[Peace] Discussion today 8pm / Solidarity with the Egyptian People / Protest Sunday 11:30am

[Karen Medina]

Discussion tonight 8pm, demonstration on Sunday 11:30am
[There will also be poster making session this evening.]

Friday Jan. 28 (today)
8 PM
1105 W. Nevada, Apt. 10, Urbana [they said Oregon yesterday, but maybe
Nevada is right??]
Revolt in The Middle East: From Tunisia to Egypt to Yemen (An evening
of informal political discussion)
A wave of revolt in the Middle East that started with the ouster of a
dictator in Tunisia has spread to Egypt, a key U.S. ally in the region
whose repressive regime the U.S. keeps armed to the teeth. Come
discuss what's happening in the Middle East, and discuss plans to
attend Sunday's protest in solidarity with the Egyptian people.
For more information, call 415-713-6260
________________________________________________________________
Protest in Solidarity with the Egyptian People
Sunday, Jan. 30, 11:30 a.m.
Downtown Urbana, in front of the courthouse
Mubarak poster is torn down 25th january 2011 egypt
Play video
00:01:33
Added on 1/25/11
15,022 views

This Sunday, 11:30-1:30, at the County Courthouse in downtown Urbana,
there'll be a demonstration in support of the demonstrations happening in Egypt.
The organizer, Ola, writes


Join us in showing our support to over 50,000 Egyptians who demonstrated
across Egypt on 1/25, calling for the ouster of the longtime president

Hosni Mubarak.

https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=189426131076443&index=1



[I write: It's an exciting time. The US government is likely to
stick with Mubarak's established gov't (after all, we give them billions

in aid each year). Let's express our support for the Egyptian people,
who are courageously standing up against their own government,
in increasingly widespread demonstrations across Egypt, at real risk

to themselves! See this clip (thanks to Bob Naiman for pointing it out):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC528nK8O2w

- Stuart
___________________________

http://socialistworker.org/2011/01/27/revolt-shaking-the-arab-world

INTERVIEW: KEVIN OVENDEN

The revolt shaking the Arab world

January 27, 2011

The self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in a moment of despair on
December 17 in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid has touched off a
chain of events that is still unfolding, but has already rocked the
Arab world.

It can't be said for sure that President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali--who
fled Tunisia on January 14, toppled after 23 years of iron-fisted
rule--is just the first head of state to be driven from power in an
area where U.S. imperial interests are keen. But already it's certain
that the political terrain of the Middle East is being refashioned in
the wake of a series of popular revolts.

For his part, Barack Obama is seeking to portray his administration as
"welcoming" the protests and sympathetic to the struggle for
democracy. But the U.S. government has a long record of support for
dictators like Ben Ali--and other strongmen, like Egypt's Hosni
Mubarak, whose fate is far from certain.

Kevin Ovenden, a British socialist and leading member of the Viva
Palestina missions to break the Israeli siege of Gaza, spoke to Eric
Ruder about the implications of the Tunisian uprising--for the U.S.
and for the Arab regimes--and the lessons it holds for all those
dedicated to the struggle for a better world.

Tunisians continue to protest the interim government that followed the
fall of the dictator Ben Ali (Nasser Nouri)

CAN YOU describe the dynamic touched off by events in Tunisia?

THIS IS the first removal of an Arab autocrat by a popular
mobilization or revolution, as opposed to a palace coup or an army
coup, in more than half a century. It's the first one in the wider
region since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, so it's hard to
exaggerate its significance.

It's almost always the case with such events that it's only after they
happen that we can look back and see this was a tipping point.

Tunisian acquaintances I had the privilege of meeting on the Viva
Palestina 5 convoy last fall described at that time a small but
perceptible uptick in conflicts and antagonisms around such things as
price increases and clashes between the police and young, unemployed
people being pushed around where they hang out. So these kinds of
things were happening, but no one inferred from them the events that
were to take place a couple months later. But looking back on it,
their descriptions were extremely prescient.

Then two things happened at the turn of the year, which gave the
growing climate of protest a more political focus. The first was the
spontaneous advance of the demands, which started as sympathy with the
events in Sidi Bouzid; calls for a reduction in food prices; and some
calls for greater freedom and less repression. But these demands grew
into directly identifying Ben Ali himself as the source of their
grievance and calling for his removal.

The second was the breakaway, under pressure, of the main trade union
confederation from the regime. In the 1970s and '80s, the union
leadership had been highly incorporated into the regime, and when Ben
Ali came into power, they were incorporated on an even more corrupt
basis.

