Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Outside interference, ostensibly on behalf of these 'revolutions', reduced Libya to anarchy and condemned Syria to a devastating proxy war now in its twelfth year. In Egypt, the Free Officers' state was re-booted in its most brutal ever form. The Americans and Europeans did not vainly try to help the Egyptians or anyone else escape from authoritarian rule. Instead, they contrived to seal them up in it. The long oppression of these societies, Kipling’s 'loved Egyptian night', is not going to be ended by the Western powers; these days it is guaranteed by them. Hugh Roberts 's new book political history of the risings in Egypt, Libya and Syria explains how the Western powers manipulated them all .

Full access to the article requires subscription. Apart from what is already available , here are some more excerpts: “ The surveillance goes beyond keeping tabs on Islamist preachers and foreign workers. Because the government has majority holdings in telecoms operators Etisalat and Du (formerly the Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company), the security services are able to monitor all communications on their networks. The UAE buys the technology to do this from Western companies such as McAfee. Shires says it’s likely that ‘Abu Dhabi has passively collected the data and provided it to Washington’ as part of the ‘war on terror’. After 9/11, it was the Arab Spring that contributed the most to the government’s determination to monitor and repress those it considered ‘internal enemies’. ‘2011 was a turning point in security terms — a brutal one,’ one of the academics who had asked for anonymity recalled. Former US National Security Agency (NSA) officer Lori Stroud told Reuters tha...

A good panorama of the situation in the MENA region. However, I think that there is  too much focus on ‘democracy’ without a single mention of capitalism in a left wing publication. ‘Democracy’ is narrowly defined and although Alaoui highlights the role of counterrevolution, he never grounds ‘democracy’ in a socio-economic revolutionary’ context. The revolution broke out in December 2010 before its spread to other countries raising socio-economic slogans and issues, not ‘democracy’.  ‘Neoliberal’ for of capitalism is meant to be the culprit along the counterrevolutionary forces as if the working of capital itself is not counterrevolutionary. ‘Aid’ replaces debt as mechanism of subjugation. The question (the headline) itself begs the question: what is the relevance of the question since the author clearly speaks about the regimes as the leading force behind the counterrevolution? ‘Popular’ as in ‘popular forces’, ‘popular currents’, ‘popular mobilisation’, etc.  is often r...

‘Arab Spring’

  The Pragmatics of a Religion

My comments on the article below. I think the writer has missed some fundamental aspects/features of what has happened: The class dynamic and the weakness of the movement and its lack of radicalism. Its inability to generate a leader (compare that with Venezuela and Bolivia, for example, or the twentieth century revolutionary movements). The role of the middle class in Egypt (for a change first then with the military after for the sake of ‘stability’) A stability endorsed and sought for by foreign powers, regional and Western. During the uprisings there was not a single occupation of a key governmental building or financial institution. Occupying squares and marching do not shift the balance of power. Indecisiveness invited aggression by the state and other forces to size the moment. It is inaccurate to say the regime in Egypt was overthrown. Even in Tunisia it wasn’t. In the two cases, the head of the regime was removed and an internal restructuring among the factions took place, pres...

“Since nearly all independent Arab films rely on European capital for finance, productions are usually shaped by what the west expects the Arab world to be, and are ultimately evaluated by western critics with little to no knowledge of the region.” How the ‘Arab Spring’ changed cinema

The author here does not consider the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or Ennahda in Tunisia, for instance, part of the counter-revolution–socially and economically. He does not mention how and why they got support from the major imperialist powers, either. It is also a liberal journalistic piece that does not mention the class character of the Islamist parties even once. The end of political Islam as we know it

 In a summary by Claudia Mende , I have found only this worth quoting: “Following initial euphoria for an Arab world on the brink of a new era, people in the West have largely lost interest.   Outmoded stereotypical views of the Arab world have re-emerged. Too religious, too backward, the region and its people are different after all – just a few widely-held western opinions. The West continues to back stability   But when issuing judgements such as these, the West should critically scrutinise its own role in the Middle East. After all, while Europe and the U.S. may have always paid lip service to democratic values and human rights, some of their policies run directly contrary to these. Arms shipments to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria and the United Arab Emirates prop up repressive regimes and stoke conflicts. In the name of democracy, the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, toppled Saddam Hussein and created a fiasco. When current military leader of Egypt Sisi violently ousted...

“ At an almost planetary scale, and for some years now – certainly ever since what was called ‘the Arab Spring’ – we are in a world awash with struggles, or, more precisely, with mass mobilisations and assemblies. I propose that the general conjuncture is marked, subjectively, by what I would term ‘movementism’, namely the widely shared conviction that significant popular assemblies will undoubtedly achieve a change in the situation. We see this from Hong Kong to Algiers, Iran to France, Egypt to California, Mali to Brazil, India to Poland, as well as in many other places and countries. One may revolt against the actions of the Chinese government in Hong Kong, against the power grab by military cliques in Algiers, against the stranglehold of the religious hierarchy in Iran, against personal despotism in Egypt, against the manoeuvres of nationalist and racial reaction in California, against the actions of the French Army in Mali, against neofascism in Brazil, against the persecution of ...

  Why the ‘Arab Spring’ failed

“We have to break bourgeois right”

The Arab Gramsci