of the other regimes having better relations in Iraq than they themselves had. The result was a downwards spiral of terrorism and civil war, fueled by virtually every player, with multiple mercenary „resistance“ groups on the ground, whose principal aim proved to be killing off every trace of Iraqi civil society, secular or left wing opposition.

They have very much succeeded, without any protest from the so called left. Not that the left had been afraid from taking sides. It took. The side of the killers, that is. In some way or another.

What has happenend in Iraq stands to happen again in Tunisia, too. And hopefully, this time the Left, which has covered itself so deeply in shame in Iraq ans Iran, will, at least, stand on its feet this time.

4. We all know there is a man in Libya called Qadhafi, and we all know who he is. Libya borders Tunisia. And Qadhafis regime this time really felt the heat. Qadhafi has lost no time to ally himself firmly with Tunisias „Muslim brothers“ (Ihkwan al muslimun). He knws that the stakes are high, and he would rather see Tunisia be drawn to the 9th circle of hell than to see it flourish.

Everybody knows that, in Tunisia. Everybody knows whats at stake. Hopefully anybody learned the lessons from Iraq. Or from neighboring Algeria (where, I will not deny that, nobody can draw the line between the forces of the state, and the Islamist militias they are supposed to hand down. Point taken? Point taken.)

If the Tunisian people don’t stand firm, and if the Left doesn’t defend their cause with steadfastness, there will be a time when death squads and truck bombs roam in Tunisia. It all starts, and all ends, with harassing and persecuting the Jews. Then come other non-Muslims, then anyone not sufficiently Muslim. Then they will come for the free women and the labor activists. We all know that. We have seen it in Iraq, and many places before. It’s time to learn the lesson, and fight back.

To many people, it seemed only natural to see protesters in Egypt carrying signs around saying „Mubarak-Traitor“ or „Suleiman-Traitor“, of portraits of each where Stars-of-David were painted on to their foreheads, so as to hear or see people call them „Israel agents“.

To us, this is not only not natural, it is deeply disturbing; or rather, it sheds a very disturbing light on some of those currents who now, after days of massive protests, are beginning to show on the surface of these turbulent waves.

We will not, however, buy into the argument, even for a secong, that this distorted imaginery, this outright madness is „what the Arab masses are thinking“. It is not, it is, what their presumptive masters want to make them think. It is what their worst enemies would like them to think, so that they can be controlled.

It is, of course, downright foolish to believe the president of Egypt, be it Mubarak or his predecessor Sadat, have been „Israeli agents“, that they somehow protected the interest not of „the Egyptian nation“, but of Israel and the USA. Such a thinking betrays a mindset that is not only nationalist, and state-fetishist, but in the case of Egypt downright imperialist.

And yes, there has been a thing like Egyptian imperialism. And it was precisely Gamal abd an Nasser, the hero of many Egyptian left wingers far beyond the narrow current of die-hard Nasserists, who promoted it.

1. To think of Mubarak as someone who miraculously worked against Egyptian interest, by upholding the peace treaty with Israel, that is to think of state as the quasi innate organ of a nation, to which people belong, by virtue of the coincidence of birth. State, according to that logic, is something quasi-natural, looking after the well-being of its subjects.

Nothing could be farer from truth, and the Mubarak regime is one of the best cases for abolishing state and nation altogether. Every state, in a sense, is a failed state, and necessarily so. State can treat human beings only as part of a machinery; therefore, it has to cease to exist.

Now to suppone to state a good, and friendly purpose with regard to the „nation“ it is supposed to embody, that means obscuring this otherwise obvious relation; spplanting national solidarity in the place of class struggle for human emancipation; promoting the prolongation of state, and by extension, capitalism. It is evidently something deeply counterrevolutionary.

Mubarak has been a tyrant exactly because he guarded the interes of the state, over the wellbeing of its „own people“. Therefore, it is warranted that people break away from this state and cease to be some powers „own people“, and start, for a change, to live as human beings should.

2. But that supposition works in another way as well. By suggesting that Mubarak did not what was in the interest of the nation, especially with regard to his alleged beneficients, Israel and the USA, it is suggested that the interest of the nation would consist in renouncing the peace treaty, and starting another round of hostilities.

Since when is advocating war of aggression a left-wing position? In the Arab world, apparently, anything goes. After al, these supposedly are the legimitate aspirations of a suppressed people.

Never mind that the people in Egypt have not been suppressed by Israel, but by Egypt; that Israels only crime in that is to have concluded a treaty with a dictator, in the absence of another government, to end a war that was started by another Egyptian despot; never mind that, because by some miraculous transformation the real oppressing Egyptian state is shown to be nothing than an Israeli agent, and therefore not the „real“ Egyptian state.

And never mind that the peace treaty has been one of the few things that disgusting regime has ever done good to its people, taking from them the menace of war; without, it must be said, relieving their burden, because it never ended military rule, and kept maintaining an extensive military expenditure.

