As I said earlier on the thread Cole: Mubarak Defies Humiliated America, Emulating Netanyahu, I am posting my response to Juan Cole’s piece Egypt: I ask Myself Why because I had a feeling that he would not publish it himself. And indeed, he has not although he has published a number of favorable and/or ineffectually critical responses that were offered after mine.
Why did I have that feeling?
Because he is a tenured academic in the totally rotted American academic system. That’s what they do. They shuck and jive; they play politics; they deny exposure to their critics. As above, so below. So does the government; so does the media. But…in the spirit of Wikileaks…I defy them to silence me.
Go read Cole’s weak, faux naive take on Egypt’s position first.
Then read my answer.
The bullshit is everywhere.
So it goes.
Wake the fuck up.
Here is my response.
You ask yourself why?
Why would authorities in a European county like Switzerland entertain the idea of trying George W. Bush for torture…?
Why?
Because they do not want to see the right wing win in The U.S., of course. Socialist Europe is scared to death of the Cheney/Bush/republican/AIPAC/Tea Party right wing of the U.S., as well they should be.
But, European countries are supporting Omar Suleiman for interim president of Egypt, even though he was the one who undertook the torture for Bush?
It’s not about “torture” or any kind of morality, it’s simply about oil and the politics surrounding the control of that oil. “European countries” and just about everybody else with any real power in the (over)developed world have been supporting…or at least tolerating…Mubarak for 30 years. Why? Because he takes money to help keep the Islamists from further uniting the Muslim world in opposition to the present Euro/American catbird seat sitters. They could care less about “torture”, Juan. Once again, your naivete is showing. The morality of power is power, Nothing more and nothing less. If it wins, it’s right.
If Frank Wisner, President Obama’s informal envoy to Egypt, is a paid lobbyist for Egypt and says things like that Mubarak must stay, which Obama then has to deny …
Why didn’t Obama send an envoy from Human Rights Watch instead
Frank Wisner is a spook, fer chrissake. The son of a founding spook. He’s just doing his spook job. Gumming up the public works while the real power decides how to redistribute the wealth.
Obama? Human Rights Watch? Please.
If Obama actually sent him, there are only three possible interpretations of that action:
1-Obama ‘s got his head so far up his ass that he doesn’t even know for whom Wisner really works.
2-Obama was told by his superiors to send Wisner. (They exist, those superiors. Bet on it. Superior firepower/money power if nothing else.)
or
3-Obama is running a masterful international diplomatic game…faking left, moving right, sending up so many smoke signals that no one knows what the fuck he’s really going to do.
With a fourth possibility that actually makes a great deal of sense as well…almost no one in Washington knows shit from shinola about anything, and all they’re doing is just running around like chickens with their heads cut off waiting for the inevitable roasting pan to come get ’em.
DC business as usual.
This country is so broken!!!
The rest of your “whys?”
It strains belief that you are actually so naïve as to think that international politics deal with any moral content whatsoever.
Should it?
I dunno.
It has never done so during my own lifetime, and this appears to have been true throughout almost all of recorded history.
It’s simply what wins.
Machiavelli had it right 400 years ago, and Sun Tzu had it over 1000 years earlier. Tactics and strategies are what win battles, not moralities. Moralities themselves are tactical and strategic. They are recommendations regarding ways to build a society on principles that make that society strong. Once those moralities are discarded…as is the case in the U.S. today (along with most of Western Europe as well.) and has been so since immediately after the end of WW II…that society begins to break down. Its moral culture breaks down, and as the prophet William Butler Yeats wrote about 90 years ago:
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?Your coy “whys” are useless in the face of the ongoing truth of power. It does what it does and there’s an end to it. One of the things that it does not do is listen to suggestions based on moral grounds. Only force…force of arms and/or force of numbers…changes that.
Do you have the numbers? The Egyptians do. Today. Watch as power seeks to sustain itself by dispersing those numbers any way that it can.
William Burroughs knew.
From “Ah Pook Is Here”
Burroughs submits questions to a mysterious oracle named “Control.”
Question: If control’s control is absolute, why does control need to control?”
Answer: “Control needs time.”
Question: “Is control controlled by its need to control?”
Answer: “Yes.”
And there it is. The very picture of how power works.
Control needs time. The answer to all of your “whys.” It is stalling for time.
Time to regain control.
Watch.
Bet on it.
AG
Bet on it.
Arthur Gilroy