I think this was a very important factor in accelerating the
developments beyond confrontational street protests. It would be
premature to say that the trade unions, or any clear organization
rooted in workplaces, emerged as a leading body of the revolution, but
it does appear that this is still one possible development.

The other form of organization that emerged was thrown up as a
response to the repression itself. When the police and secret police
began invading poor and working-class neighborhoods and even some
middle-class areas in order to brutalize people, it necessitated
people defending those areas. So people began forming street and
neighborhood organizations, and they showed incredible bravery--armed
with sticks in most instances, trying to defend their neighborhoods
from rampaging terror by the regime.

The speed with which this took place was blinding. And now the surge
of protest has filled people with confidence, and they are demanding
more than just a reshuffling of the figures at the highest echelons of
the regime.

This is the battle that's opening up now, because to clear out
everybody associated with the old regime would mean that the acting
president, the acting current prime minister, a section of the
ministers, the people in the bureaucracies of the ministries and so on
would have to go. This would hit a significant chunk of Tunisian
capital and potentially challenge the control of significant chunks of
Tunisian industry.

For example, half of the telecommunications network is in the hands of
the Ben Ali family. So, you can see how this question of clearing out
the criminals begins to open up a wider question, both politically in
terms of democracy and freedom, and economically in terms of
addressing the plight of the people.

In this process, Western governments are really running to catch up.
This has caught them completely unawares. Several years ago, George W.
Bush privately asked Ben Ali to introduce some military reform. He
knew that there was a huge amount of repression, and he wanted reform
not for the sake of reform, but to try to give the regime some greater
legs, some deeper roots.

The U.S. and France--despite years of turning a blind eye under Bush
and then Obama, and under Chirac and then Sarkozy--are trying to say
that they are in favor of "democracy." And remember that the U.S. was
fully aware of the repressive conditions in Tunisia--that's why the
U.S. made Tunisia an endpoint for its "extraordinary rendition"
flights, in which people were lifted from airports in the U.S. and
Europe and taken in "black flights" to the dungeons in the Tunisian
desert.

The U.S. and France are now trying to say that they're in favor of
democracy, but of course, it's a highly limited democracy. They'd like
to turn to the Tunisian army to accomplish this, but it remains
unclear which way it would go. The army is a third of the size of the
police force and stayed out of the repression of the protests.

The government is trying to use the fact that the army has some
credibility among the people--because in many instances, the army
protected people from the rampages of the secret militias under the
command of Ben Ali.

The army could move toward a more progressive position of clearing out
the old order if the generals, who have been so far reluctant to play
a more directly political role, choose to intervene more directly.
There are various figures in Europe, in France in particular, who are
encouraging the army to do that. The former French military chief and
former ambassador to Tunisia, Admiral Jacques Lanxade, said recently
that the army had emerged from this with its integrity intact and can
play a very positive role in stabilizing the country.

So they are all desperate to try and bring this process to a halt in
the name of stability, with as little further change as possible. But
the most dynamic sections in society are saying that with upwards of
100 people having lost their lives in the course of the revolution so
far, without winning further change, this bloodshed would be wasted.

CAN YOU describe how the toppling of Ben Ali and the mass protests in
Tunisia are playing out regionally?

PEOPLE ACROSS the region are giving voice to their own economic and
political grievances by modeling their actions on the Tunisian
uprising. In Egypt, nine people have set themselves on fire as of now.
>From Mauritania to Yemen to Jordan, protests have broken out.

A young man in Mauritania set himself alight, and interestingly, he
wasn't from a poor family. He was from a reasonably well off,
middle-class family. According to the family, his motivation was the
sense of regional humiliation, and of the dysfunction and injustice
within his own society.

This is very important to understand, because we're not just talking
about raw economic concerns. These concerns are important, but they're
also fused with the grievances of large numbers of people, highly
educated, who see above them people in positions of authority,
fabulously wealthy, driving the big Mercedes. These middle-class
people are painfully aware that the jetsetter class is made up of
people inferior to them intellectually, but who happen to be members
of the right family.

They are painfully aware of the pimping of their countries to all
sorts of interests around the world, at the expense of the cause of
some kind of regional integrity and regional honor inside the Arab
world and at the expense of, among other things, the cause of the
Palestinian people.

But I don't mean that people are being driven merely by abstract
concepts. There is the sense that the Arab region has, in its
totality, large amounts of fertile land and water, oil and gas, and
yet the bulk of the people are fantastically impoverished.