It is not only a logical fallacy to depict Mubarak as an Israeli agent, it is also part of a propaganda effort aimed at hysterization, of appealing to cheap conspirational thinking, and at once more playing the same tired old tricks to lure the people into another edition of the military state whose last verstiges they had overthrown only recently. It aims at nationalist mobilization, and submission under the national war effort, and discipling the aspirations of the laboring classes.

What is next? Invading Yemen again, to fulfill Nassers legacy, which led him to wage what has been called, and rightfully, Nassers Vietnam, and a colonial enterprise? Or annexing Syria, while we’re at it?

Many prominent Egyptian so called left wingers seem to have no problem with letting that genie out of the bottle again. They deserve to be denounced as what they are. Among them are such celebrities as Hossam al Hamalawy, who is feted even in council communist and anarchist circles who should know better.

All those Nasserists in disguise are recuperateurs, enemies of the working class and its revolution, and should be treated as such.

Das Wort wird nicht gefunden,
das uns beide jemals vereint:
der Regen fliesst nämlich nach unten
und du bist mein Klassenfeind.

source

From an interview about Tunisia, and the Islamist threat:

Wir halten sie für sehr gefährlich. Sie sind der Erhebung ferngeblieben, außer am letzten Tag, als sie ein Vereinnahmungsmanöver versuchten über die Instrumentalisierung der Märtyrer, aber ohne Erfolg. Heute ist ihre Taktik, teilzunehmen, aber unsichtbar zu bleiben. Sie haben tatsächlich einige Volksviertel von Tunis infiltriert. Der Führer der fundamentalistischen Ennahdha-Partei will nach Tunis zurückkehren [das ist am 30.1. passiert] und die Strömung umbauen, um den neuen Generationen Platz zu überlassen. Sie haben also eine geheime Agenda: sie werden sich nicht gleich aufstellen lassen, aber sie bereiten sich auf die nächsten Wahlen vor. Sie sind da, sie sind bereit. Wenn den anderen die Luft ausgeht, werden sie den Gipfel erklimmen. Umso mehr als man spürt, dass Gaddafi sich mit ihnen verbündet: das ist natürlich eine Mauschelei, denn er ist kein Fundamentalist. Aber er praktiziert die Politik der verbrannten Erde, denn er fürchtet sehr um seine Macht: diese tunesische Erhebung hat zu einer internationalen Breite geführt, und er ist der erste, der fürchten muss, dass unser Beispiel bei ihm Schule macht. Es gibt schon kleine Demonstrationen in Libyen, und er hat einige Armeeoffiziere abgesägt – angeblich wegen Korruption… Er ist also in schrecklicher Verlegenheit: das beste, was er machen kann, ist Anarchie, Chaos zu stiften, und dafür muss er die Muslimbrüder unterstützen. Ghannouchi, der Führer der tunesischen Fundamentalisten, hat übrigens erklärt, dass er die Position von Gaddafi schätzt, der von Anfang an gegen die Bewegung war. Wir denken also, dass es eine objektive Allianz gibt zwischen der libyschen Regierung und den Fundamentalisten, und das ist eine große Gefahr.

Was ein wenig beruhigt, ist die neue Generation, die 15-25-jährigen, die den Aufstieg des Islamismus in den 1980er Jahren nicht miterlebt haben, die also ein wenig geimpft ist gegen den Fundamentalismus, auch wenn nichts gewiss ist. Man spürt andererseits, dass die Leute in den Stadtteilkomitees schon die Ankunft des Fundamentalismus fürchten, die Ankunft von Ghannouchi. Und diese selbe Generation hat auch die Verwüstungen durch des Linksradikalismus nicht erlebt. Es ist also eine gewissermaßen von diesen Ideologien unberührte Generation, sie wurde nicht kontaminiert.

Gut, aber das verhindert nicht, dass die Fundamentalisten die Dinge wieder in die Hand nehmen wollen, wenn auch erst morgen. Deshalb muss man sehr wachsam sein. Um so mehr, als die Linken dabei sind, mit diesen Leuten Bündnisse einzugehen, und das ist das Allergefährlichste. Bei der Versammlung aller Parteien, die kürzlich stattgefunden hat, waren auch Vertreter der Fundamentalisten: es waren also im selben Saal Trotzkisten, Stalinisten, Islamisten usw. Das ist für uns völlig unverständlich, dass Leute sich derart verbünden…. Das ist wie bei Euch: Ihr habt die Islamo-Linken, wir haben auch diese Bündnisse, aber in allen Schattierungen, mit Unterschieden von Gruppe zu Gruppe. Auf jeden Fall werden sie in den nächsten zehn Jahren keine Gefahr darstellen. Sie sind eine klare und schwerwiegende Bedrohung, aber keine unmittelbare.

