“Morsi misread the Arab Spring. The uprising that ended decades of dictatorship and led to Egypt’s first free and fair presidential election last year was about the right to that vote. But at a deeper level it was about personal empowerment, a demand to join the modern world, and live in an open society under the rule of law rather than the rule of despotic whim. …
“Instead, Morsi placed himself above judicial review last November, railroaded through a flawed Constitution, allowed Brotherhood thugs to beat up liberal opponents, installed cronies at the Information Ministry, increased blasphemy prosecutions, surrendered to a siege mentality, lost control of a crumbling economy and presided over growing sectarian violence. For the Brotherhood, the pre-eminent Islamist movement in the region, the sudden shift from hounded outlaw to power in the pivotal nation of the Arab world proved a bridge too far. …
“This was Morsi’s core failure. He succumbed to Islamic authoritarianism in a nation whose revolution was diverse and demanded inclusiveness. The lesson for the region is critical. …
“‘The rejection went far beyond the liberal community,’ [Heba] Morayef [director of Human Rights Watch in Cairo] said. ‘The vast majority of the women at the demonstrations were veiled. Practicing Muslims, non-Westernized Egyptians, were saying no to political Islam and religious authoritarianism. We have never seen anything like this in the Arab world.'”
“At what point does justifying the military’s actions by declaring there to be ‘exceptional circumstances’ as Beradei and other Tamarod leaders have said, become mere excuses for authoritarian and undemocratic actions against one’s political opponents who have not committed any crime? I personally fear — and this is something that people like Heba Morayef of HRW Egypt have been warning in the last 48 hours — that the military is putting the revolutionaries in a situation where they are forced to support actions that will come back to haunt them severely in the near future.
“Is not the final battle of the revolution still to be fought — that between revolutionary forces and the military and the deep state? Can there be any real transition to democracy, never mind ‘freedom, dignity and social justice’ without a systematic and wholesale transformation of Egypt’s political economy towards the kind of sustainable and downwardly redistributive model (in terms of wealth, resources and political power) that is an anathema to the global neoliberal order, never mind the existing Egyptian elite? … What would happen if Beradei spoke honestly to the Egyptian people about the military and the deep state and the existing political economy from his new position of power and demanded their tranformation? Would the tens of millions in the streets this week support him? Would the military allow itself to be declawed and its power severely curtailed? Will the elite willingly allow a new system to emerge that would channel a significant share of their wealth and power away from them?
“Ultimately, is what we’ve just seen still not the warm-up for an even bloodier and more monumental fight?”
Larry Derfner writes on the progressive Israeli blog +972:
“Look at what ‘people power’ just did in Cairo. It overthrew the first elected president in Egypt’s history — a year after he got elected. It was a military coup — backed deliriously by the people. And look at what’s happening now — the army has arrested the elected president, Mohammed Morsi, and all the other leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, and is calling the shots again with its old buddies from the pre-revolution era, who are back in business. And “the people,” the millions who filled Tahrir Square this week, are triumphant. They willed the return of military dictatorship to Egypt, after willing its downfall two-and-a-half years ago.
“And good people everywhere are supposed to sympathize with them. Sorry. This is demoralizing.”
I feel about the same way. I didn’t like Morsi. He was incompetent, clannish, authoritarian, failed to address the economic and security problems of Egypt — and most importantly, he began alienating potential supporters almost from the moment he took power, rather than broadening his coalition as he would have had to, to tackle the enormous problems facing Egypt in this time of upheaval.
Yet despite this, I feel sad, even ashamed, that Egypt’s “revolutionaries” have called on the military to step in and fix things for them, rather than sticking things out through the political process, and organizing for parliamentary elections in the fall. If Morsi’s support had really withered to the point that it seems obvious that it has, then wouldn’t the opposition parties have won a strong parliamentary majority, and have been able to set the country on a new, more progressive course? Instead, we have a complete end-running of the electoral process, just one year after Egypt chose its first democratically elected leader in its 5000-year history!
