2011 has begun as a momentous year in the history and practice of nonviolent civil resistance. Tunisia and Egypt have sparked movements across North Africa and the Middle East as ordinary people rise up to resist the autocracy, corruption, and abuse they have lived under for decades. This method of struggle is by no means new, however. People throughout history have waged nonviolent struggle to gain independence, dissolve oppressive structures, and demand rights. With each new movement we are given an opportunity to learn from those who wage these struggles. Here’s what we can learn from Egypt…so far.
Social media does and can play a significant role in civil resistance. Due to the sexy, catchy narrative that “Twitter” and “Facebook” revolutions provide for the mainstream media – something akin to the old guard kissing up to the very platforms that will eventually dismantle their monopoly on information – the impact of social media is often attacked for being overblown. Has it been? Sure. But in an attempt by some scholars, writers, and pundits to throw a wet blanket on these new modes of communication and information sharing, they have fallen into the trap of stubbornly hanging on to an argument that flies in the face of what’s actually happening.
What Egyptians have demonstrated is that a Facebook group—We Are All Khaled Said—can make people more aware and fed up with the injustice and brutality they face at the hands of their government. Young Google executive, Wael Ghonim, was the creator of said page, which soon became a platform for others to share stories, videos, and images of police brutality. Reporting on Ghonim’s efforts, Newsweek reporter Mike Giglio writes, “the page quickly became a forceful campaign against police brutality in Egypt, with a constant stream of photos, videos, and news. Ghonim’s interactive style, combined with the page’s carefully calibrated posts—emotional, apolitical, and broad in their appeal—quickly turned it into one of Egypt’s largest activist sites.” So it is no surprise that when this Facebook page called for mass demonstrations on January 25, which is also National Police Day in Egypt, that large numbers of Egyptians were sufficiently informed and enraged to a point of heeding the call for direct action.
In 2008, the April 6 Youth Movement blossomed out of a Facebook page that, for the next three years, became the virtual staging ground for a larger coalition of groups working together to demand an end to Mubarak’s reign, envision a new government, and organize protests and demonstrations in that effort. Two young Egyptians, Ahmed Maher and Esra Abdel-Fatah, started the April 6 Youth Movement Facebook page to organize demonstrations in solidarity with a labor strike set to take place on April 6. When the page first went live on March 23, 2008, the power of social networking took immediate effect. David Wolman with Wired magazine writes, “By the end of March, the group was pushing 40,000 members. Participants began changing their profile pictures to the April 6 logo, which meant the logo kept popping up in the News Feed of anyone on Facebook who was connected to someone in the April 6 group. Adding to this barrage, the activists kept loading a link to the group into their Status Update fields, further flooding Egypt’s Facebook universe with connections to the group and its message.”
The organizing utility of Facebook was immediately apparent. The April 6 demonstrations became one of the biggest in Egypt’s history and put the opposition movement and larger Kefaya (Enough) coalition on the map in a big way. The Internet, blogs, and social networks were seen as a new virtual space for people to organize campaigns and discuss social and political issues that were extremely difficult and dangerous to hold offline in physical spaces.
Twitter hashtags – #egypt, #jan25, #tahrir, #mubarak – provided, real-time, citizen perspectives of what was happening on the ground in the middle of Tahrir square and in cities across Egypt. Twitter was also used to confirm or deny rumors of certain developments being reported by the mainstream and state media outlets. It stripped the power and concentration of information away from the state and instead Twitters set up their own system of trending certain topics and verifying credible sources.
Videos captured on cell phone cameras and posted on YouTube exposed what government censors didn’t want people to see – be it abuse at the hands of the government or movement successes that would add fuel to the resistance. These videos were then remixed and mashed up by digital creatives into music videos, which became a source of inspiration to keep the movement strong and inspire other oppressed people to rise up.
SMS helped activists coordinate actions – where and when to meet, sharing protest routes, reminding people to remain nonviolent, sharing methods to protect one’s self from tear gas and rubber bullets. This instant communication could be texted to a small group of direct action takers or tweeted out to millions of followers.
Is it possible to do all these things without the Internet, social platforms, and digital tools? To a certain extent, yes. Do social platforms, digital tools and the Internet as a whole allow for this kind of coordination and information sharing to happen more quickly and be more widely shared – in other words, increase the chance the movement becomes viral? Absolutely.
Two of the most recognized critics of social media’s perceived role in revolutions, Evgeny Morozov and Malcolm Gladwell, make some important and interesting arguments on this topic. However, their analysis of social media’s role, from a movement’s perspective, is both naive and slanted. In Gladwell’s much-debated article, The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted, he argues that social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are based on and foster weak social ties. Whereas encouraging someone to participate in a movement in any kind of meaningful way by engaging in high-risk actions relies on strong social ties. This is a sophomoric view of both social media and social movements.
What Gladwell assumes in his argument is that everybody uses Facebook or Twitter in the same way he does. Just because his social ties on social media platform may be weak does not mean that it’s impossible for other people to develop strong social ties on these very same platforms. Second, even if his weak social ties argument were valid, it fails to recognize the dynamics of social movements. Most people in the midst of a social movement do not engage in high-risk actions, in fact most people engage in what would be considered low-risk actions. What is considered high-risk vs. low-risk of course depends on the nature of the movement, the ways in which an adversary responds to certain actions, and the personality of the individual implementing the tactics, but over all it is often a small segment of the population that is willing to subject themselves to physical and verbal abuse or risk imprisonment or death. Those low-risk actions do matter, however, particularly when they are adopted by a lot of people. What encourages and emboldens those who are willing engage in high-risk actions is the knowledge that the arc of history is bending in their direction. That arc can manifest itself quite potently through online social networks. We saw this in Egypt. If you have mobilized and informed enough people online, and a critical event takes place, that active online network can quickly morph into on the ground action.
