Posted on 02/21/2011 5:57:03 PM PST by Iam1ru1-2
Events in Egypt with Mubarak resigning and thousands of jubilant Egyptians in the streets have brought joy and hopefulness to people in Egypt and around the world.
We hear the siren words of freedom, liberty and justice from the Egyptians in the streets, while the media portray these events as joyous blessings and the end of a tyranny.
Perhaps. We seem to be, again, without any history context. With more of this important context, the need for caution would be obvious.
For these words of freedom, liberty, justice (a supremely vague term) have all been heard before, and they did not lead to freedom, liberty, and justice. Instead they led to worse tyranny, mass murder, decades of deprivation, and repression. As the saying goes, be careful of what you wish for.
While it appears that the Egyptian military, now in control of Egypt, may add political stability to this situation, it is certainly no guarantee of future freedom, liberty, and justice. We've historically seen military forces directly involved with citizen repression. Remember the Cuban Revolution?
When Lenin came to power in Russia in 1917 he led the Bolsheviks and people in the Russian streets with inspiring words of hope, inspiration, freedom, and liberty (http://tinyurl.com/4trefcj). Yet history has shown to all who can read history, that Lenin, and his successor Stalin, led the Russian people to decades of mass murder, deprivation, and phenomenal abuses.
After nearly a century under the communist rule of Lenin, Stalin, and their successors, many Russians spent their entire lives in the Soviet Union without ever knowing a day of freedom, liberty, and justice, those who weren't killed, that is. Whatever their personal lofty hopes and goals, millions lived their entire lives in the equivalent of a huge slave labor camp deprived of any of the promised freedoms.
The American communists of the day lied through their teeth about a workers' paradise even after they saw the results themselves of mass murder and deprivation in Russia. They lied even after hearing the screams of the tortured in Lubyanka Prison. Paul Kengor has described some of the treasonous behavior of these un-American Americans (http://tinyurl.com/4s3r4wm). How they could sympathetically view the mass murderers and slave masters Lenin and Stalin defies human understanding.
The behavior of the Western media was nearly as sympathetic, if not servile, to communist agendas of the American communists. We are seeing some of this uncurious media coverage in Egypt as well today, reminiscent of the journalists of an earlier day.
Walter Duranty, a New York Times writer during the 1920s and 1930s, was breathtakingly dishonest in his coverage of the Soviet Union, as documented by Sally J. Taylor in her book entitled "Stalin's Apologist". Duranty apparently saw himself as "prettifying" (Kengor's word) Stalin's mass murders and deportations of the Ukraine, and kept realistic and accurate descriptions from American readers.
John Earle Haynes and Harvey Klehr also wrote of this period of history in their book "Fools for Communism" (http://tinyurl.com/yke38gq). As the reviewer Glenn Garvin wrote: "Journalism, academia, policy wonkery: They all maintain well-oiled Orwellian memory holes, into which errors vanish without a trace. Stern pronouncements are hurled down like thunderbolts from Zeus, and, like Zeus, their authors are totally unaccountable to mere human beings". Will journalism fail us again in Egypt?
There has been a lot of history written about this sorry state of journalistic affairs and their common sympathies with Communist Terror States. Robert Conquest wrote in detail of the great famine imposed by Stalin on Ukraine in the early 1930s. His book "The Harvest of Sorrow", describes the murders, deportations, deprivation, and suffering of the Ukrainians under Stalin (http://tinyurl.com/5g8dgw).
Sometimes, starving parents requested that their starving children cannibalize their parents bodies after death to prolong the lives of the children. Somehow, Duranty and the New York Times failed to report all of this to the American public. Nevertheless, Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize for this massive cover-up of communist atrocities, and we are told that his picture still hangs in a place of honor in the New York Times office building. Duranty won great admiration from Stalin for his efforts.
Similarly, some of us recall the war against the tyrant Batista in Cuba, where an idealistic upstart fought, predictably, for freedom, liberty, and justice. His name was Fidel Castro. As with Stalin and Duranty Fidel enjoyed great admiration from the media. Women and children cheered Castro's success in the streets after Castro deposed Batista. Those magic words of freedom, liberty, and justice exempted Castro from any serious examination of his agenda for Cuba, until Castro showed his Marxist leanings. Many Cuban military men fought alongside of Castro against Batista's forces because they believed that there would actually be freedom, liberty, and justice for Cuba after Castro came to power. History has shown that this was not to be.
Believing they were actually fighting for Cuban freedom, liberty, and justice, many of Castro's military friends and colleagues were remorselessly betrayed, some executed, some sent to prison for years. One of them was Armando Valladares. In his book "Beyond All Hope", Valladares describes in detail the incredible betrayals, abuses, tortures, and mass murders of Fidel and his regime (http://tinyurl.com/482762r). Yet for 50 years the media, Hollywood, and the American Left have somehow not reported them as crimes against the Cubans themselves. Instead they continue to lionize Castro, portraying him as a victim. Imagine a mass murderer, torturer, and jailer, portrayed as a victim, incredible.
