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.
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