The argument is that the 22 million signatures claimed by the youth movement Tamarrod (“Revolt”), and the massive crowds on June 30 who outnumbered even those opposing Mubarak in his last days, amounted to a popular referendum against Morsi that obliged the army to act. Indeed, given the way tensions have been increasing among Egyptians over the past weeks and months, perhaps there was no time to waste, and no other way to avoid a far more explosive crisis.
And yet — and yet, I can’t help but wonder how it all came to this. Was it really so impossible for either side to reach out to the other, and make compromises that would permit the different factions to work together, sharing the same political space since they are all Egyptians, until the people could once again be consulted in elections, on schedule and in due time?
So, congratulations to the Egyptian people for toppling your second dictator — and shame on you for how it went down. Let’s hope this is the last time you settle your differences in this way! May those who claim to be democrats stick to democracy from now on.
“Despite U.S. intelligence officials’ repeated denials that the National Security Agency is collecting the content of domestic emails and phone calls, evidence is mounting that the agency’s vast surveillance network can and may already be preserving billions of those communications in powerful digital databases. …
“The administration is building a facility in a valley south of Salt Lake City that will have the capacity to store massive amounts of records — a facility that former agency whistleblowers say has no logical purpose if it’s not going to be a vault holding years of phone and Internet data. …
“‘What we are really talking about here is a globalized system that prevents any form of electronic communication from taking place without it being stored and monitored by the National Security Agency,’ [columnist Glenn] Greenwald said in a webcast to the Socialism Conference in Chicago. ‘It means they’re storing every call and have the capability to listen to them at any time.'”
“Why, do Germans and others ask, does the U.S. need to collect 6 billion (!) German communications each year? What is going on here? Even the Stasi would have settled for 600,000. …
“But having pissed off major European partners is not enough for Obama. This is unprecedented:
“‘The plane carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales was rerouted to Austria after various European countries refused to let it cross their airspace because of suspicions that NSA leaker Edward Snowden was on board, Bolivian officials said Tuesday. …
“‘A furious Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca said France and Portugal would have to explain why they canceled authorization for the plane, claiming that the decision had put the president’s life at risk. …
“‘In a midnight press conference, Bolivian Vice President Alvaro Garcia…described Morales as being ‘kidnapped by imperialism’ in Europe.'”
“The forcing down of the Bolivian President’s jet was a clear breach of the Vienna Convention by Spain and Portugal, which closed their airspace to this Head of State while on a diplomatic mission. It has never been thought necessary to write down in a Treaty that Heads of State enjoy diplomatic immunity while engaged in diplomacy…. But it is a hitherto unchallenged precept of customary international law, indeed arguably the oldest provision of international law.
“To the US and its allies, international law is no longer of any consequence. … I have repeatedly posted, and have been saying in public speeches for ten years, that under the UK/US intelligence sharing agreements the NSA spies on UK citizens and GCHQ spies on US citizens and they swap the information. As they use a shared technological infrastructure, the division is simply a fiction to get round the law in each country restricting those agencies from spying on their own citizens.
“I have also frequently remarked how extraordinary it is that the media keep this ‘secret’ which they have all known for years.”
“Egypt has entered a volatile and potentially dangerous new phase with the army moving swiftly and decisively against President Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood to take control — though only temporarily — of the Arab world’s largest country. …
“Morsi’s overthrow is a hammer blow for Egyptian Islamists who spent the long decades of authoritarian rule under Mubarak and his predecessors building up the Brotherhood organisation and dreaming of the day when they could take power. The worry must be that this experience will reinforce their sense of victimhood — that despite winning a free election they have been betrayed and prevented from exercising legitimate power. It clearly creates a dangerous precedent.”
