by AIJAZ AHMAD
The rebellious multitudes have laid to rest the Westocentric myth that Muslim masses can be mobilised only through religious exhortation.
The dilemma of the middle-class youth who have risen so heroically against these servant-dictators is that they are themselves products of American liberalism, and some of the leading elements among them have been trained and funded by such American institutions as Freedom House, the National Endowment for Democracy and the International Centre for Non-violent Conflict. They then float or join a variety of civil society organisations and they know how to organise Facebook and Twitter communities for democracy agitations if and when necessary. The rhetoric of democratic reform that periodically emanates from the high and mighty in Washington inspires them, as does Barack Obama’s slogan of “Change” – contentless but delivered with great rhetorical aplomb. They look at the U.S. as the harbinger of democracy and hope that if they make enough noise and trouble in the streets, and if they can demonstrate the magnitude of protesting numbers, Obama will somehow dismiss the likes of Mubarak from imperial service. That has been the structural problem with some aspects of these uprisings. However, their sheer explosive scale has been truly exhilarating, for once put into motion, the process necessarily brings into the streets numerous other kinds of elements that cannot be controlled so easily.
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Will the U.S. allow all this to slip out of its hand, and does it not have enough power inside Egypt – the security establishment, the Army, the corporate rich of Egypt – to re-stabilise the situation in its own favour? Only time will tell. Essentially, the U.S. is faced with a choice: it can arrange for the departure of Mubarak and his cohorts, allow a controlled democratising process in which reliable men like ElBaradei can be put in charge of the transition, and hope that the elections held under this umbrella will be won mainly by the liberal, IMF-oriented elite, even if the Muslim Brotherhood garners a significant part of the vote. This is the outcome that most protesters, from the Twitter revolutionaries to the Brotherhood, seem to have aspired for. The other option is that of doublespeak: condone, indeed engineer, sufficient degree of street violence to justify intervention by the Army, which then stabilises Mubarakism with or without Mubarak himself, and then combine this with high-pitched public condemnation of violence and demands for punishment of the culprits. Israelis will clearly prefer the latter option and have already mobilised their powerful Zionist lobbies in the U.S., Britain and other countries to put Obama into a corner over this. Words of highest praise for Mubarak have come as much from Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, as from Tony Blair, whom someone described quite justifiably as the only American Britain has had as its Prime Minister.
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