The WikiLeaks revelations on Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak regime provide an interesting political Rorschach testâviewed either as evidence that the US backs unsavory dictators or as vindicating paranoia about neocon conspiracies behind the current wave of unrest in the Arab world. In the words of The Telegraph‘s incredibly distorted lead Jan. 28: “Even as they were officially supporting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, American officials were secretly helping dissidents interested in using social media to overthrow his regime, a secret dispatch from the US embassy in Cairo has revealed.” In fact, the Dec. 30, 2008 cable (on the Wikileaks website) only “reveals” that the US embassy helped a young activist attend an “Alliance of Youth Movements Summit” in New York, while keeping his identity secret from the Egyptian security services.
The more accurate account in the Globe & Mail quotes the cable from US Ambassador Margaret Scobey saying the dissident “offered no roadmap of concrete steps toward [the] highly unrealistic goal of replacing the current regime with a parliamentary democracy prior to the 2011 presidential elections.”
Kind of like the blind men and the elephant, eh? The Guardian cites another US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks as documenting that the embassy knew police brutality and torture in Egypt are “routine and pervasive”âyet this never prompted the US to cut off aid (an annual $1.5 billion, exceeded only by Israel and Pakistan), much less unleash the kind of demonization campaign reserved for official enemy states (e.g. Iran).
Read one cable: “The police use brutal methods mostly against common criminals to extract confessions, but also against demonstrators, certain political prisoners and unfortunate bystanders… NGO contacts estimate there are literally hundreds of torture incidents every day in Cairo police stations alone.” It found that under Mubarak’s presidency there had been “no serious effort to transform the police from an instrument of regime power into a public service institution.”
Particularly egregious is a YouTube clip of an RT TV interview with William Engdahl, author of Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order. (Both the oxymoron “totalitarian democracy” and the invoking of the “New World Order” clichĂ© should clue you in that we have now entered the wack-o-sphere.) Engdahl waxes histrionic about supposed US instrumentation of the “color revolutions” in the ex-Soviet sphere (and we can imagine that Russia-based RT TV is sympathetic to such a view)âwithout offering a shred of evidence that “the Pentagon, the State Department and various US-financed NGOs” are similarly at work in Egypt, Tunisia, etc. This hasn’t stopped his irresponsible speculations from going viral on the conspiranoid circuit.
We have warned again and again and again that elements of the “left,” in reaction to the “regime change” hubris of the neocons, are becoming apologists for the dictatorships favored by paleo-cons or “pragmatists” as guarantors of stability. We saw such ugliness in “leftist” gushing for George Galloway, an avid enthusiast for authoritarian Arab regimes, and in the downright eagerness of “progressives” to betray the opposition movement in Belarus during last month’s protests there.
Remember when the left used to fetishize balaclavas and molotov cocktails? Today it seems to more often fetishize police uniforms and truncheons. What’s up with that?
See our last posts on Egypt, the WikiLeaks scandals and the idiot left.
Please leave a tip or answer the Exit Poll.
Egyptian protesters choke on US-made tear gas
So the US is trying to undermine the Mubarak dictatorship? That must be why US firms sold his regime the cyber-surveillance tech now being used to block activist communicationsâand, it appears, the tear gas his police are using against protesters. CNN reports Jan. 28 that protesters in both Egypt and Tunisia took pictures of tear-gas cannisters hurled by police that bore the marking “CSI, Made in the USA.” The Palestine solidarity organization Adalah-NY quickly identified the manufacturer as Combined Tactical Systems Inc. of Jamestown, Penn. Adalah-NY has been targetting the company for protest since Jan. 1, when demonstrator Jawaher Abu Rahmah died after inhaling CSI-made tear gas at the West Bank village of Bil’in. Big kudos to Adalah-NY for making the connection.
Meanwhile, CBC News informs us that Egyptian activists are still managing to access the Internet by using dial-up modems and long-disused Web portals, despite the regime’s shutting down of most of the country’s communications networks. We should be cheering them on and helping them outânot illogically demonizing them as imperialist pawns.
Paranoids see neo-con conspiracy.
A conspiracy is a plot as agreed to by its conspirators to perform injustice. It comes from the latin conspiratus meaning ‘having leagued together’. Conspiro in latin means breathe together and also unite or agree together.