“The most dangerous aspect of Brotherhood rule was probably its discourse of fear and loathing. In fact, Morsi wagging menacing fingers against Egyptians has become emblematic of his brief rule. Incitement against Copts, Shias and anyone who dared oppose him was rampant and unchecked. …
“After an excruciating year of mismanagement, sectarian rhetoric and state violence, it is understandable that Egyptians should rise in full force against a regime that seemed to hold them hostage. Morsi has shown himself to be incapable of governing or even understanding the fundamentals of managing a modern state. What he succeeded in doing was to dispel any illusions that Egyptians might have had about the Muslim Brotherhood as a morally and spiritually superior faction….
“Morsi and his supporters have argued that his overthrow was a violation of the legitimacy of the ballot box. In his last speech as president, Morsi repeated the word legitimacy over and over again. What he did not realise, however, was that the legitimacy of a ruler springs from popular consent.”
“The dilemma facing Egypt is that it’s a limited, electoral democracy whereas many want it to be a republic. The difference being that in a republic the individual has guarantees in the context of a socio-political compact, whereas in a democracy the minority has little if any voice. Egypt is formally a republic, and has been since 1956, over several iterations of a compact…. It might have turned into a more democratic republic after 2011 except the new social compact was left to elections. Because elections are not very accurate indicators of national sentiment…and the voting public has still mostly few lasting allegiances in post-revolution Egypt, this was always a bad idea. A lot of people have changed their mind.
“However Egypt comes out of this crisis, hopefully a republican pact — hopefully based around a bill of rights — will form a more stable base for its political system.”
“If we discovered tomorrow that there was an asteroid on a collision course with Earth and – because physics is a fairly simple science – we were able to calculate that it was going to hit Earth on 3 June 2072…governments worldwide would marshal the entire planet into unprecedented action. Every scientist, engineer, university and business would be enlisted: half to find a way of stopping it, the other half to find a way for our species to survive and rebuild if the first option proved unsuccessful. . We are in almost precisely that situation now, except that there isn’t a specific date and there isn’t an asteroid. The problem is us. Why are we not doing more about the situation we’re in – given the scale of the problem and the urgency needed – I simply cannot understand. … The biggest and most important experiment on Earth is the one we’re all conducting, right now, on Earth itself. Only an idiot would deny that there is a limit to how many people our Earth can support. The question is, is it seven billion (our current population), 10 billion or 28 billion? I think we’ve already gone past it. Well past it.
“Science is essentially organised scepticism. I spend my life trying to prove my work wrong or look for alternative explanations for my results. It’s called the Popperian condition of falsifiability. I hope I’m wrong. But the science points to my not being wrong. We can rightly call the situation we’re in an unprecedented emergency. We urgently need to do – and I mean actually do – something radical to avert a global catastrophe. But I don’t think we will. I think we’re fucked.”
“There is a New Cold War but it is not like the old one. It is not country against country. It is the shadow state in every nation against its own people, with the collusion of an inner core within the regular State.”
The subject is governments spying on their own citizens, as revealed most famously in recent weeks by Edward Snowden. Malone’s thesis is that all supposedly democratic governments do it, and even help each other to do it, by sharing data with each other in ways that enable each nation to evade its own legal framework of checks and balances. A nation’s spy agencies get around the limits placed on them under the law by spying on the citizens of other nations, then sharing this data with those same nations, in exchange for data on their own citizens. Convenient!
So we are now in a position where we can no longer trust our own governments, which are ruled by what Malone calls a “shadow state” that is unaccountable to, and frequently even invisible to, our elected officials. The elected officials are either kept in the dark, or simply don’t want to know, so they can avoid uncomfortable questions. Who watches the watchmen, indeed.
Last night, the Egyptian president wrote this on his official Twitter account:
“President Mohamed Morsi asserts his grasp on constitutional legitimacy and rejects any attempt to deviate from it, and calls on the armed forces to withdraw their warning and refuses to be dicatated to internally or externally.”
The warning referred to was an ultimatum to President Morsi that if he and opposition forces were unable to reach a negotiated settlement by 3:00 p.m. Egyptian time today — a deadline that has already lapsed as I write this — they would step in and impose their own “political road map” for Egypt, including the forced resignation of the president, the installation of the head of the Supreme Court as interim president, an interim government of civilian technocrats, suspension of the constitution until it is rewritten, and new elections for the presidency and parliament within nine months to a year.
