Welcome all to the BWB forum, where we will try to make sense of all the news going on in the world today, and attempt to make sense of it all, paying special attention to how precisely it affects you the avid BWB reader.
So, there is peace in Egypt now, right? After all, the bad guy is gone and now peace can reign, right?
Yes and no. In a perfect world (which is what we live in, of course), the Egyptian people, who successfully ousted President Hosni Mubarak after unceasing protests which shut down and destroyed much of Cairo and other cities, would now get the chance to rule on their own and create a peaceful representative democracy along the lines of our “fair” country. As it stands now, the military is officially in control. And if you think that is a good thing, I remind you it was a strong military presence (and nominal rule) in Boston which led to, amongst other things, the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, the Battles of Bunker Hill, Lexington and Concord, and then the American Revolution.
Martial law will cease eventually in Egypt…more than likely. The last major example in the Muslim world of a military takeover of this magnitude was in Pakistan, where Pervez Musharraf took control in a bloodless military coup in 1999. He stayed in power until 2008, bringing stability (and a strong American ally) in many respects during that time, but his reign also brought strength in numbers to his Taliban adversaries. And to top it off, an arrest warrant has been issued for his alleged involvement in the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
But Egypt isn’t Pakistan. President Obama has promised free elections in Egypt this year. Do you doubt it will happen?
No, I don’t doubt it will happen. But the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned political organization in Egypt since 1954 on the basis of a provision banning any party based on religious affiliation, will be represented. Though experts state that the Brotherhood doesn’t represent more than twenty percent of the population, I harken back to two examples of minority parties taking a command of a country; two minor parties who under a different time and different place were (or should have been) considered terrorists groups. Hezbollah, a Lebanese terrorist group, began as a political party in 1992, and though most “experts” didn’t think they represent the people, they swept the elections.
In 1932, only 37.8% of Germans voted for the National Socialist (Nazi) Party. Though the NSDAP won a plurality of the votes, they by no means constituted a majority. And look how well that turned out.
You are just a fear-mongerer! Why would the American government support a group of Islamic radicals? Why would they allow their thirty year ally in Mubarak to fall if not to bring about a true democratic revolution?
Am I fear mongering? I don’t think so. I am simply relaying what has happened in recent history. I haven’t even mentioned the 1979 Islamic Revolution which has far more in common with the Egyptian Revolution than one would choose to believe. Then, we had a quasi-Socialist President in Jimmy Carter who called for reforms and democracy in Iran, then America’s strongest ally in the Middle East. The Shah of Iran, a brutal and oppressive man yes, but also a staunch American supporter, had the fringe elements held at bay until Carter began to subtly look the other way as small discord turned into students and activists in the streets of Teheran turned into storming of the American Embassy turned into the Ayatollah returning from Paris to create a theocratic oligarchy which brutally suppressed the people of Iran far more stringently than the Shah ever did.
Have you ever heard of Santa Anna?
Is that in California? What does that have to do with anything?
“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Though there is historical discord on whether he said that or not, the quote is generally attributed to him. He was one of Mexico’s greatest men, and he knew that everything that happens, all that will happen has already occurred in one form or another.
We the People, stuck in the present time, often lose focus of what has happened. Sometimes we forget that just because we live in America now, just because life is the way it is now, doesn’t mean it will continue that way. At the pinnacle of their civilization, do you think the Aztecs in 1518 knew their society was about to crumble and disintegrate at the hands of Cortes by 1521? Do you think the citizens of Rome in AD 470 thought their Empire would cease to exist six years later?
Hey, aren’t I the one who is supposed to be asking the questions?
One thousand apologies. Please continue.
What is going on in Libya these days? Didn’t we care about that country a while back?
Apparently dismayed at their poor showing and their defeat at the hands of Marty McFly and Doctor Emmett L. Brown, we haven’t seen much from the Libyans since the days of “Back to the Future.” (More than likely this wasn’t the reason, but the 1986 Operation El Dorado Canyon, the American bombing of Tripoli which killed Muammar Gaddafi’s infant daughter, amongst others.) Back in the Reagan days, Libya was perhaps the biggest enemy America had besides the USSR. That attack was in response to a 1986 bombing of a Berlin disco which killed two American servicemen (the dreaded proportional response). They had a hand in the bombing of PanAm Flight 103 in 1988, but have been largely quiet since.
But with their neighbor Egypt on fire and in the midst of revolution, the same “youths” on twitter and Facebook have perked up and have been calling for a Libyan caliphate, amongst other things. Gadaffi, a strong man the likes of Mubarak, did what Mubarak didn’t dare do, namely firing upon his own citizens, killing untold amounts of them. He seems unwilling to release the country he has had in his grasp for decades.
Shouldn’t the United States step in and help the protesters? At the very least, shouldn’t the President say something akin to what he said about the Egyptians?