That many neo-cons get together and agree on common direction would hardly be dismissed by anyone. That neo-cons have a plan for a new world order is something they themselves profess. I suggest what, where, how and why are only known fully by those within.
That Julius Caesar, Abraham Lincoln, John F Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr were conspired against is historical fact.
One need not be suffering from paranoid delusion to consider the hand of providence and the eye of providence at work in world affairs.
an oxymoron is a figure of speech with pointed conjunction of seemingly contractory expression. Thus totalitarian democracy is explaining the present status quo.The motto ‘novo seclorum ordo’ as conceived by Thompson conveys the metonymy of meaning of ‘the new world order’, though this meaning has been contrived to only be recognized by the elite. The masses consider a ‘new order of the ages’ to be meant. But this sense would have been better served if the word saeclorum was used instead of seclorum.
At present in America debate has been replaced by ridicule, facts by supposition and reason by emotions.
conspiratus, conschmiratus
Very good, you know the etymology and definition of “conspiracy.” That doesn’t make the notion of a US policy initiative to create an astroturf opposition movement in Egypt any more likely. The phrase “New World Order” has long been abandoned by all except the conspiranoid set. If you are referring to the assassination, it is far from an established “historical fact” that there was a conspiracy against JFK. (The “lone nut theory” is at least possible.) Now since you are so interested in definitions, I suggest you check the dictionary entries for “totalitarian” and “democracy.” Then get back to us and explain in what sense they are not antonyms. We’ll be waiting.
Paranoids see neocon conspiracy.
that is what an oxymoron is. words opposite in meaning placed against each other. Such as knowledgeable journalist.
That the term new world order was used by Bush and many others by your reasoning makes them conspiranoid. (is there such a word?).
One can view the assassination of J F K and determine the last shot came from the front and that his secret service men were ordered to stand down. The conspiracy that was the warren report is set in Stone.
I am not asking you to look through the looking glass, I am asking you to see.
Come up with another subject line already, willya?
Yes, we know the meaning of oxymoron. You were just arguing that “totalitarian democracy” isn’t an oxymoron. Or at least that’s what we got from your semi-coherent spewings.
“Knowledgeable journalist” isn’t yet an oxymoron despite the recent degradation of media standards, but “knowledgeable troll” certainly is. Take a hike.
Totalitarian press
there is no hope for a closed minded bigot like yourself. As america decays I will applaud its demise . I will have the world with me on that. You edit you dont publish and you sir have no intellect. you asked me to explain and when I do you run for cowardly cover.
“closed minded bigot” calls kettle black
You haven’t “explained” a thing, unless name-calling is “explaining” in your book. If the press is “totalitarian,” why does it have the diversity of perspectives on the Egyptian crisis that we demonstrated above? Go clutter up someone else’s blog, willya?
Analyzing the US State Department position on Egypt
Very well done.
“Regime change” conspiracy in Egypt?
Five years ago, when the neocon “regime change” offensive was on a roll, we noted that the Mubarak regime was ripe for a homegrown protest movementâbut that the US had not been able to find reliable proxy forces. If they couldn’t do it then, they certainly couldn’t do it now.
Mohamed ElBaradei: neocon pawn?
Let’s see. He’s called out Israel on its secret nuclear arsenal. He called out the Bush administration on its assumption that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons. He’s repeatedly called out the Great Powers on their failure to live to up to their responsibilities under the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Strikes us as an unlikely candidate.
proposterous
Why the hell would the U.S. stage an uprising against a president they’re pretty much Best friends with?
Even preposterous
We agree.
Expiry Date?
As an Egyptian who participated in the Revolution since day one; I feel I have the tendency to go with the conspiracy theory, and your question here is an obvious one that I have already answered before; Expiry Date.. where every Dictatorship has an expiry date. Not only was a mass scale revolution in Egypt expected, it was inevitable! I can tell you I mentioned it in the conclusion of my bachelor thesis paper in economics submitted in May 2010..
The entire line of thought is a long elaborate one, could hardly be discussed in a comment reply, yet what I wanna say is that things said over here shouldn’t be entirely dismissed or disregarded!
Who imposed Mubarak’s Expiry Date?
The Egyptian people or a handful of neocon schemers in Washington? You seem to contradict yourselfâon one hand, you “have the tendency to go with the conspiracy theory”; on the other, you say the revolution was inevitable. Which do you mean?