Cailean Bochanan

30th January, 2011

The response of the British political class to the Egyptian uprising has been to get on their high horse about democracy whilst  keeping their fingers crossed behind their backs for Mubarak and Israel. But luck has nothing to do with it: Mubarak is destined to fall, as is the Washington-London-Tel Aviv axis of global  power sometimes rather grandiosely referred to as the New World Order. Actually, it’s the Old World Order: the New World Order is to be seen on the streets of Cairo. The Arab street has lost its fear, and Wall street has found it. The Arab nations and the great Arabic culture now move to centre stage in the new, multipolar world order.

One day, 28th January, 2011, has shaken the world and it will never be the same again. Obviously, this new reality is beyond the conceptual framework of the West: it’s too simple for them, with all their learned professors, think-tanks and institutes,to grasp. The NWO, which was to obliterate the sovereign nation in establishing a global oligarchy, has come face to face with its antithesis, the sovereign people and has turned away aghast. If only the events in Egypt could be characterized as an extremist, “islamicist” putsch as British foreign minister William Hague and a flurry of pundits are trying to suggest. Anything but the Egyptian people with a novel, wholly unexpected symbol of their aspirations: the Egyptian flag. The NWO offered Egypt a special role in their scheme of things as a reliable Western ally, as a force for stability in the region and as a pillar of the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process”. But they have spurned it: they merely wish to be themselves- a self determining people.

The Israelis have responded with disbelief to the unfolding events. They remain confident that Mubarak’s massive paraphernalia of oppression can restore ‘stability” i.e. the dictatorship. They have to believe this: what else do they have to offer the world except brute force? If that fails all will fail.

The British government has now discovered that it wants reforms in Egypt. Anything is better than the removal of their man, Mubarak. Hague fears that could lead to “a more authoritarian system of government”. That really would take some doing! He wants free and fair elections (no postal ballots or Diebold counting machines presumably). Never mind what the people want- this is democracy British style, democracy without the demos.

What about our radicals? In Britain this grouping is subsumed under the great British Labour Party now that they are in opposition and we start re-imagining them as some kind of force for good. Shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander has declared:

“Egypt can move from protest to progress”

This sounds like the old New Labour “move on” mantra: let’s move on from Arab-nationalist anti-imperialist revolution to “progress”. But for the Egyptian people Arab-nationalist anti-imperialist revolution is progress.

Demonstrations in London by Egyptian expatriates seem to have remained unsupported. In a country where thousands have campaigned to end the siege of Gaza this seems illogical. Hopefully we will see some movement from them soon.

Some in the western left have put out the idea that this is an orange revolution, Ukraine- style- an idea which has been picked up by the Daily Telegraph and the Israeli website Debka. According to Professor Michel Chossudovsky:

“The removal of Hosni Mubarak has, for several years, been on the drawing board of US foreign policy.”

Well if that’s their goal now is their opportunity to realize it. I suspect that the opposite is the case: Mubarak, seeing the writing on the wall, wanted to take a plane out but his masters insisted on him staying.

Anyway, in an orange revolution the bad guy wins an election which the “international community” then expose as having been, supposedly, fraudulent and replace him with their own guy, the good guy. Here the good guy is in power and understands, to quote an unnamed Israeli minister, that “the time is not right for the Arab region to go through the democratic process”. He tries to blast the bad guys, the people, off the streets and the international community tries to buy him a bit of extra time by pretending that he’s got some great reforms in the pipeline.

El-Baradei cut right through the bullshit in yesterday’s interview:

“Those powers who preach democracy are either with the people or the dictatorship- there is no middle ground”

They are with the dictatorship and the preaching is finally and definitively exposed as utter hypocrisy. This seems indiscreet given that Mubarak’s fate is sealed but what else can they do? Their world order needs a pro-western pro-Israeli strongman in Cairo. The Egyptian people are neither pro-western nor pro-Israeli. Therefore there can be no democracy in Egypt if their world order is to survive.

But it isn’t going to survive. Therefore as El-Baradei said:

“These countries should recalculate their agenda”

This applies especially to the UK which stands on the brink of total oblivion as its economy collapses and its dependence on the wider world exposes the absurdity of its narrowly based foreign policy. Do we intend to make enemies of the new wave of democracies in the Arab world to add to all the other enemies we insist on making? What support can we seriously expect from the USA, itself going down?

We need to open out both at home and abroad. The surprise campaign against the Murdoch monopoly could be the beginning of a kind of glasnost at home. We need to adapt to the post-imperial world internationally. Our response to the movement in the Arab world shows how far we are from doing this but the momentum towards a new global system is unstoppable: the sooner we embrace it, the sooner we’ll be able to extract ourselves from the deep and dark hole we’ve dug ourselves into.