Tonight We are ALL Egyptians 20110202 (Ich bin ein Berliner)

(2 pm. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

I know that many, many featured writers and other contributors have written about this subject, but I think that I have a bit of a different take on this subject than most have.  I know that there are real, difficult, important, and political implications in this entire affair.  I know that the ravers on the right (interesting, Glenn Beck was not on air tonight) and on the left have their version of things.

My outlook on the entire subject is from the perspective of the people who are either participating or affected by what looks like to be the beginning of a revolution proper in Egypt.  A revolution that is fueled by many factors, including generations of oppression, a lousy economy (the wealth difference betwixt the top and everyone else is much worse there than in the United States), suppression of opinion, and the dreaded “knock at the door in the wee hours” are but a few.  Please bear with me for a few moments.

Egypt has an extremely long heritage, millennium after millennium.  Dang it, the Egyptians were amongst the first civilizations in what has become known as Western Civilization.  As a rich culture, there were those who envied their wealth and finally subjugated them, several times as a matter of fact.  But that is not the thrust of this thesis.

The thrust of this thesis is that the “real” protesters appear to be what we would call “people on the street”, just regular folks who finally had had enough.  Where I grew up, people would say that they finally “just got a can full of it.”  The “can” in the cliche was a chamber pot, and everyone knows what went in those!

The reason that I say that we are all Egyptians now is the the United States is intimately involved with the politics of modern Egypt.  Here is a very brief history.

Nasser, the Egyptian strongman when I was little, was very much under the influence of the Soviet Union.  The USSR gave Egypt lots of money for “progress”, mainly lining the pockets of the Egyptian ruling class, but also doing some public works, like the Aswan Dam.  Now, it is a matter of debate whether this was a fundamentally good idea, but it did employ a lot of local folks.  Nasser died, and finally the Egyptian Army installed a new strongman, Sadat.  Sadat saw that the money was more reliable coming from the United States, and broke with the Soviets.

Sadat came to Washington and met with the President of the United States (Jimmy Carter) and with his Israeli counterpart and signed a peace treaty with Israel.  What most people do not realize was that part of the deal was massive monetary aid both to Egypt and Israel from the United States, a practice that continues to this day.  We are talking over a billion and a half dollars in direct aide to both nations, and lots more sort of off of the books.  The power of money to quell bad feelings is always astonishing to me.

Anyway, Sadat’s personal bodyguard force became compromised and one of them, as best as I can tell, shot him to death.  By that time the Egyptian Army was the strongest single force in the country, and they chose Mubarak to be the new President.  Because of the decades of experience of stuffing ballots from the Nasser and Sadat police states, Mubarak had little trouble getting reelected.  He always had over 98% in the final tallies, and obviously those kinds of numbers are bogus in any kind of legitimate election, unless it the the Pope or George Washington who is the top candidate.

So we bought and paid for Mubarak with our tax dollars.  That makes every taxpayer in the United States an Egyptian in a sense.  Ostensibly, that was to enhance the chances for peace in the Near East.  In reality, it was to keep Egypt from attacking Israel, since the Egyptian Army was the only real threat at the time, and the physiological benefit of the single most populous Arab nation seemed like a good idea.

Well, the curtain has been removed.  The reality is that most Egyptian citizens live in what we, in the United States, call crushing poverty, whilst the elites are rich.  The reality is that we, United States taxpayers, have sustained this system since Sadat.  The reality is that modern communication has led to a demonstration of the want for freedom in what are really disenfranchised masses.

Of course there are organized, powerful associations who are playing this situation like a game of chess.  The Muslim Brotherhood is often mentioned, but in my opinion they are bit players.  The real players are the United States, Mubarak himself, the Egyptian Army, Israel, Russia, the UK, and BIG OIL.

Now to get to the folks in the streets.  They, except for the paid Mubarak mercenaries, are pretty much like you and I are.  They want to be good providers to their families, and to give their children something just a little better than they received from theirs.  They all love their children, except for the minority of cruel folks in all cultures.  They all want their nation to be proud once again, and sell the products of her output, rather than be kept on what is essentially welfare provided by US, and I mean us, the United States.  By the way, almost all of this aid goes to the Army.

All they want, at least the overwhelming majority of them who are decent people, is to have a fair chance to have some decent representation in their governing body, a fair chance at finding gainful employment, and a fair chance of leaving a better life for their progeny.  Egypt is NOT a radical Islamic culture, although there is a fair chance that those who are would use this moment of disarray to attempt to make is so.  I am not too worried about that.

One of the few benefits that derives from our massive military aid is that almost without exception their top military officers have been trained in the United States.  Perhaps the training is not as important as the fact that they lived here for several years, and can see what benefits a relatively free society can offer.  I seriously doubt that Egypt will go the way that Iran did in 1979 (I am old enough to remember that well), because the psychology is very different.

I welcome any and all comments, and everyone that reads my work knows that I love to be corrected, debated, and challenged.

Once again, we paid for it.  So, tonight, we Americans are all Egyptians.

Warmest regards,

Doc