In response to Morsi’s refusal of their ultimatum, the armed forces today posted a message entitled “Final Hours” to their Facebook page:
“We swear to God that we will sacrifice even our blood for Egypt and its people, to defend them against any terrorist, radical or fool.”
The message went on to quote the military’s top officer, General Abdul Fattah el-Sisi, as saying, “It is more honorable for us to die than to have the people of Egypt terrorized or threatened.”
Can this story possibly have a happy ending? If your goal is simply to get the Islamists out of power, perhaps it will. Reports are that top leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood are already being placed under house arrest. But if your idea of democracy is broad, inclusive government representing all sectors of society, validated at the ballot box, resulting in negotiated solutions in which principled opponents can preserve their mutual respect, this isn’t looking so good.
“The calls you make can reveal a lot, but now that so much of our lives are mediated by the internet, your IP logs are really a real-time map of your brain: what are you reading about, what are you curious about, what personal ad are you responding to (with a dedicated email linked to that specific ad), what online discussions are you participating in, and how often?
“Seeing your IP logs – and especially feeding them through sophisticated analytic tools – is a way of getting inside your head that’s in many ways on par with reading your diary.”
Also see this story from Business Insider, “The NSA Has Processed 1 Trillion Pieces of Internet Metadata,” which provides background on a program called ThinThread, authored around the year 2000 by top NSA analyst (and later whistleblower) William Binney. To Binney’s regret, ThinThread ended up providing the core functionality for the massive unauthorized data collection of the Bush years. (The Business Insider article, and this one, also include many useful links you may follow for further information.)
For a more in-depth discussion of ThinThread, William Binney, and fellow whistleblower Thomas Drake, see this May 2011 New Yorker article by Jane Meyer. Despite the recent publicity given to the NSA’s data collection by the revelations of Edward Snowden, much of this information has been circulating in the public domain for years!
Personally I think it’s exciting, not frightening at all, that the NSA is able to know anything about anyone, anywhere in the world, in real time. In fact, I think they should add face recognition technology from surveillance cameras, GPS data from cars and cell phones, medical records, electronic purchase and ATM records, and so on to the data they already have — though I doubt they’ve been waiting for my advice on this. I have only two provisos: 1) the data collection system itself should be completely visible to the public; and 2) the information it collects on individuals should be freely available to everyone, so we can all track each other in real time! We’re already living in a world where secrets and privacy are no longer possible — or necessary, or even useful — so let’s just make that transparency complete and put all data on everyone in the public domain. In this sense, the NSA is doing us all a public service, in building the tools for us to do this. We just need to liberate them from the control of the spymasters!
The following quote is widely attributed to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda.
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
But did he really say this? Randall Bytwerk, a university professor whose field of study is German propganda, doesn’t think so. He looked for it in the original sources, and couldn’t find it.
The quote came to my attention today because of this article by David Malone, author of a book called The Debt Generation about the financial crisis. In his article, Malone deconstructs a recent use of the quote by Michael Howard, the former leader of the Conservative Party in Britain. In a speech, Howard cites the first two lines of the quote to justify an occasional lie by the government to maintain economic or social stability. What prevents the government from abusing its power, Howard claims, can be found in the second line of the quote: a lie works “only for such time as the State can shield the people” from its consequences. Innocent, short-term lies may be thus acceptable, even necessary, so long as they are in the public interest.
Malone refutes Howard by bringing in the third line of the quote, which Howard ignores in his speech. To shield the people indefinitely from the consequences of a lie, the quote says, the State must “use all its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie.” This means there is no check on State power, as Howard claims, because the State will never be held accountable for the consequences of its lies. Indeed, Malone says, in modern times the State no longer needs to repress dissent at all, but simply “drown it out. Media outlets…owned by a few powerful and like-minded friends” define public opinion today, and dissenting voices are never heard.
