“Bliss was it in that Dawn to be alive,
But to be Young was very Heaven!”
Gawd, those Romantic poets wrote some drivel, mainly about daffodils ‘n’ stuff, but that is truly hard-core drivel.
Biggest international news story of the moment is the outbreak of rebellions – ‘revolution’ is too presumptuous a word at this stage – in lots of ‘Arab streets’, starting in Tunis, spreading to Cairo & Alexandria, and who knows where else?
(We’ll wait and see.)
Sadly, as repeatedly shown with utter clarity in the West’s own revolutionary era from 1789 to 1989 – except to the brain-dead in its academia, its media, and among ‘courageous’ arty-farty collectives (you know, the ‘bravery’ of an RC crux in a stale bottle of piss) – these genuinely brave demonstrators will be devoured by the machinations of cliques of hard men in back rooms.
Letter writer to The Australian, Graham Connolly of Bowral, NSW (Mon 31 Jan 11), summed the situation up as follows:
“WHILE right-thinking Westerners may feel kinship with educated Cairo liberals campaigning for supposedly universal rights, few revolutions result in these people running the ‘new regime’.
“The disastrous results of various so-called popular movements in the Middle East since the late 1970s should inspire grave caution: the fall of the pro-Western shah in Iran and his replacement by the ayatollahs, and the rise of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip.
“Where there is disorder, the most well-armed, organised and ideologically committed will ultimately prevail. This has been the West’s own experience: the 1789 French revolution’s chaos quickly gave way to the Jacobin reign of terror in the 1790s, while the fall of the Russian tsar rapidly led to Bolshevism and the deaths of millions. There are worse outcomes than functional autocracies such as a tsar, a shah or a Hosni Mubarak, as will be the case for many Egyptians, especially Christians, if any new Egyptian government is influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood”.
And, Mr Connolly, “especially” for women – but let’s not inhale and wait for our very own Germaine to take any stand on that.
The Fall of the Bastille followed by The Terror, the Storming of the Winter Palace followed by the Gulag & the KGB^, the flight of the Shah followed by the misogynist theocracy of the Ayatollahs – it would be a ‘miracle’ if these street rebellions really were to evolve into a Springtime of Freedom for the Arab peoples.
Two alternative developments seem likely:
FIRST SCENARIO: MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD (Al-Ikhwān Al-Muslimūn) seizes control of the ‘revolution’ – as did the homicidal Jacobins in May 1793 and the murderous Bolsheviks in ‘October’ 1917 – and impose a theocratic tyranny à la Iran (possibly even worse, as Egypt seems to have lost the sort of middle class which had evolved in Shahist Iran). Note, Germs: it ain’t a ‘Sister-hood’.
This would have truly frightening possibilities, among which the following:
~ Islamist fanatics getting access to a powerful conventional armed forces, with the prospect of an Islamist Armageddon in Israel – but what ‘Bliss’ for our home-grown anti-Semites in academia, the commentariat and among the arty-fartys: a second Holocaust of the perfidious Zionists, a more thoroughly ‘Final’ Solution to the Jewish Problem.
~ 40,000,000 women & girls consigned to house arrest under shariah ‘law’, deprived of any education, and subservient to the sort of often brutal misogyny which that sort of ‘law’ engenders. (Germs, are you listening?)
~ 4000 years of pre-Islamic Egyptian civilisation trashed, a la the Buddhist statues in central Afghanistan’s Bamyan Valley; the most extreme Islamists follow the (reported) attitude of the Caliph Omar: “If those books are in agreement with the Koran, we have no need of them; and if they are opposed to the Koran, destroy them”.*
According to an edited version of a paper given at the 20th International Congress of Historical Sciences (Sydney 4-8 July 2005), “Jihad occupies a principal place in the writings of Islamists. Their starting point is the idea that Islam is a complete and coherent system whose aim is to spread the message of Islam, to destroy systems of government that are not based on the rules of Islam and to rebuild the world as an Islamic entity governed by the Koran and the teachings and practices of the prophet Mohammed.”
Meaning: Islam has no equivalent of separation of Church and State expressed in the gospels of Mark and Matthew: “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and to God that which is God’s”.
(Note, however, that, although both the 20th century’s major revolutionary regimes, in China and the Soviet Union, went through a phase of Red Guards-style ‘Smash the Four Olds’, both worked, albeit haphazardly and selectively, to preserve much of their countries’ cultural heritage. Actual power can sometimes moderate the fanatical extremism of revolutionaries – but then there’s Pol Pot.)
SECOND SCENARIO: the ARMED FORCES, as the most (apparently) efficient institution in Egypt, take control and restore order (if not ‘law’) – and everyone waits to see what emerges from that breathing space.
BTW, these questions following remain as pertinent now as when they were first asked, and despite by whom:
“Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty? Are millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism? Are they alone never to know freedom and never even to have a choice in the matter?”
Meanwhile, expect lots of breathless drivel of the sort uttered by English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (but in the far more drearily tendentious PC jargon):
“Bliss was it in that Dawn to be alive,
But to be Young was very Heaven!”
Bit tough, Willy boy, wasn’t it, on the millions who missed the “Bliss”?
And never got to live beyond the “Young”.
^ Yes, I know it wasn’t the KGB till later – recognition rules, OK?
* cross or crescent, it doesn’t matter all that much: the (Western) world’s first female mathematician, Hypatia, was torn to pieces by an Alexandrian mob of Christian monks in 415. (Though, to be fair & up-to-date, mainstream Christianity has moved on from that sort of barbarity.)
PS: got this article from Fairfax’ ‘National Times’ at about 10.00am, and an hour later it had ‘disappeared’!! –
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/all-egyptians-are-being-liberated-from-the-burden-of-history-20110130-1a9qi.html?comments=13#comments
