Egypt is on fire. There are more people out in the street trying to bring down the government than there have been at any other point in Mubarak's thirty-year rule. One protester interviewed on Democracy Now! said it best: "For a very long time, I feel that I’m really—I own this place; this is my country. Finally I feel it’s my country. It’s not the country of the police. It’s not the country of the governing elites or the ruling elites. It’s my country." It's a time of chaos and turmoil, and as the book "A Paradise Built in Hell" points out (must get around to reviewing that soon), that means its a time for the breakdown of restricting social roles and wild experimentation with other ways of living. As Nazly Hussein, a female activist in Egypt, is also quoted as saying in that DN! piece: "Women were treated with a lot of respect. I have never been treated with this much respect in Egypt, I must say." Formerly oppressed groups can feel in more equal solidarity in times like this.
Most impressive to me, though, is the spontaneous outbreaks of anarchist organizing:
It’s a big "to hell with the government," like it’s a big message we’re sending to the minister of interior, especially. After they did the very low move of pulling out all the police force from everywhere, we had to do everything ourselves. So, there was a couple days of anarchy, that we’re kind of still in, so people have to protect their buildings. We have communities, families organizing themselves to have like checkpoints on every corner. We have young people from every house or from every family protecting. But we’ve also gone out in the streets to clean up the garbage and to organize traffic. And so, here we’re trying to make a big point that we’re not going to make anything—we’re not going to make any mess here. And actually, people are going around with trash bags and saying, "Donations to the National Democratic Party, anyone? Donations to the National Democratic Party!" And people throw their trash. And so, they’re making sure that we keep this as clean as possible to show that we don’t need this government, we don’t need the minister of interior. We can do this on our own, and we can do it better. It’s safer, cleaner and a much more pleasant life for everyone.
I don't think that there are a lot of anarchist organizers in Egypt right now, but people are spontaneously getting into affinity groups and organizing from the ground up to run things better, safer, and cleaner. This is what happens when the police are pulled off the streets: "a much more pleasant life for everyone."
As one would expect, those with vested interests in power are afraid and reacting harshly. The Mubarak government has police and other government thugs doing things like looting museums to tar the revolt, freeing prisoners to scare people back to their neighborhoods, and posing as pro-Mubarak "protesters" driven to the public square on government buses. Meanwhile the US is not pressuring the Mubarak regime to give in and in fact is coming to its defense, saying that Mubarak is not a dictator. The NYTimes, everyone's favorite paper, is running constant stories about the danger of protests.
This makes sense; to my mind the people who should most be worried about this revolution are the US and Israeli leadership. Mubarak, assuming he wisely leaves before one of his military guards decides to shoot him, can retire in opulence in Saudi Arabia (like the former dictator of Tunisia) or perhaps even the US. I hear Florida's nice -- certainly lots of former thugs from South America and Cuba like our hospitality there. But if Egypt becomes a democracy, one of our main client states in the region will presumably no longer be acting against its and the region's best interests in favor of ours. Concretely, Israel will no longer be able to choke Gaza to death when the Egyptian government no longer prevents people from just walking in with medicine, food, etc.*
Anyway, for the best reporting I've seen of the situation in Egypt, you should check out DN, and for the best analysis, check out Globa Guerrillas for a tactical analysis, this article from energy bulletin to put the revolution in a larger context, and this article by Dmitry Orlov putting it into a historical context, as he compares it to the revolutions in the sattelite states against their Soviet-allied puppet regimes.
What I want to talk about though is the possibility of this revolution spreading throughout the Arab world and "disrupting Saudi oil fields" as one government official was quoted as saying.
First, it bears stating that "The propaganda of the deed" as anarchists call demonstrations of the system's weakness and people's strength, can make things change in unexpected ways, so my guesses might be way off. When people see that institutions they thought were all-powerful are in fact very vulnerable; when they realize their own power; it can be shocking how fast people change from compromising goodenoughism to real revolutionary action. The same Spaniards who a few months earlier had voted for the slightly liberal "realistic" alternative were the ones running Barcelona as a cooperative commune, once the possibility seemed real. This is why, for revolutionaries, the spectacle of success can be very valuable in asymmetric warfare.
