The Army Pulled The Trigger, But The West Loaded The Gun

How Western liberals provided the moral ammo for the massacres in Egypt

By Brendan O’Neill

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article35875.htm

August 16, 2013 „Information Clearing House – There is ‘world outcry’ over the behaviour of the Egyptian security forces yesterday, when at least 525 supporters of the deposed Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi were massacred. The killings were ‘excessive’, says Amnesty, in a bid to bag the prize for understatement of the year; ‘brutal’, say various handwringing newspaper editorials; ‘too much’, complain Western politicians.

Such belated expressions of synthetic sorrow are not only too little, too late (hundreds of Egyptians have already been massacred by the military regime that swept Morsi from power); they are also extraordinarily blinkered. To focus on the actions of the security forces alone, on what they did with their trigger fingers yesterday, is to miss the bigger picture; it is to overlook the question of where the military regime got the moral authority to clamp down on its critics so violently in the name of preserving its undemocratic grip on power. It got it from the West, including from so-called Western liberals and human-rights activists. The moral ammunition for yesterday’s massacres was provided by the very politicians and campaigners now crying crocodile tears over the sight of hundreds of dead Egyptians.
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„[…] Dem gestürzten Präsidenten war es weder gelungen, die Generäle unter seine Kontrolle zu bringen, noch, deren Macht entscheidend zurückzudrängen. So gingen die Übergriffe der Polizei weiter, ebenso das gewaltsame Vorgehen gegen Proteste. Mursi bemühte sich, die Sicherheitskräfte nicht zu vergraulen. Zugleich versuchte er, das bestehende Regime unter die Kontrolle der Muslimbrüder zu bringen, statt es mit einem transparenten Vorgehen und unter Einbezug anderer politischer Gruppen zu reformieren. So besetzte er Schlüsselpositionen mit eigenen Leuten, statt Forderungen nach einer Wahl der Provinzgouverneure umzusetzen. Für Mursi oder vielmehr für die Führungsriege der Muslimbrüder, welche im Hintergrund das Sagen hatte, ging es um einen Wettstreit der Islamisten mit der alten Elite, der jedoch so nicht zu gewinnen war.

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„[…] Since the military leads the ruling caste, and sets the agenda and talking points for their civilian subordinates, political conflict is now cast as military conflict. Look no further than the military ruler’s discourse portraying resistance to his putsch as a battle between patriots and enemies. Oppositional sit-ins are threats to national security. Participants in the sit-ins are duped simpletons or paid agents. Their leaders are terrorists and killers. And any opposition to the military’s road map is a threat to state standing.

The challenges confronting the revolutionary project couldn’t be more daunting. It not only faces a reconstituted, militarized anti-revolutionary order, but a wicked ideology that naturalizes that order as a matter of state standing. State standing boils down to the prestige of the state’s hard core, military and police. And the revolution’s great promise of endowing citizens with full political standing is in abeyance.“

via Baheyya: Egypt Analysis and Whimsy بهيّة: Fetishizing the State.

A note on the imminent dispersal of the Pro-Morsy sit-ins

Every time I go to the Rab3a sit-in I think that it would be an almost impossible task to clear the people crammed into it; surely not even the Interior Ministry and armed forces would want to take on that task, not because they are concerned about loss of life but because of the logistical difficulty, and the political fallout internationally (the July 26 protests demonstrated that the anti-terrorism crowd seem to care about what the international community thinks).

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