The meta-level to all this is that we’re arguing about a quote which, itself, is very likely fabricated. The power of the quote comes from the idea that it’s Goebbels who said it — but Bytwerk, in his research, failed to find an original German source. So if Goebbels isn’t the author of the quote, then who is? And how does that change our sense of the quote’s meaning, or its value in any debate?
My own interest in the quote, and the reason I researched it further, comes from a fascination with its final phrase: “Truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” This phrase isn’t emphasized by Malone, and it is ignored entirely by Howard. But what sort of vision of the State did the Nazis have, I wondered, if they saw truth as its greatest enemy? It must have been a deeply nihilistic vision, because Goebbels seems to be arguing (if, indeed, he really said it) that lies are vital to the functioning of the State — that lying, and thus repression, are the very nature of State power. This certainly fits with what we think of the Nazis, but it’s troubling to those of us who believe that power comes from the people, and is only delegated by the people to the State. I wanted to learn more about the quote’s context — what speech did it come from? what did Goebbels say before and after? — but discovered that, on the Internet at least, there is no context. It’s a free-floating quote, nothing more.
So, the Big Lie Quote is itself a Big Lie? And the Nazis never claimed that truth is the enemy of the State? Yet many people today — perhaps even the majority! — seem convinced that State power can sustain itself only through secrets and lies, which are the subject (and the title) of Malone’s article. Indeed, we’ve gotten new proof that our paranoia is justified, in the form of revelations that our private phone and Internet communications are being sucked into vast databases by the surveillance arm of the U.S. government, to be stored, perhaps forever, on servers buried deep in the Utah mountains. (Does this surprise anyone? I thought it was already an open secret!) The degree of fraud and insider dealing, and the lack of subsequent prosecution, in the 2008 financial crisis — or among defense contractors in the Iraq War — are further grounds for a deep and abiding cynicism in our government. The fact that the election of a supposedly progressive president has only strengthened the security state and pushed its secrets deeper underground is the final, ironic twist. It’s over, Joe! No matter how you squirm, the net will tighten.
So is truth really the enemy of the State, whether Goebbels said so or not? If it is, then the State must have nefarious interests of its own, opposed to those of its people. But can’t we imagine, instead, a State dedicated to spreading truth, because truth helps to serve the people’s interests? I refuse to believe that State power, as such, is incompatible with transparency and truth. To say that is to accept that democracy is always and forever a sham. That can’t be! The trouble is that we’ve too easily come to accept a cynical vision of the “necessities” of power, and we’ve got to stop living in that paranoid, nihilistic world. So how do we get from here, to the world as it should be — a world where everyone can see and debate the truth? What steps should we take? What is the first step?
I began eatbees blog at the end of 2006, after returning to the U.S. from three years in Morocco. At the time, since I had friends in both places, I felt that I might be able to serve as a bridge between the two cultures, “Western” and “Arab-Islamic,” that were too often (and still are) portrayed as incompatible or even at war. I wanted my friends in the U.S. to know that Arab and Muslim youth aspire to democracy, personal dignity, freedom of thought and self-expression just as we do. Equally important, I wanted my friends back in Morocco to keep the faith that despite outward appearances (these were the worst of the Bush years) we in the West hadn’t abandoned these ideals.
I wanted my blog to show that conversation was possible, something I knew from the many rich discussions I’d had about politics, religion, and culture during my time in Morocco. It was an experiment, and during its heyday, 2007–2009, it proved to be a great success. Thanks to the many new friends I made as a blogger, often young Moroccans (or Tunisians, Egyptians, Syrians, Iranians…) who were blogging themselves, we tackled subjects like whether Islam can act as a progressive and democratic force, whether traditional identity is compatible with modern ideas of individual rights, and how (even then, four years before the Arab Spring) internet activism can enable young people to engage in critical thinking and challenge the “red lines” of the authoritarian state. I deeply appreciate the exchanges we had then, in which a community formed that supported and enriched each others’ efforts. Quite often, a theme raised on one blog would be taken up and expanded on other blogs in a web of interconnected commentary and debate. Many of the people I met then, online, ended up becoming friends in the real world when I returned to Morocco in 2009. But for all its richness, that era died out — and since those days, I’ve struggled to feel the same motivation for blogging I felt then.