Translation:

We hold them to be very dangerous. They stayed away from the movement, except for the last day, when the tried a recuperation maneuvre, by instrumentalizing the martyrs, but without success. Today their tactic is to take part, but stay invisible. The indeed infiltrated some quartiers of Tunis. The leader of an Nahda party intends to return to Tunisia and rebuild the current, to make room for a new generation. So, they have a secret agenda: they will not run for office now, but prpeare for the next elections. They are there, they are ready. When the others will be out of breath, they will klimb the peak. All the more that one feels that they are allied with Qadhafi: that, of course, is insincere, for he is no Islamist. But he is pracizing scorched earth policy, for he fears for his power; the Tunisian uprising has had an international impact, and he is the first to be afraid that people in Libya will follow that example. There are already a few demonstration in Libya, and he fired a few army officers; for corruptio charges, allegedly. So, he is in a terrible mess: the best he can do is create disorder, chaos, and therefore he needs to support the muslim brothers. Ghanouchi, the head of the Tunisian muslim brothers, by the way, has declared that he appreciates the position of Qadhafi, who was against the movement from the start. So, we are thinking that there is an objective alliance between the Libyan govenment and the Islamists. And that is a great danger.

What is a bit of a comfort is the new generation, the 15 to 25 year old, who haven’t seen the rise of Islamism in the 1980s, who are therefore a bit immune to it, even if that is not for sure. On the other side, you feel that people in the neighborhodd comittees are fearing the coming of the Islamists, the coming of Ghanouchi. And the same generation hasn’t lived through the devastations of left wing radicalism. It is, so so say, a generation untouched by the ideologues, it hasn’t become contaminated.

Well, but that doesn’t hinder that Islamists would like to get matters in their hands, even only tomorrow. One needs to be vigilant, therefor. All the more, because the left wing is about to conclude alliances with these people, and that is the most dangerous thing. The assembly of all parties, the other day, was attended by the Islamists, too; there were Trotskists, Stalinists, Islamists etc. all in the same room. It is totally unconceivable to us, that people conclude alliances like that… It’s just like over there in your country: you have the Islamo-Left, we have these alliances, but in all shades, differing from group to group. All in all, they will not pose much of a threat for the next 10 years; they are a clear and grave threat, but not an immediate one.

Well, while it seems 10 years is a bit too generous, and 4 years is definitely closer to what the interviewee said himself (next elections etc), and while the situation in Egypt is certainly not that easy, this is really interesting.

source

I want to talk in more detail about the local committees formed by the masses, which are one of the most interesting manifestations of its revolutionary action. In the face of the looting started mostly by the ex-secret police, people formed these committees as really democratic institutions, a real competition to the power of the ruling elite and its authoritarian institutions… in Egypt now there are two governments; the local committees and the Mubarak government that is hidden behind the tanks and the rifles of its soldiers. This is happening in a region that is used to dictatorships and authoritarianism… that is the great thing about revolutions, that they transform the world so fast. That doesn’t mean that the struggle has been won; on the contrary, this means that the real struggle has just started.

How much of all that, exactly, is wishful thinking? Is it possible that sheer enthusiasm overcomes critical thinking? Isn’t all that at least ambiguos? Is he not terrified by the prospect of a „really democratic“ government by the owners of property?

At least Signalfire got a firm opinin on the phenomenon of neighborhood militias in Egypt; and it is quite reasonable:

The mass arrests of looters in Egypt and the para-military self organization of petty bourgeois citizens for the protection of their ill gotten gains against the destitute majority, once again illustrates the heinous fraud that is every cross-class “popular” and “democratic” movement.

To citizens intoxicated with bourgeois ideology’s normalization of commodity tyranny and human degradation, proletarians appropriating what they need is a crime and an act of provocation, which can only be explained by their being in the pay of the old regime.

The sanctity of the banks, the supermarkets, and most of all the homes of the well to do, these temples of the modern age must be protected at all costs from the grubby hands of the dispossessed mob, a mob which was of course more then welcome to die for democratic and national slogans which were never its own.

The problems faced by the masses in Egypt have nothing to do with the “corrupt tyranny” of Mubarak and his cronies, they are the same problems faced by the proletariat worldwide, unemployment, wage dependency, police terrorism, overwork, austerity measures and hunger.

No restructuring of the state to allow for the idiotic circus of competitive elections, no shift of power towards this or that sordid gang of “socialist” or populist bureaucrats will change these conditions in the slightest.

Only the self organization of the class for the expropriation of the means of production and the abolition of commodity production, can emancipate the proletarianized majority from the misery to which capital is compelled to consign it.

Billions of people around the world, confront the contradiction between the relations of production and the forces of production everyday in the form of crushing poverty and humiliating slave labor and this contradiction can only be resolved by the dictatorship of the proletariat, not the democracy of commercial exchange.

The looting of a supermarket or the torching of a bank, possesses immeasurably more authentically political significance then all the whining of every opposition party and human rights group put together.

The poor and the wage dependent have no stake in the political deals which will be written in their blood.

As for the shop owners and residents of upscale neighborhoods fearful for their designer furniture, we can only say, your time will come and when it does, moaning about democracy will do you no good.

Although they perharps miss the fact that there are defence committes in destitute quarters as well, they certainly got one important thing right: those gangs that defend property today will support everybody who credibly promises to return order. That is, to protect property. In 1979, those militias were the fiercest champions of Khomeini.