Whether or not our country should become involved, I don’t think they will. A major reason we are hated throughout the entire world is that we get to heavily involved in other nations’ domestic affairs. Most people don’t realize it, but we went to war with Libya (then Tripoli) back in the days of Thomas Jefferson. Anyone know the old Marine song, “From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli…?”
President Obama, in a vain effort to make the Muslim world like us once again (I suppose I missed the memo of when they ever actually liked us), has decided to sit this one out; in fact, I have been hard-pressed to find any comment he has made about the unrest.
Does it really matter to me if the Muslim Brotherhood takes over Egypt and Libya and any other country? Like the President said, shouldn’t we let those countries decide for themselves what type of governments to have?
Yes it does matter to you. And yes, we should let them decide for themselves.
First, the latter. Nations don’t exist in a bubble. Libya has been officially an enemy of the United States since the 1970’s, but has largely been neutered since Reagan’s attack in 1986. A strong, thriving, anti-American government in Tripoli may not seem like much, but when coupled with a possibility of a strong anti-American government in Egypt, Tunisia (another of Libya’s neighbors), and the building discontent and protests on the Arabian Peninsula, it isn’t out of the question that a trillion dollar Muslim Caliphate controlling most of the oil reserves of this planet, a caliphate which considers America to be the “Great Satan,” will rise in the coming decade.
Again, you are fear mongering! Let them rule themselves the way they want to! Obama is President now, and they love Obama! He won’t let anything bad happen to us!
I didn’t hear a question due to your hysterical crying. But let me just say this: today, February 22, 2011, the price of oil jumped 8.5% in just one day. Gas is over four dollars per gallon in California, and it will only rise as more and more protests, clashes and riots happen.
It is enough to make me wonder whether this was the plan all along. Again, I know you will call me a fear-monger, but since I don’t care what you think about me, I will continue anyway. What if the President of the United States and his Google brethren, who have been proven to have had a hand in starting the Egypt riots, planned on creating massive instability in the Middle East in order to raise the price of oil through the roof as to make the “alternative/green energy” not look like such a pricey and undoable alternative. If gasoline costs eight dollars per gallon, doesn’t hydrogen fuel cells which aren’t much better, but produced by GE and other Obama supporters, solar panels which are far too pricey to be cost-effective, and wind powered turbines sound like much better alternatives?..
I suppose that makes some sense, if you believe in conspiracy theories. Does anyone else believe as you do?
Yes. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is in agreement that the protests in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Jordan, and most recently in Iran and even China should not be countenanced. And while I am not the biggest fan of Russia or its politics, any country who has leaders (including Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, BWB’s favorite current strong man) who will not allow such violence and mayhem grip their country, I am behind. Russia, since the breakup of the Soviet Union, has vacillated between being run by gangsters and terrorists. It was only by quashing rebellions such as the ones in the Muslim world has Russia regained any real sense of stability.
And stability, my friends, is really all anyone can ask for from their government. What is freedom if it means you can get gunned down on the street by someone else attempting to express their own perverted form of freedom? What does the right of assembly mean when the only reason people assemble is to bring down a President, shut down a state, or grab a bigger piece of a dwindling pie?
You mentioned China. What is happening in China?
That is perhaps the best question you have asked. Nobody really knows. There have been calls for protests and rebellions in thirteen cities; they are calling it the Jasmine Revolution. But go ahead, try finding out any real information on it. The problem is that the one party government of the quasi-capitalist dictatorship led by Chairman Hu has control of all the media in the entire country. No images leave without their consent. They even have the ability to censor and, when they want to, turn off the internet for the entire population of one billion. That means: no twitter, no Facebook, no MySpace (sorry pedophiles), no Yahoo!, no ESPN.com, no Drudge Report, no Huffington Post, no live streaming porn, no Hulu. Now do you think it is a good idea that Mr. Obama have the same internet kill switch?
Who wants to give the President the power to turn off the internet?
Nobody, save the President and those currently in power obviously. That is precisely why I love watching the news of the protests in Wisconsin, which have begun to spread like the flu across this country. I wonder what would happen if there were protesters who the President didn’t support (he came out in favor of the union-backed protesters, probably because his own Organizing for America is largely behind them) paraded around the country stating they had had enough of his socialistic ways, his over-spending, his poor foreign policymaking, and his aloof shoulder shrugs at the problems of the world.
Wait a second, that happened already. Don’t you remember the Tea Baggers?
You just proved my point. When Americans protest the President and his policy, they are derided with disgusting sexual innuendos. When the protesters are union-backed, the same unions who supported the President, they are noble and are fighting for what they believe in.
Hope and change, hope and change, hope and change….
Perhaps if I say it enough times I will delude myself into giving myself hope for the future. Unfortunately, I think far too much has changed…
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