One thing that happened is that many of my friends from that era simply stopped blogging, and they’ve stopped coming here to comment on new pieces I write. Their blogs are either updated so rarely as to have gone into a coma, or they’ve disappeared altogether. Of course, I’m as responsible for this failure as anyone, as a glance at my archives will show — my blogging has slowed dramatically in the past three or four years. Another problem, which isn’t really a problem at all, is that events have caught up with us, and leaped beyond us. Instead of merely speculating about the possibility of change in the Arab world, now we are living it, with upheavals in many countries that are far more dramatic than anything we could have imagined in 2007. Journalists also cover the Arab world very differently today. It’s no longer just about the way the Middle East impacts the security of Western states (though it’s still too much about that) — the media have finally figured out that history can be made in the Arab world, by and for Arabs, just like in Latin America, Asia, or anywhere else. So what we were trying to do as bloggers is maybe less necessary now. People no longer need to be persuaded of what we were saying, because those who went into the streets took it out of our hands. Certainly it’s out of my hands as a Western observer — and in the hands of Egyptians, Tunisians, Libyans, Syrians, and all the rest.
Another point I want to make is that as a blogger, at a certain point one has to make a decision. Either one is going to “turn pro,” become an “authority,” or keep doing what one is doing as a purely personal venture. Nearly all of the bloggers I follow regularly now are the ones who’ve gone pro. Either they are working journalists who keep blogs as part of their work, or they are academics who follow social, political, and economic trends regularly and in depth. A few are activists who’ve made a name for themselves, and made the leap to being full-time policy voices. I might, at some point, have had my own chance to “turn pro” — but if there’s anything I’ve been consistent about throughout my life, it’s that I’m not an expert on anything — especially not a place as rich and complex as Morocco, where I wasn’t born and raised, and don’t have any kind of special insider knowledge. As a teenager I used to hate “experts” who set themselves up to talk about the very things they know least about. In the field of Arab or Islamic culture, such people are called Orientalists — and I’m damned if I’m going to Orientalize my time in Morocco, because Morocco is not my sphere of expertise, it’s my everyday life, and these are my friends. So, paradoxically, since returning to Fez in 2009, I’ve found it harder to talk about Morocco than when I was away, because it’s too real, too intimate, and too mundane. If I see kids with smart phones in the local café, does that mean there’s an “emerging Moroccan middle class”? If I see a street protest, does that mean “Moroccans are losing their fear”? I’ll leave that to the objectifiers, the specialists, the “experts” real and imagined. This blog will have to remain personal, if it is to continue to exist at all.
That said, I apologize for not writing here more often in recent times. I realize I still have friends who come here occasionally to learn what I’m up to, or to discover my thoughts on this or that — and they’re bound to be disappointed if, as is the case now, I haven’t authored a new post in several weeks. For this, I have several excuses. In our era of instant communication, where the world’s news stories are updated online from minute to minute, there are times when I get so caught up in chasing all the latest developments, and examining the new leads, that I have no time left over to write about what I’m reading. Besides, there are others who do that for a living, so if my readers really wanted that information, they could get it for themselves in the same way I do. I’m thinking about events like the new Egyptian constitution that was approved last year in an atmosphere of extreme political tension, or the controversy around the selection of Chuck Hagel as U.S. Secretary of Defense, or the recent elections in Israel and Italy, or the selection of a new Pope, or the Boston Marathon bombing and subsequent hunt for the suspects. When, in the past, I’ve tried to comment on events like these as they happen, I’m often embarassed by what I write just a few days later, because by then the rush of events has made my initial reaction look foolish and incomplete. Perhaps in the future I’ll just throw up a few links to whatever stories I’m reading at the moment, as I’ve seen other bloggers do, without even a word of commentary, and let you, my readers, follow them if you like. It pains me to do this, because I like to explain what I’m thinking, but in this busy world, who has time to stop and explain?
