The Great Social Revolution in Egypt: What’s Next?

The Great Social Revolution in Egypt: What's Next?
Posted by Lew Rockwell on February 13, 2011 02:17 PM

The Overture to Egypt's Great Social Revolution Has Ended on the Soaring Notes of Victory And Hope, But Act 1 Has Not Yet Begun
by Jack D. Douglas

Most Great Social Revolutions end up very badly. France and Russia are grave warnings to anyone who places great hope in Great Social Revolutions. Even the American Revolution, which gave Americans a great boost for freedom and democracy in the West produced a terrible slaughter of "Indians" and slavery for Africans and a Civil War and imperial oppression of the South a mere four score and seven years after the launch of the great experiment in liberty. And America today is a vast imperial police state, the opposite of the Shining City on a Hill the founders hoped to build and maintain over the millennia.

The Egyptians succeeded in  their soaring Overture to social revolution in forcing the main head of the hydra-headed military dictatorship in Egypt to run away and hide. They did not even cut off the main head of this vast snake of totalitarianism. The top Army officers, who are all totally loyal puppets of the U.S. Empire and have worked slavishly to help Mubarak build this vast totalitarian system for their entire adult lives, say they are now in complete control and insist the people should once again submit to the commands of the vast secret police at the heart of the regime with the Army. They say they will devolve government power to civilian rule in six months, but they do not say if civilians will be working with them to build the new foundations for government, The wiser revolutionaries are threatening to try to resume vast protests soon if they do not get favorable responses to these obvious criticisms of the Army dictatorship. Yesterday there was some "scuffling" between soldiers and protestors when the Army tried to force them to leave Liberation Square. The revolutionaries say they will not leave until their demands are met, presumably for a totally civilian, non-Oligarchic Council to plan the development of the new government.

I have believed all along from what I could see and hear from the Egyptians that there were some very intelligent, natural leaders at work among the masses who understood that they needed to take one major step at a time in building their Revolution, Mubarak was the snakes main head who held the others together. With him gone, at least from public view, it will be easier to gain the long series of objectives they must to have a real social Revolution that works for the mass of people, IF the mass of Egyptians stay with them rather than returning simply to daily cares and dreaming of the victories to come.

Real, great social revolutions like the Democratic Revolution that swept through Europe in the nineteenth century and much of the world since then, take a long time to develop and win out even partially over the ancient regime. They commonly start small and with little blood shed, but as their great sweep becomes more apparent the great wars begin and rivers of blood flow. The longer run view does not offer much hope that this short-run Egyptian revolt will produce a great revolution of freedom and democracy on the cheap, with a mere 300 martyrs.

I think this is a first great step–a victorious Overture–to what will be a century or more of Muslim wars to free themselves from the terrible yoke of oppression the U.K.. France and the U.S. imposed on them with the help of the worst criminal elements of the whole Muslim World for the past century and a half. This terrible reign of criminal oppression took many decades to develop and it will take many to undo it and replace it with some better forms of government.

You can be quite sure that behind the calm and happy greetings of the U.S. Empire for this "victory" there is massive work being done in a desperate effort to stop the revolution and its spread to other puppet regimes. The Saudis are openly enraged at the U.S. for this betrayal of the totalitarian puppet regimes, even though all the U.S. did was resist until Mubarak was already in hiding and they rode the wave in the short run with the victors to regain what trust they can, the better to destroy them in the long run. The Americans and their puppets will try desperately to divide the vast Muslim people against each other to rule over them, as they have done for all ofd these grim decades, I think there is some good reason to hope this will be one of many fatal blows now developing against the U..S. Global Empire, the Great Financial Crisis produced by the insanity and corruption of the U.S. at the top being a far greater blow. But there are tremendous forces against freedom and democracy in the oil-rich middle East, that concentrated wealth in the hands of dictatorial governments being a major one. We shall have to wait and see if the revolution continues beyond this glorious overture or is interrupted, even if temporarily, by a new and more terrible American yoke of secret tyranny.

Human beings in the large societies have lived almost entirely as the slaves and serfs of imperial states for the past four thousand years. There have been hundreds of oppressive empires in these millennia and only a few brief periods of real freedom and democracy in the large societies. Most human beings obviously do not yet know how to make freedom and democracy work for long or the cynics are right that there is something about human nature in our human condition that makes us seek out and impose or submit to imperial police states, making these oppressive regimes our natural state.

These vast failures over the longer run do not mean the Revolutions are not worth their cost. After all, counter-revolution years against the French Revolution waned and the French are still better off than they would have been under the horribly corrupt feudal aristocracy and the terrible years of Stalinism after the Russian Revolution waned and, while Russia is a totalitarian police state today, the people are probably a bit better off than under the tsars.

The utopian hopes die away and are replaced by far more grim realities. But this whole Age of Imperial States of four to five thousand years is a brief time in human history. We are still learning–at least, some of us are.
The American Revolution of freedom and democracy fulfilled some of its hope of those for the small enclave of European settlers, but it imposed a vast tyranny and slaughter on millions of the "Indians" and continued the enslavement of many hundreds of thousands of Africans for almost a century. Americans did find "final solutions" to those horrifying oppressions, but they then began almost immediately building a Global Empire in the islands of the Pacific which continues to this day. Like almost all imperialists before them, Americans are almost totally blind to their awful imposition of slavery and oppression around the world and then within the U.S. in the immense, totalitarian police state we now have.

Maybe some day we will find a way to make it work over the long run, beginning with learning to see what we are really doing, not with what we want to see and want others to think we are doing,  If at first you fail for four or five thousand years, try, try again. It may even take the evolution of a homo sapiens sapiens to make real freedom and democracy possible for human beings in general. We may even see a final Great War of the new Free Human Beings against the sociopathic totalitarians oppressing almost everyone else, If the totalitarian genes win out, human beings will most likely degenerate into ferocious beasts of prey. If Free Human Beings win out, we might be able to fulfill our hope of building an ever better world for all but the regressive sociopaths.

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Jack D. Douglas is professor emeritus of sociology at UCSD.