The Latest From The
Rag Blog-A Voice Of The Old New Left
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Blog
http://www.theragblog.com/
Peter Paul Markin comment:
When we were young, meaning those of
us who were militant leftist baby-boomers from what I now call the “Generation
Of ‘68”, we would chuckle/gasp/shriek in horror when some Old Leftists tried to
tell us a few of the ABCs of radical politics. Those scorned old leftists,
mainly old Stalinist Communist Party hangers-on or moribund Trotskyist
Socialist Workers Party members who had come of political age in the 1930s and
1940s had nothing to tell us young stalwart in-your-face- rebels who were going
to re-invent the world, re-invent it without the hurts and sorrows accumulated
from millennia of previous struggles to push the rock up the hill of human
progress.
Well, we fell significantly short of
that aim, had that Promethean rock come speeding down over our heads. Today I
am still not sure whether in retrospect those scorned Old Leftists of old had
anything going but all I know is we are now cast in somewhat the same light. We
are now the Old New Leftists. Problem is that unlike our 1960s generation,
warts and all, there is no sizable younger crowd of young stalwart
in-your-face-rebels to thumb their noses up at us. And there should be. That
has not stopped many old radicals, many who have not succumbed to old age and
hubris, from trying to be heard. And the place they have congregated, for
better or worse, at least from what I can see is at this site.
So I find this The Rag Blog website very useful to monitor for the latest in what
is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with
some kind of name, and who is still around from the 1960s has found a home
here. The remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists.
Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least any that would
help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time new left
politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end
of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this
is a must read blog for today’s left-wing militants.
A Markin disclaimer:
I place some material in this space which may be of interest
to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Sometimes
I will comment on my disagreements and sometimes I will just let the
author/writer shoot him or herself in the foot without note. Off hand, as I
have mentioned before in other contexts, I think it would be easier, infinitely
easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the
“remedies” provided by the commentators in the entries on this website. But
part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real”
stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our
efforts. Read on.
*******
:
A People’s History of Egypt, Part 21, Section 1, 1992-2000
The Mubarak government responds to Islamist violence with heavy-handed repression; the Muslim Brotherhood splinters; Egyptian poverty increases.
Mubarak after assassination attempt in Ethiopia, June 26, 1995. Photo from AFP.
As Jason Thompson’s A History of Egypt recalled, the Mubarak regime mostly tolerated the Muslim Brotherhood between 1981 and 1991, but in 1993 it “launched a major assault on the organization, denouncing it as “illegal,” and accusing it of having “ties to extremist groups” responsible for violently opposing the Mubarak regime; and “hundreds of suspects” were then “jailed and tried in military courts after successive rounds of arrests.”
As James Gelvin observed in The Arab Uprising: What Everyone Needs To Know:
The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was formed in 1928. Its last confirmed use of violence was in 1948 when its “secret apparatus” assassinated the Egyptian prime minister who had ordered the organization dissolved… After years of repression, the “supreme guide” of the brotherhood renounced violence altogether in 1972, and his successor renewed the pledge in 1987.According to the same book:
In Egypt it was groups splintering off from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood or unaffiliated with the brotherhood that perpetrated the violence… The government responded to Islamist violence with heavy-handed repression. In the wake of the assassination of President Anwar al-Sadat, for example, the Egyptian government imposed an emergency law that entitled the state to restrict freedom of assembly, arrest and detain suspects without warrant, monitor and censor publications, establish exceptional courts to try those accused of violating presidential decrees…According to a 1994 article about Egypt by Chris Harman, “20,000 troops with tanks and armoured cars” occupied “slum areas in Cairo, such as Imbaba,” in 1993, and “tens of thousands were arrested.” In addition, “death squads set out to kill those activists who escaped,” the “main mosques used by the radical Islamists were blocked with concrete,” and “parents, children and wives of activists were arrested and tortured,” according to the same 1994 article.
The movement to democratize Egypt
During the subsequent 1990s conflict between militant Islamic splinter groups in Egypt and the Mubarak regime, “over 1,200 people were killed, 10,000 wounded and scores of thousands detained under the emergency laws,” according to The Rough Guide To Egypt. In 2010 the same book also described in the following way the political and economic system that existed in Egypt under Mubarak’s U.S. government-backed regime between 1981 and early 2011:Mubarak’s regime has long been a thinly-disguised military dictatorship allied to an oligarchy. Ex-military and police officers hold top jobs in civilian life; the army is a profit-making entity (owning farms, factories and construction businesses using conscript labour); and senior officials and wealthy entrepreneurs (often from the “Menoufi Mafia” promoted from the Delta governorate where Sadat and Mubarak were born) collude in a web of mutual corruption. Most Egyptians refer to the ruling elite as the “band of thieves”…In addition, according to A History of Egypt, “the parliamentary elections of 1995” in Egypt “were particularly notorious for fraud and violence”; and in Egypt’s November 2000 elections, “Muslim Brotherhood candidates and supporters were hindered and harassed, and even physically blocked from entering polling stations.” The same book also indicated how the economic situation of most people in Egypt worsened under the Mubarak regime during the 1990s:
According to international standards, the percentage of the Egyptian population living in poverty increased from 20-25 percent in 1990 to more than 45 percent in 1997. The real wages of most workers have steadily declined over the past several decades. Unemployment has risen sharply, with published figures running between 9 and 10 percent, but those are underreported and almost certainly should be adjusted upward by at least an additional 5 percent.[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]
The direness of the situation is further masked by widespread underemployment and low wages, compelling many individuals to find supplementary work and even full-time second jobs in order to support their families… Food prices have increased to distressing levels…
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