Besides the difficulty of keeping up with events, there are other reasons why I don’t update my blog more often. One is that, obviously, I have a personal life that takes priority. If someone close to me is experiencing pain and difficulty, that takes a toll on me that makes it hard to focus on blogging until the situation is resolved. In a similar vein, if there is happiness around me, my instinct is to jump in and live the moment, rather than set that aside for an abstract pleasure like blogging. Beyond that, I’ve found that I can’t always vent my feelings, be they good or bad, in a public place like this, because they involve other people who may cherish their privacy. So I edit out a good deal when I write here, and I don’t like to do that, because I’m a fairly transparent person by nature. The result is that I stick to abstract subjects like politics that don’t touch me directly, which gives an incomplete picture of what really matters to me. What I care about most are people — people as unique individuals — and this blog began as an effort to reach out to people in new ways. Yet paradoxically, blogging takes me away from the people I care about, or they take me away from the blog. I still haven’t found the right balance between self-exposure, which makes writing real, and the abstraction needed to make what I say matter in a lasting, universal way. Occasionally I feel like I’ve hit the right balance — as in In or Out? which explores my conflicting impulses toward engagement or isolation, or Women: Parasites or Saviors? which asks where misogyny comes from — and these are among my most popular posts. I’d love to do more of this kind of writing, but all I can say is, I’ll try. The flash of inspiration doesn’t always come when I need it, nor do I always have the time.
So where do we go next? For a while, I was thinking of wiping the slate clean. I would take all my old articles offline, and start over with a new look and new themes. The focus would no longer be on current events, but rather on culture and history. Perhaps I would talk about the books that I’m reading, like Paul Bowles’ The Spider’s House, or Khalil and Dimna, a fable from ancient India, or Utopia by Ahmed Tawfik, a nihilist’s view of near-future Egypt. I would talk about the films that I’ve seen lately that interest me, whether old (Heaven’s Gate, Letters from Iwo Jima, The Battle of Algiers) or new (Enter the Void, Road to Nowhere, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Headless Woman). I would talk about the relation between psychology and propaganda, as related in the documentary Century of the Self. I would mention the music I’m listening to, from Carlos Gardel to Fela Kuti to Joy Division, and the trips that I’ve taken, to the Dades Gorge in southern Morocco, or to the Mani Peninsula in Greece. I might throw in a few photos, along with descriptions of where they were taken and what they mean to me. I might even offer some poetry and short fiction. I would describe the researches I’ve done on the reign of Edward II of England, or the White Lotus movement in Yuan dynasty China. (Just recently, a friend asked me if Voltaire had provided “elite justifications” for slavery, and I researched that too, finding to my shock that it’s more true than you might think.) I would write posts that start from nowhere and go nowhere, and expose thoughts that to an outsider must seem arbitrary, chaotic, and fleeting. Above all, eatbees blog would avoid the news of the day, and instead offer a glimpse of my broader enthusiasms, however whimsical and opaque. The blog would take on a new identity, and become something entirely different from what it’s been until now.
On reflection, I decided that I can do all that without wiping the previous blog from existence. It’s one thing to make a fresh start, but I owe it to those who commented here in the old days to keep a record of what we did then. Many of those articles still attract readers, either because they are linked from other sites, or because people find them in web searches. Besides, even if I start anew, there’s no guarantee, despite my best intentions, that I’ll update the blog any more often than I have in the recent past. I’ll still be just as busy as I am now, and as easily distracted — and writing will be just as much work. Better to have a solid foundation, then, of past articles, than start over from zero. If I did wipe the blog clean, the site might remain empty for a long time! If I leave the past work in place, however, and keep plugging away, then over time the tone of the blog will change naturally on its own, and people will see that change for themselves. No reason to get too dramatic about it.