The mere possibility that a mass movement might cohere around a demand
to address this glaring injustice has sent a wave of anxiety through
the region's ruling classes. The deputy prime minister of Israel said
in mid-January that the events in Tunisia don't have an immediate
impact on Israel, but were they to spread throughout the region, this
could seriously compromise Israel's security. And there have been
similar comments from politicians in Europe--and indeed a caution, to
put it mildly, inside the United States.

Importantly, this shows that the events in Tunisia are not simply a
Tunisian or an Arab event. Tunisia is part of a global capitalist
system, structured hierarchically by imperialism, and thus events in
Tunisia have an impact on the fault lines of the system itself.

That means that when we in the U.S. or Britain speak of events in
Tunisia, we're not talking about a land far, far away--some exotic
Oriental land. We're talking about something which has lessons for us
as activists, but also has a direct impact on the calibrations of
governments and institutions like the IMF and so on which are based in
the West.

Already, we see a viral spreading of this--to Algeria, Jordan and most
recently Egypt. The response from these governments has been to dig
deep in their arsenal to blunt similar protests. First of all, they've
sought to diffuse the regional anger over food price rises, so there's
been an increase in subsidies in Morocco, in Syria, in Yemen, in
Sudan. Egypt is considering an increase in its subsidies, and
similarly over oil and fuel subsidies.

There's an unwritten social contract throughout much of the region
that compensates for limited political freedom and limited economic
opportunities for the mass of the people with at least being able to
have bread on the table. And particularly in those countries that are
oil-rich, there has been a policy of providing affordable fuel for
cars. The cost of a gallon of gas in Kuwait or Libya is cheaper than a
gallon of water, for example.

So these governments have attempted to reverse the food and fuel price
hikes of recent years and promise jobs and so on. The problem they
face, however, is they are being squeezed by the general crisis of the
system--especially for the non-oil producing countries, which have to
import oil. North African countries' exports to Europe have trailed
off because there's a contraction of demand inside the European
economy.

And so it remains to be seen how this will play out. They can't
indefinitely increase subsidies to try to head off this discontent
without starting to impinge on the interests of capital or particular
capitalists inside these countries, so it's not a sustainable measure
in the longer term.

And almost universally, we're talking about regimes which are disliked
or hated, not just for internal reasons, but because of their support
for the U.S. to one degree or another in the American carve-up of the
region in the interests of global capital, and American capital
especially. So there are severe limits on what they can do.

The dynamic has already spilled outside of Tunisia, and this will
continue. People are following events across the region, and talking
and debating, and this has widened ideological horizons. This isn't
something that can be limited to a traditional transfer of power from
one political block to another organized political block. This is
something which has come from, as they say, "the Arab street"--and
it's thrown lots of the old ideological assumptions up in the air.

Here, it's very important to get out of our heads the image of the
region presented by the American media. We are not talking about
people who are "medieval" and "backward." We are talking about high
levels of education, high levels of urbanization and a very high level
of knowledge of about what is happening--from the Atlantic coast of
Africa all the way over to Iraq.

You have families that sit down and watch the news here, and the
discussion will effortlessly switch from Arab League Secretary General
Amre Moussa talking about how there needs to be reform and economic
rebalancing in the region, through to the latest in Iraq, through to
the events in Tunisia. And large numbers of people will know the names
of all the leaders in this region and the opposition figures as well.

THE U.S. has pursued alliances in the Middle East with what it
considers "friendly Arab regimes"--by which it means friendly to U.S.
interests, no matter how authoritarian they are with respect to their
own populations. What are the implications of events in Tunisia and
beyond for U.S. interests?

THE U.S. has constructed a series of alliances with semi-client
regimes--not fully client regimes, because they do have their own
interests--first of all during the Cold War, and then after 1989, the
horizon expanded to the whole of the region. During the 1990s, this
took the form of the first U.S. war on Iraq in 1990-1991, as well as
the shoring up and stabilization of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Tunisia and
so on.

You now have a second phase, lobbied for by the neocons and the
Project for a New American Century, which came to a head and was
activated at the beginning of the new century following September 11.
It wasn't just about invading Iraq in the wake of 9/11 to demonstrate
U.S. power, end potential rivals around the world and send a message
to the rising power of China.

They also had a view, which was full of hubris, that they could bring
a so-called Western-style democracy to the Middle East--what I call a
Florida-style democracy, where political power could oscillate between
two safe, pro-Western capitalist parties, and where, like during the
battle in 2000 between Bush and Gore in Florida, the outcome could be
rigged to ensure one party won, but still rigged in a highly
sophisticated way.

This would serve the interests of capital, which certainly could grow
locally, but would be penetrated by Western interests--above all, U.S.
capitalist interests. It's difficult to remember, but we should recall
that in 2003, they were talking about their hopes for a popular
revolution in Syria, because Syria remained in opposition to the
United States.

