Category: Politics

Reflections on Egypt

As a rule, the masses will not revolt against even the worst government unless they are starving, and Egypt is no exception. Having endured the unpopular Mubarak regime for 30 years, Egyptians did not suddenly discover the internet or develop a stronger taste for democracy. What has happened in recent months is that food prices have escalated without an increase in government food subsidies, bringing an already impoverished society to its breaking point.

A nice graphical depiction of Egypt’s food and energy crisis can be found at The Oil Drum, showing how Egypt’s increased oil consumption is leading it to become an oil importing nation for the first time. Without the windfall of oil export revenues, the government can no longer subsidize its failed domestic economy to alleviate the cost of food and other necessities. Egyptians literally have nothing to lose by resisting a government that has denied them the means of subsistence.

Egypt’s problems are an extreme form of similar problems held throughout the Middle East, as global oil exports are down, and many Arab governments find themselves too cash-strapped to keep their populations fed by subsidies. Only in such extremes do we find genuinely spontaneous mass movements from the bottom up, which are not orchestrated by any political or military cadre. The success of the Egyptian revolution in a mere 18 days has removed the biggest obstacle to mass revolt, namely the fear that there is no chance of success.

Ironically, most of the Arab dictatorships came to power by leading populist movements that toppled Western-backed monarchs in the 1950s and 60s. Several of these regimes, facing the same economic problems as their predecessors, eventually became dependent on the US or the USSR for military aid in order to secure their rule. The nations with greater oil wealth could afford to deliver economic improvement to the lower classes, which was generally implemented through socialistic or statist programs. The inefficiencies of socialism led to attempts at privatization reforms, such as those enacted by Mubarak, but the implementation of these reforms reeked of cronyism and corruption, offering little tangible benefit to the lower classes.

The mass revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere have no discernible political program other than to get rid of the existing failed regime. It is by no means guaranteed that the long-term result of these revolutions will be parliamentary democracy. After all, that had been the intent of the 1952 revolution that resulted in Nasser taking charge of Egypt. The present Egyptian military has disavowed any intent to rule, but even civilian leadership in the Middle East often proves reluctant to relinquish power, once obtained. Whatever the form of the new government, it will face the same structural economic and social problems that brought down the previous regime, and free elections will not bring any miraculous solutions. Both the market economy and the social welfare state can bring their fair share of ills, as the wealthy nations of the West have recently learned or re-learned.

Much has been said of the role that so-called “social media” played in the Egyptian revolution. Such tools were undoubtedly helpful in coordinating mass revolts without the help of structured leadership, but they would have come to nought if there was not a broad determination among the people to persevere in their protests. The Egyptian government was astoundingly successful, from a technical perspective, in shutting down the Internet for five days, yet the protests persisted with even greater fervor and finally the government relented. Shortly after the revolution, Syria actually liberalized internet access, realizing that its suppression would only give the people one more occasion for discontent, as if you had cut off power or water or any other utility. The Internet does not create revolutions, but gives voice to discontent that is no less real if the nation is unplugged.

Leaks in Government Intelligence

The WikiLeaks scandal is exposing the internal contradictions of liberal democracy, which pretends to promote an open society while its heavily entrenched power structure relies on coercion and espionage. The hypocrisy of Western democracies is not a new thing; in fact, we can turn to the revolutionary movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to see how the principles of “liberty” and “equality” were often imposed by brute force or deceit.

The infamous “Reign of Terror” in revolutionary France was but the culmination of an increasingly aggressive secularism that had sought to turn the Church into an arm of the state with its Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1791. Thousands of priests, aristocrats, and peasants who opposed the new order were killed or exiled. Similarly, in Mexico, the liberals, once securely in power, abolished the Catholic university, and eventually all public manifestations of Catholicism. Back in Europe, democratic and republican revolutions were prompted through coups and assassinations, including the infamous throat-slitting of Pellegrino Rossi, interior minister of the Papal States.

The use of secret societies, Masonic or otherwise, was a staple of liberal and revolutionary movements of the nineteenth century, as is well documented. In England, whose Protestant culture is also the product of a successful intrigue – the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 – and its cultural heir the United States, it has been common to dismiss such claims as paranoia, since they are vested in defending the legitimacy of the liberal power structure. In fact, the existence of a real Masonic conspiracy (as opposed to the various bugaboos of more recent times) was publicly exposed in France in 1904. In “l’Affaire des Fiches,” the anticlerical war minister General Louis Andre was found to have been determining promotions and denunciations on the basis of a card file he kept of who was a Catholic and who attended Mass. Both Andre and Prime Minister Emile Combes were Freemasons, and had acquired their information from the spy activities of the Masonic Grand Orient of France.

Once victorious in destroying the cultural infrastructure of its rivals, democrats hypocritically proclaim “freedom of education”, where all education dogmatically accepts the tenets of secular democracy, which is why, to a historically educated person, there is surprisingly little ideological diversity in modern academia. The dissenting academics having been purged or rendered impotent, a new form of coercion is free to impose itself. It is only through a historically inaccurate demonization of previous forms of government that our modern Western governments can pretend to any virtue.

After the outbreak of the First World War, the governments of the West gradually abandoned any notion of aristocratic honor, and learned to wage war and peace mercilessly. Apart from the mechanical destruction of much of Europe’s cultural patrimony in the two world wars, there arose intelligence agencies that took the ancient art of espionage to new levels, systematically intercepting communications even of allies, and attempting to corrupt foreign citizens into betraying their governments (i.e., act as “agents”). The U.S. and Britain were most advanced in this regard, especially in the aftermath of World War II.