As with Walter Duranty being a media apologist for Stalin and Russian communism, the Cuban Revolution had its own American version of Duranty in the person of another New York Times author and Castro apologist Herbert Mathews (http://tinyurl.com/4fj9xw9). Why we are not surprised.
Now the same patterns of revolutionary rapture are emerging in the media in Egypt. We can only pray that it is real, and that freedom, liberty, and justice prevail. Anyone capable of uttering those magic words of freedom, liberty, and justice will cause the media to soil themselves in hope and admiration. It most certainly is too soon to see how this history plays out in Egypt, but some of the same patterns in media coverage are emerging. We don't know the agendas and there is too little effort to learn them.
History has taught us some sad and deadly lessons about these revolutions. One of them is that the killing of millions of a nation's people is not sufficient for the left, Marxists, socialists, progressives, you name them, to discourage them from supporting such despotic regimes. Nor is the lack of freedom, liberty, and justice that the leaders promised. There seems to be no limits in human suffering these people will not support so long as socialism/communism/despotism is being promoted.
Another lesson is that the media can often play a role in helping the despotic murderous leaders come to power, simply by not publicly reporting actual events on the ground. Prettifying tyrants is also among these capabilities. A third lesson is that the mere utterance of those magic words, freedom, liberty, and justice from despotic leaders of the revolutions, is enough for the media, Hollywood, and the American left, (often distinctions without differences), to suspend belief and curiosity about potential disastrous outcomes.
Know your 20th century history and stay alert.
I am sure that everything that happens in Egypt has happened at least once before in Egypt.
I fear they are trading a tyrant for a slave master..they are not demanding a representative government, they are ushering in a slave master..hope it works for them..May Islam rot and be exposed for the hateful theocracy that it is..
I think if you look at history, you’ll find one revolution that lead to true freedom.
One might recall the riots in Cairo in 1952, after which the king was deposed in a military coup. The next year, the monarchy was abolished and in 1954, Gamal Abdel Nasser set up a leftist dictatorship which would rule Egypt until his death in 1970.
Everything that has happened in Egypt has indeed happened at least once before in Egypt. That is what I realized when I lived there. All those events in the Bible? They still happen.
Egypt is after all the worlds most ancient civilization. They have been ruled by a Pharaoh for millennia, interrupted by a few invaders. The army will pick a new ruler pretty soon, just like they did when Sadat was shot. The generals own most of the things of any value there, even the bottled Safi water.
I hear of no demands for a constitution that would guarantee the basic rights of all people. I hear only of calls of “democracy”, i.e. mob rule where the majority can destroy the minority with impunity and then force their will on all.
I wonder if they own the Stella brewery? When I was in the Soviet Union in 1972, the best beer available was Stella, from Egypt. Beer was about the only thing that the Egyptians had to export to the USSR in return for tanks, warplanes, missiles, etc that Moscow was shipping to Cairo.
My gut still tells me this was more about food than politics. The Egyptians like the Persians of the late 70’s don’t know what they’re in for yet.
Trained agents provocateur quick to take advantage of the situation convinced the economically oppressed crowd ‘they wanted change’...
...’change they could believe in’.
We can only hope and pray the Egyptian Army does the right thing.
Strange that China has been so quiet...hummmm.
Stella:
Al Ahram Beverages Company - ABC was successfully privatized in 1997 when Mr. Ahmad Zayad bought the government’s stake in the company. Since its privatization, ABC built on its monopoly position in the local market to expand its activities into a full-fledged range of beverages including beer, wine, and non-alcoholic carbonated and other soft drinks.
Big differences between the American revolution and other revolutions, such as France, Russia, and Cuba.
One difference: The ruling authority in America was thousands of miles away, in a world where travel time was measured in weeks. Another: The states already had local and state governments. Americans had training in democracy and a tradition which was founded on the principles of the Bill of Rights before the Bill of Rights was written.
The rebels did not have the U.S. Constitution in mind when they rebelled. That came later, after the revolution, after the Articles of Confederation had failed. At first, they wanted to keep things the same as they were, as much as possible, and just wanted the distant king to butt out.
Yep, it will end up an Islamist state, Islam may be best for people who cannot control themselves, but the truth is it only just makes their sins acceptable, ie, wife killing etc...
If Egypt or other states looked at it, they would be very afraid of what may replace their system, like the USA being replaced w/communism/dictatorship..
What is sad is it will soon be unsafe to visit. Egypt’s treasures of the ancients will be looted by the uneducated islamic masters.
The past will be lost. As will the future.
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