I do want to express here, however, my intention to do something different, and strike off in a new direction. And in this, I hope you will help me. First of all, we have to return to the days when comments were frequent, and the commenters (you) talked to each other. So if you’re out there, even if you’re not the sort of person who normally comments on blogs, please take the time to leave a comment on this post. Maybe you just want to say hi! Maybe you want to give me a push to post here more often — and in that case, the best way to do that is to tell me what you want to hear. Do you want pictures of mountain goats? My poetry translated into Arabic? A list of my favorite rap songs? Stories of paranoia and drug addiction in Reagan’s America? Shocking images of babies thrown from towers into the jaws of crocodiles? An examination of Brahman and Atman and how this relates to Gnostic Christianity? A discussion of dark matter? Links to articles about Fernando Pessoa? Whatever it is, just tell me, and that will be our starting point. Don’t worry, I’m not desperate — I’ll only follow your suggestions if they make sense to me. I already have a life, and I don’t need whatever attention this blog brings. But I do enjoy a good conversation, and I’m curious about you, so I’m leaving the door open to see who walks in. Leave a note!
“For the Palestinians, there can be no ceasefire without an end to the siege on Gaza, regardless of how this is reached. There can also be no ceasefire without Israel pledging that they will not resume their assassinations when things are calmer, and attacks by both sides have stopped.”
If the Palestinians can achieve this, and Israel can achieve guarantees (backed by Egypt?) that missiles will no longer be brought into Gaza or fired from there (which means monitoring land and sea traffic once the blockade is lifted), a more durable peace is possible.
“Israeli forces killed at least 11 people, including several children, in a single airstrike that destroyed a home [in Gaza City] on Sunday…. The airstrike, which the Israeli military said was meant to kill a Palestinian militant involved in the recent rocket attacks, was the deadliest operation to date…. Among the dead were five women and four small children, The Associated Press reported, citing a Palestinian health official. …
“‘There’s no country on earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders,’ Mr. Obama said in his first public comments since the violence broke out. ‘We are fully supportive of Israel’s right to defend itself.'”
So the U.S. position is that missiles raining down on Gaza from Israel are justified self-defense, while missiles raining down on Israel from Gaza are something no country on earth would tolerate.
“William Hague, the British foreign minister, said in a television appearance on Sunday that he and Prime Minister David Cameron ‘stressed to our Israeli counterparts that a ground invasion of Gaza would lose Israel a lot of the international support and sympathy that they have in this situation,’ The Associated Press reported.”
And this:
“Reda Fahmy, a member of Egypt’s upper house of Parliament and of the nation’s dominant Islamist party, who is following the talks…insisted Sunday that Israel was to blame for starting the current round of violence by killing Hamas’s top military leader, and that Israel would have to act to end it. … ‘We can’t pressure the victim while the perpetrator isn’t even ready to settle,’ he said.”
So who is to blame for starting the violence? Was it the militants of Gaza for escalating their rocket attacks over the past months, or was it Israel for its assassination of Hamas’ military leader, Ahmed Jabari, at the very moment when he was preparing to sign off on a long-term cease-fire proposal? Peace activist Gershon Baskin writes in the New York Times:
“Passing messages between the two sides [Israel and Hamas], I was able to learn firsthand that Mr. Jabari wasn’t just interested in a long-term cease-fire; he was also the person responsible for enforcing previous cease-fire understandings brokered by the Egyptian intelligence agency. … On the morning that he was killed, Mr. Jabari received a draft proposal for an extended cease-fire with Israel, including mechanisms that would verify intentions and ensure compliance. This draft was agreed upon by me and Hamas’s deputy foreign minister, Mr. Hamad, when we met last week in Egypt.”
More on Baskin’s cease-fire proposal here. Baskin was the one responsible for opening back-channel negotiations with Hamas that led to Gilad Shalit’s release.