In the U.S., the presence of an agency that systematically violates personal privacy would run into constitutional problems. These were circumvented by allowing the CIA only to spy on foreigners, and by collaborating with the FBI, which spies on U.S. citizens in the name of police security. The NSA can spy on U.S. citizens indirectly by making use of data gathered by British collaborators. Between the U.S. and the U.K., no one’s information is safe, as was proved by the infamous scandal of the U.S. and U.K. spying on UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and other officials.

We know from bitter experience that the U.S. and its allies are ruthlessly amoral when it comes to espionage – absolutely nothing is exempt from the catchall excuse of “security”. The successful 9/11 attacks only allowed the U.S. to declare openly what it had already been doing in secret for decades: illegally spying on its own citizens, and detaining people in foreign prisons for years without trial. A majority of the docile public actually supports these policies. So much for their supposed love of liberty.

Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange have lain bare the contradictions of our liberal establishment, which demands that we respect the authority of governments that were founded by murdering and destroying the previous social order throughout the nineteenth century. Liberal democracy, at its core, was founded on intrigue and brute force, so it is only fitting that it clings to power by using coercive tactics against its citizens. We should find it blessedly ironic, then, that the government of Sweden makes use of its extraordinarily liberal laws regarding sexual consent as an excuse to arrest Assange shortly after his latest wave of embarassing leaks. Liberal efforts to defend women, the poor, and the disabled are really designed to pit the citizenry in competition with one another, always asserting their rights against each other, rather than joining forces against their real enemy.

When the core of the liberal democratic establishment (and I use “liberal” in the classical sense, which includes today’s so-called “conservatives”) is challenged, it is remarkable how everyone suddenly marches in lockstep. Credit card companies refuse to process payments, hosting companies drop the site, and even the ostensibly neutral ICANN takes away the domain name ‘wikilieaks.org’. It is chilling how all the powers in the world can line up against someone and try to suppress them, even on the supposedly free and open Internet.

Fortunately, there are countermeasures available. Already, a host of mirror sites have been created, and there are even instructions online for creating a mirror site. Supporters of Wikileaks have initiated distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against some of the companies that tried to kill the original site. While such activity is illegal, it is surprisingly easy to accomplish, as are other forms of online hacking. A person needs only to set himself up behind a proxy in a country that does not forward tracking records to the U.S. or other Western countries, or simply login through a neighboring wireless network. These tricks and other hacking tools can be found by searching on the scraper site Scroogle, which lets you search without being tracked by Google.

The weapons of the hacker can provide a potent counterbalance to the temerity of our governments, which pretend that they own you and have the right to spy on you or do whatever they want with you, but heaven forbid that you should find out what they are doing. These illegitimate usurpers, who use public authority for private aggrandizement, should be thankful that we do not do anything worse to them.

Invasion of the Body Scanners

A funny thing happened on the way to the airport: the American public has finally stopped its docile submission to the ludicrous security measures imposed by the Transportation Security Administration, a division of Homeland Security. The last straw apparently is the new “virtual strip search” body scanning being installed by the hundreds in airports throughout the U.S., at a cost of $173 million, giving new meaning to the term “stimulus spending”. Pilots, airlines, and travelers have all raised massive protests against these scans, and a national opt-out day has been planned on November 24. The alternative to the scan is an aggressive frisk, akin to sexual molestation, which serves no real security purpose, but is intended to frighten passengers into assenting the scans.

Some citizens, finding both the scans and the opt-out procedures abhorrent, have called for a boycott on flying. A public policy research center, EPIC, has filed a against Homeland Security, holding that the scans are a violation of the Fourth Amendment, as well as the Administrative Procedure Act, the Privacy Act, the Video Voyeurism Prevention Act, and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The last act is cited by a Muslim litigant who holds that the scan-or-grope system is a violation of Islamic modesty. Indeed, it is a violation of any semblance of sexual decorum retained by any culture.

The defense of the scans is predictably crass and utilitarian, with the usual senseless fearmongering about terrorism we are accustomed to hearing from Homeland Security apparatchiks. It is no matter that Americans are far more likely to be murdered by non-terrorists – 15,000 victims a year – but we do not on that account put high-crime areas under lockdown. Terrorism is a convenient excuse for the expansion of the police state. It is not even true that airline terrorism is at its worst in this decade. As airline pilot Patrick Smith points out on Salon.com, the world experienced a horrific sequence of airplane terrorism from 1985 to 1989, yet this did not result in a call for draconian security measures. Even if a 9/11-scale catastrophe happened every year, you would still be more likely to die as a pedestrian in a road accident (over 4,000 deaths per year).

If this were not enough, the scans do not even enhance security as is claimed. Body scans would not have detected the low-density materials carried by the “underwear bomber”, the ostensible reason for implementing the scans. Even if it were so, should we have randomized cavity searches if a single terrorist smuggles contraband in an orifice, as is common practice among prisoners and guerrillas? As Israeli counterterrorism experts understand, effective security requires breaking up the plan before it gets to the airport, or identifying suspects based on behavior. This is why Tel Aviv’s airport doesn’t use the scanners, and a leading Israeli airport security expert has called them “useless”.

That’s right. All the tough-talking TSA fearmongers who talk about needing to counteract “the enemy” aren’t even being effective at doing that. Fortunately for them, their performance can be rationalized as a success no matter what happens. If there are no more successful attacks, this proves that the scans work (“banana in the ear” syndrome), and if there is a successful attack, that will only prove that we need more power in the hands of TSA. Their ineptitude will still be obvious to those who are well informed, and as for their tough talk about the need to sacrifice some liberty in order to win this fictitious war, it cannot mask their craven cowardice, for only a creature somewhat less than a man could allow the fear of death make him seriously consider compromising his dignity.