With that hopeful caveat out of the way, however, I have to say that the chance of a Tunisian-Egyptian-fillintheblank (Yemen? Syria? Jordan?)-style revolution is very unlikely in KSA, at least in that form. This analysis is based on the Saudi citizens I have interacted with, which is obviously a highly selected group, since I only interact with those Saudi's who qualify for a government scholarship to study English (usually), and who decided to come to the US to do it. This means that they are usually middle class or higher, so that too may affect things. On the other hand it also means that they are very Western-oriented as a rule, and fairly secular, so if anything that should increase the chance that they would be the citizens most interested in change.
To illustrate my main points, let me take some of my students as representative examples.
One student, M, is in love with what he sees as the freedoms in the US. He thinks that America has the best education system possible (I know, right?) and that our culture inculcates an open-minded love of freedom and yadda yadda. He likes this system much better than I do. Yet when he graduated, he spent a lot of his time thanking the autocratic monarch that gave him and his fellow Saudi classmates the opportunity to study here. So, thanks for the handout! The idea of the nation's wealth flowing through the monarch to the people, rather than belonging to the people directly, doesn't seem to bother him or any other Saudi I've spoken to. The king is seen as wise, good, kind, etc. A man of the people (worth billions) and any faults of the government are placed at the feet of corrupt subordinates. Not a good recipe for revolution.
Another problem is illustrated by my student S. He loves political science, and really wants to study it, but won't because he doesn't see a point in a country with no politics per se, and he can make a lot of money if he majors in business, so that's what he's doing. He's bright, motivated, and curious, but is frankly cursed with the possibility of wealth. KSA is a very rich country, and those in power are able to give enough to the people to keep everyone quiescent (like America in the fifties, say.)
In fact the only Saudi's I've met who are truly motivated to change things are the women. They know they're oppressed, though they might disagree with Westerners as to what that means, and they know how they want things to change. Equal access to society, autonomy, and adulthood are the issues they aspire to change.
So what are the possibilities for revolution in KSA? Nothing in the short term like Egypt, I'm afraid, where the people at least all knew they were under the boot of a dictator. But there is already a cultural revolution underway led by women; piecemeal fighting with tiny victory leading to tiny victory. I can well imagine it reshaping the country, and that's no small thing.
From a more politically revolutionary point of view, I could also see something like the Japanese Meiji revolution. In that, the revolutionaries declared themselves as loyal to the Emperor, and used that standard to rally people against those that actually ran the country. This could well happen; those under the king are seen as hated and corrupt; ask a Saudi what's wrong with his country and the most common answer from men or women is "corruption".
Alternatively, the king is in ill health and in his late 80's. After he goes, his successor is only five years younger, and after that, who knows? The next king may well not be as respected, and that could lead to a serious restructuring. Also worth looking at is that they recently had some small-scale, local elections for the first time last year. It seems counter-intuitive, but revolution often comes after slight easing like that. The French Revolution occurred after the first parliament met, for example: people having a bit of a voice gives them the desire for and confidence to demand more.
The thing that gives me the most hope is the scholarship program. Saudi's are paid by their government to travel abroad and study. They're exposed to other ways of seeing the world, they're educated by the Western system, and they expect that this will lead to a secure future for themselves. While this is true, they are quiet about the problems they see in their own society once they learn about others, but if their university degrees didn't guarantee a job, or if they were forced to go home (right now those who are most bothered by Saudi society just stay out, teaching in a university or working in an international business) I can well imagine tensions becoming unbearable.
If KSA were to become more democratic, it would indeed be a bad thing for the US. Because that country's own self-interests lie in charging far more for oil, pumping much less per year, and investing that in something other than their current number two industry, used luxury goods. Saudi's are some of the nicest people I know, and their culture is strikingly like ours in many ways (I'll explain in another post what I mean). Like us, the possibility of revolution is buried right now, but it could break out to the surface.
* By the way, there's a picture circulating around of Fox News mislabling Iraq as Egypt. The surface analysis of this, that Americans don't know anygoddamnthing about geography, even of countries we've been at war with for a decade, is true enough; but there's another way of looking at this that I think also merits some time. We have systematically, for the last few hundreds of years, been minimizing the contributions Africa has made to our cutlture. It's important for our narrative that we believe that Africa is a poor, beknighted continent of savages. We no longer need this for justifying slavery; now we use it to justify economic imperialism and exploitation, especially under the aegis of "aid". So it makes sense that we'd believe Egypt, clearly recognized as a seat of culture, isn't in Africa.
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