Another thread. Please.
For fuck's sake, not only is that an aside to direct commentary on Egypt's current situation, it's elaboration on a point that was also direct commentary.
Regardless, make with the not-angry tone.
That was a particularly annoying post. It's annoying enough when people bitch about
actual derailing (the irony that they're contributing to it, often in a worse fashion, seems lost on them), but when they make it abundantly clear that they didn't even bother reading the post they're bitching about? Both the first and last* paragraphs directly addressed the topic, and the rest was necessary elaboration on points related to the latter.
Besides, that was meant to come across as exasperated, not angry. Actually, that's a pretty safe rule of thumb for reading my posts: if I sound angry, I'm either being facetious, employing hyperbole, employing hyperbole facetiously, or exasperated. Unless I'm talking about copyright, in which case I am angry, even if I don't sound angry.
*Ignoring the footnote.
There's this awesome thing about dictatorships: THEY FAIL.
Why? Let's see:
A crowd of people walk up to the army, they have nothing to lose, maybe 10 soldiers are killed, 50 others are killed. There are less soldiers than public, so the public will win, eventually, after many attacks. The massive deaths of the public will scare other countries, who are likely to send aid and weapinry to the public, meaning most of the soldiers get massacarred.
If the military kills all the public, however, other countries will be scared, and will likely send trained soldiers and armoured veichles IE. tanks.
The non-Egyptian army will win, as their allies swarm over Egypt and kill the soldiers, while many soldiers surrender and help rebuild the country, along with many members of the public that were in hiding.
Basically, Mobarak couldn't have won, in any situation.
No that's... really never true. At all. Ever. The whole of human history up until the nineteenth century was almost entirely made of dictatorships of one sort or another. Or rather, the whole of history after the advent of agriculture within a society, horticulturalists and hunter-gatherers being semi-anarchist with token ritual figures or respected individuals, but that's beside the point. Dictators are
extremely good at holding on to their positions. They only fail when they're Stupid Evil or otherwise grossly incompetent*. Sometimes not even then, at least for a long time. I mean, even the Nazis held power for a good stretch, and they're kind of the textbook example of Stupid Evil, not to mention a model of staggering incompetence...
The only times a popular revolution succeeds is when the revolutionaries are well equipped/funded, either skilled or trained by a third party,
and almost exclusively when the State they're fighting is also monumentally incompetent, or too poor to afford a proper army.
I think the only semi-exception I can think of would be the beginning of the first French revolution, against Louis XVI, where massive riots stormed the armory at the Bastille, after which it more or less satisfies those conditions. Of course, bloodshed, incompetence, more revolution, and more dictatorships followed it, so it's a good example for why revolutions
almost never produce something meaningfully better than what they replaced. (Well, I suppose it was, at its worst, a good step up from Louis XVI's... sheer dumbshittery. Grossly incompetent and ultimately Too Dumb to Live.)
The only success story we have is the US, which almost imploded on itself less than a decade after its creation, turned on itself in a civil war that left over four hundred thousand Americans dead less than a century later, and was frequently threatened to one degree or another by external powers, despite being in a relatively unimportant, geographical backwater, with only a two-bit Spanish colony and
Canada next to them. By a stroke of luck (for the US), nationalism led to Europe burning itself to the ground twice, so it remained the only state with a developed, intact industrial infrastructure, and so wound up a superpower as a result, not to mention the good PR of being the "liberating hero" that it exploited for all it was worth.
Just about every other revolution either ends up collapsing shortly thereafter, ending in a dictatorship, or otherwise ending in a severely fucked nation (which may or may not still be a mild improvement over the previous regime). When a more powerful country is backing the revolutionaries, things tend to end a little better, but rarely all that great.
Cuba is more or less the best case scenario for a third world country.
Cuba.
*Well, maybe not grossly incompetent, though being surrounded by people plotting to usurp you and not managing to stop them could be considered as being grossly unqualified for the job of Dictator.
Did you guys already talk about the pro-tempor head of the military yet?
I read a profile of him on CNN...and he kind of sounds like a weasel. It also said he was basically a Mubarak crony.
Not that I expect much from that...it's just I didn't expect the titular head of the military to have such strong connections to Mubarak.
So um... about that Egypt place.
Do people think the military will actually hold free elections come September? I admit I'm starting to slightly worry about it.
The military isn't stupid, which they proved by not siding with Mubarak. I imagine they'll go through with the free elections.
I think you're contradicting yourself there.
The Egyptians overthrew one dictator, and military or no military, they could probably overthrow another. It would be foolish to set up a millitary state.
The Egyptians didn't overthrow a dictator. The military sat on its hands, and for all intents and purposes declared themselves on the side of the rioters, and let things come to a boil before deposing Mubarak "for his own safety" and taking the reins "because someone has to keep things running," thus both getting themselves into power and getting some good PR. If they do hold elections, I predict they'd get a sizable majority of the vote and no one would question it, whether they rigged it or not. In all, this shows a good deal of cunning on their part, and a nice aversion to the normal Stupid Evil "But I thought that's what dictators were supposed to do!" things dictators seem to like doing.
I can't be the only one willing to believe that people who do suspicious but ostensibly "good" things might have ulterior motives, can I?
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Topic: Egypt and the world and Libya - Now without Ukraine! (Read 373493 times)