http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/03/egypt-peering-into-the-revolution%e2%80%99s-crystal-ball/ a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice Thu, 23 May 2013 19:40:48 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/03/egypt-peering-into-the-revolution%e2%80%99s-crystal-ball/#comment-82041 Deadbeat Fri, 11 Mar 2011 05:17:54 +0000 http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=30465#comment-82041 Reading this and the comments you’d think that Zionism has nothing to do with anything in the Middle East.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/03/egypt-peering-into-the-revolution%e2%80%99s-crystal-ball/#comment-82032 MichaelKenny Thu, 10 Mar 2011 21:12:38 +0000 http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=30465#comment-82032 There both parallels and differences with the overthrow of the communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe. The Arab regimes now falling were modelled on the Soviet dictatorship in the 1950s and early 1960s when people still believed that communism was a progressive ideology. In both cases, you find a corrupt, one-party system with a failing economic system. And Marx indeed sees to be proven right in both cases that the problem is “a desperate protest against mass poverty resulting from rampant capitalism”. Communism was capitalism in its worst form, with a single monopoly capitalist in the form of the state and a fascist system of government to keep the people down. The Arab “copycats” have applied the worst post-cold war form of capitalism: American-style neo-liberalism with the same fascist-style government. All of which tends to confirm the Catholic view that “Americanism” and “Sovietism” are just two sides of the same evil coin and the fall of one will inevitably bring about the fall of the other.
On the other side, the relationship between the Arab states is totally different. They are essentially independent of each other and the system is somewhat different in each country, whereas in Eastern Europe, the largest of the regimes, the Soviet Union, not merely dominated the others but had actually created them, imposing a monolithic clone of the Soviet system on unwilling populations by force of arms. Those populations thus saw the communist regimes as a humiliating subjugation to a foreign power. Once the Soviet leadership realised that their system had failed, the whole house of cards collapsed. There is no equivalent of the Soviet Union in the Arab world and whatever influence the US may have in this or that country, it is nothing like the day-to-day control exercised by the Soviets. The only parallel is the role of Islam, the one thing that, in Arab eyes, makes them different from the American ogre.
The difference with the Phillpines could well be that, prior to the US discrediting itself post-9/11, the predominantly Catholic Phillipines, an oddity in Asia shared only by East Timor, didn’t see a realistic alternative to “Americanism”.

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