And on the wilder fringes of the neocons, there was even talk of a
wave of democratization sweeping through Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the
Gulf. So their vision was that the invasion of Iraq would have a
demonstration effect, so they could bring about this wider change. But
it would be limited, because it would be without the revolutionary
process that has opened up inside of Tunisia.

Events in Tunisia have blown what remains of that apart. First of all,
they retreated from even the rhetoric of democratization. Why? Because
insofar as there were parliamentary elections in Lebanon and in
Palestine in 2006, the wrong guys won. This has always been the flaw
in their strategy--if you allowed a system in which the elected part
of the state was at all reflective of the popular will, then this
would bring parties to power which were not aligned with U.S. policy,
and certainly not U.S. policy around Israel.

So they retreated from that, and hence they have this kind of hybrid
strategy. On the one hand, they hope for some kind of limited reform
within these states, but on the other hand, they don't want to push it
too far for fear of opening up something opposed to American imperial
interests, and possibly bring to power political forces which wanted
to use economic development in a different way.

Writing in the Financial Times, Zalmay Khalilzad, one of the more
astute intellectuals of the neocon agenda, says that the lesson in
Tunisia is this: First of all, we shouldn't push democratization in
the sense of early elections, because in most parts of the region,
early elections will bring the wrong guys to power. But, he says, the
West should do something because it's clear that the pressures are
building.

So what he suggests--his version of democratization--is to try to
build up political forces which are pro-Western and certainly
pro-capitalist before any kind of change in the political setup. They
have in mind being able to divert popular change as we've seen in
Tunisia, along safe channels.

The template for a lot of this is the intervention that was made
around the fall of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 in the
ex-Yugolsavia--when a genuine popular revolt, with the help of many
millions of dollars under the guise of "democracy promotion," could be
diverted along safe channels.

But I think the space for this strategy is extremely limited, and the
thing that limits it above all is the ongoing destruction of the
global economic crisis. There is a closing of the borders of Europe
and a turn to anti-immigrant scapegoating, so people from countries
like Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria, who hoped either legally or
illegally to enter Europe, are being shut out. For many years, this
exodus had provided a safety valve for these countries, with lots of
young people finding their way into Europe by one means or another,
but now it is being shut off.

Remittances back home from people living in those countries are also
falling off, and this idea that you can modify the structure with just
the right amount of reform in order to head off Tunisia-style events
is fraught with danger.

Most obviously, the offer of a tiny amount of reform can give way to
the demand for greater reform, and not just over formal democratic
rights and the end of repression, vital as they are, but on the
economic and social conditions and also over regional political
issues, such as the continuing humiliation and dispossession of the
Palestinian people.

This is coming at a time when U.S. policy in the region is under
severe pressure. Far from leading to greater U.S. hegemony in the
Middle East, the invasion of Iraq has opened up the space for other
actors, in particular state actors, to begin to play a more
significant role. This is the case around Turkey, which is
renegotiating its relationship with the United States.

It's not a one-way process, and there are historic connections
particularly to the military in Turkey, but the forging of a
Turkish-Syrian-Iranian bloc has gotten stronger over the course of the
last year rather than weaker, despite the sanctions against Iran.

This is also being played out in Lebanon now, where the U.S. has now
had to watch yet another ally fall--the government of Saad Hariri,
with his place taken by a Hezbollah-backed candidate.

So this popular revolutionary event in Tunisia is happening as the
United States is geo-strategically weaker inside of the region than it
was in 2003. And it has opened up new horizons for those people that
would regard themselves as part of a wider resistance to imperialism
and to Israel.

In other words, the Tunisian events have demonstrated the viability of
a political challenge to a repressive regime, which can overthrow an
autocratic ruler and simultaneously keep from becoming simply a
plaything of the greater imperial powers. If we listen carefully, the
events from Tunisia are speaking to anti-imperialist and
anti-capitalist strategies and activists all around the region.

And that, I think, is very important in countries such as Britain and
the United States where so many people, either from the beginning or
later, came to oppose the Anglo-American intervention in Iraq in 2003,
and where there's a growing receptivity to solidarity with the
Palestinians. These things won't happen overnight, won't change
everything overnight, but there are new horizons and new reference
points for all of us who will be involved in those struggles.

Transcription by Christine Darosa, Matthew Beamesderfer, Karen
Domínguez Burke and Matt Korn.


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ISO Resources:
isochampaign.org
internationalsocialist.org
haymarketbooks.org
socialistworker.org
isreview.org
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