The Wingnut bloviators who are bleating that the United States should stand by Mubarak should sit down and have a hot beverage.
They don't get a say in it, either. This is Egypt's struggle. It is not ours. Considering that the Egyptian army has not moved against the protesters, despite the evident fact that they were supposed to do so, will probably be viewed as the death knell for the Mubarak government.
I would argue that any American involvement at this point, other than helping Mubarak to find the airport for his flight to France (or humanitarian aid), will only make the outcome worse for the U.S. The number of Egyptians who would hold our country responsible for Mubarak's lengthy rule probably numbers in the many tens of millions. Working to impose whoever is our guy will backfire, maybe not now, but soon and for a very long time. You need only look at Iran, where the toppling of the Mosaddegh government by the CIA nearly sixty years ago reverberates to this very day.
Let the Egyptians handle their own affairs. After all, they were a country when Europeans were still living in caves and painting themselves blue. They hardly need us telling them what to do.
7 comments:
It appears the people may come out on top for a change. The ones that do the dirty work for Mubarack have said no. This is interesting.
remember the "Domino Effect" reasoning for getting invoved with Viet Nam? The same reasong could very well be supplied concerning (don't laugh) stability (and by stability i mean a steady oil supply) in the Middle East. It is now just a matter of waiting to see how bad it can get...Allan
Thugs ain't happy unless they're pissing off distant brown people.
Actually, modern-day Egypt has very little connection to ancient Egypt. When the Arabs conquered the place, they basically wiped it down to Day Zero -- wiped out the language, wiped out the culture, wiped out everything. Egypt's culture today is primarily Arab, with little connection to ancient Egypt. The closest to ancient Egyptian that exists today is the Coptic liturgies of the Coptic Christians, which very few people outside of their clergy understand.
Contrast with modern Iran, where the native Persian culture and language have clear antecedents all the way back to the Persian Empire that Alexander the Great conquered...
As for the tighty righties, they're taking their marching orders from Israel's Likud government here. Until Israel said "Uhm, we like Mubarak!", many of the righties actually supported the people on the streets. But once Israel gave them their marching orders, they all lined up like good little children and spouted the official Likud line ("Mubarak good! Revolution bad!"). Tools. Bah.
My take: Mubarak is a bad guy. Most folks lined up to take his place are bad guys. I'm not seeing much hopeful here even if the revolution succeeds. But as you say, it's for the Egyptians to decide -- not us, and not Likud. Thus why I haven't opened my pie-hole on the subject on my own blog. There simply isn't anything useful that I -- or any American -- could say here.
- Badtux the MMOB Penguin
"When the Arabs conquered the place" ... give me a history lesson. When did this happen?
The truly ancient Egypt (pyramids and stuff) was wiped out by Persians and later Hellennic influence (Macedons et al).
Your representation of what happened since 639 is very well-suited to create very wrong impressions in readers.
Sven, I could have spent hours talking about daily Egyptian life during the Ptolemic dynasty, yada yada yada, but the basic point remains -- modern-day Egyptian culture is basically Arab, not Egyptian. The number of Coptic speakers is in the low hundreds today. That was *not* true when the Arabs conquered the place, the daily language of ordinary Egyptians at that time was Coptic (late Egyptian, a descendent of the old Egyptian language), though as you point out, the language used by the intellectuals in Egypt had been Greek for over 800 years by that time.
Why did this happen? Perhaps I gave the impression that the Arabs exterminated the population and razed the place to the ground. But that is not, of course, what happened. The Arab conquerers really weren't much into that whole kinda thing, they were after Egypt because Egypt was the breadbasket of the Western Mediterranean and they needed those people there to till the soil, and the only real difference between their rule and that of the Byzantines that they replaced was that a) they taxed non-Muslims but not Muslims, giving people a huge incentive to convert to Islam, and b) they taught Arabic to the common folk so that they could read the Koran in the only authorized tongue for reading the Koran (Arabic). Both of these were new, previous conquerors hadn't cared what tongue the common folk spoke or what gods they worshipped. Apparently the Egyptians liked what they heard, because they abandoned their prior culture and language rapidly and adopted Arabic culture and language as their own, perhaps aided by the similarities between Arabic and Coptic...
But anyhow, I could go on and on. But my basic point there remains. Modern-day Egypt's only real connection to ancient Egypt is its geographical location -- not its language, not its people (who are a rag-tag bunch of mixed conquerers), not its culture (which is Arabic).
All of which, BTW, was an aside to the *real* point, which is that it's up to the Egyptians as to who they want to rule them, and it's not really any of our business...
-Badtux the History Buff Penguin
"modern-day Egyptian culture is basically Arab, not Egyptian"
You are so extremely misleading because this is a "so what" thing.
Guess what - English culture and language didn't exist in England in 640 either.
The Arabs came to Egypt with a few ten thousand men, a few ten thousand followed and then more than 1,300 years passed by. Of course there's not much left of ancient Egypt. Nowhere is much left of some ancient society, except probably somewhere in the Amazonas region.
"they abandoned their prior culture and language rapidly and adopted Arabic culture and language as their own"
"rapidly" is incorrect. It was a process that spanned over centuries. The conquerors did merely set the official language and added their culture to Egypt like the Greeks did before.
The problem here is that your questionable description might add to other people's bias against Arabs in an unfair way.
The Europeans wiped out Indio culture in Central America, but the Muslim conquests of 7th to 9th century were much more gradual in their influence on local culture.
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