Morozov argues that the Internet and the liberating virtues that are increasingly ascribed to it mask the fact that it is also being used as a tool of oppression. Because the Internet has no moral code, autocratic governments can and are leveraging it to censor information, disseminate propaganda, gather intelligence on activists, and, in turn, control the population. I do not deny this reality. But it’s that reality that makes a struggle and movement strategy necessary. Just like printing and distributing fliers, setting up pirate radio stations, and communicating via land lines and short wave radio brings with it certain risks, so too does online communication and information sharing. This is why technologically savvy activists are finding ways to communicate in code, use proxy servers to access banned websites, and tap into online platforms and services that are so pervasive they become nearly impossible to ban without shutting down the Internet all together. And once you’ve shut down the entire Internet and suspended cell phone service, as the government did in Egypt, the lie of the regime becomes even more apparent, not just in the minds of the movement, but also in the minds of those who were, until then, sitting on the fence.
To be absolutely clear, though, these platforms and tools are not the reason people rise up, and I don’t think anyone has actually been arguing that. Injustice, economic hardships, corruption, human rights abuse, and autocratic rule are the reasons. Savvy organizers in Egypt knew how to take advantage of these online tools by using them to communicate and amplify those reasons to the public.
United States foreign policy needs to rethink “stability.” Supporting autocratic governments with military and economic aid that is used to suppress people and deny them their basic human rights puts and has put America on the wrong side of history.
For almost 30 years the US government, under both Republican and Democratic presidents, supported the Mubarak regime with billions in economic and military aid—some of which was made evident by the “Made in the USA” markings on the tear gas canisters being thrown at the demonstrators during the uprising. The reason given for this support is that Mubarak’s secular autocracy prevented radical Islamist elements, like the Muslim Brotherhood, from taking control and potentially threatening the peace deal with Israel and destabilizing the entire region.
However, history has demonstrated time and time again that people yearn to be free and that eventually they will find a way to resist oppressive and tyrannical rule, be it through armed conflict or, as we have seen in Egypt (and many other countries), through nonviolent civil resistance. In addition, history has shown us that the very terrorism the United States wants to defeat is bred in the oppressive societies we support or helped put in power in places like Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Egypt.
So, instead of looking at stability as something that remains steady or unchanged despite the evolving realities and shifting demographics within a given country, it might be better for stability to be the recognition that change and reform need to happen organically in ways that address the indigenous needs of the people who are affected by the actions and policies of their country’s government.
If U.S. foreign policy remains locked into their old way of viewing stability, future administrations will continue to find themselves in the uncomfortable position of either (a) supporting allies whose autocratic regimes act in direct contradiction to America’s stated values or (b) throwing autocratic regimes under the bus in favor of recognizing the legitimate will of ordinary people fighting and organizing nonviolently for rights and justice. Did the Obama administration throw Mubarak under the bus? Basically. Should they have? Absolutely. So now we will see if this new understanding and approach to stability will emerge.
President Obama’s comments on the eve of Mubarak resignation hinted that this shift may be taking place. He said, “The Egyptian people have made it clear that there is no going back to the way things were: Egypt has changed, and its future is in the hands of the people. Those who have exercised their right to peaceful assembly represent the greatness of the Egyptian people, and are broadly representative of Egyptian society.”
Autocratic rulers take note. When people living under intolerable conditions rise up nonviolently to demand human rights, democracy, and the basic freedoms for which we all yearn, the U.S. and other governments may start to go with the tide of history and appreciate that people power will take its course, whether they like it or not.
Freedom and democracy are more successfully won nonviolently by the people who seek it, rather than imposed violently by governments who decide which people deserve it. George W. Bush famously stated in his 2001 that, “Freedom is not America’s gift to the world; its God’s gift to humanity.” I’ll admit, this phrase resonated with me, which is why I still remember it to this day. However, I find it rather unfortunate that for eight years the Bush administration took ownership of this “freedom” agenda, not because I disagree with the agenda in principle, but because the administration’s strategy for implementing this agenda was wrought with hypocrisy.
While promoting freedom and human rights in speeches, the Bush administration was imprisoning people without due process (ahem, Guantanamo), sending detainees to other countries to be tortured (ahem, Egypt!), eroding basic civil liberties domestically (ahem, Patriot Act), and turning a blinds eye to U.S. allies who are far more tyrannical and anti-democratic than Iraq was under Saddam Hussein (ahem, Saudi Arabia). Hence efforts to spread freedom and democracy fell extremely flat and the principles embedded in that agenda were betrayed.
I understand that Presidents must weigh a host of geopolitical considerations as they formulate their foreign policy. It is for this very reason though that democracy is best served, not when it is imposed on people by foreign governments with ulterior motives, but when democratic transitions and movements are homegrown, bottom-up, grassroots, and nonviolent. As we saw in Egypt, it was this kind of people power that toppled Hosni Mubarak, not foreign military intervention. War, killing, death, and bloodshed should not be seen as the default method of removing dictatorial obstacles to democratic rule.
In fact, the Freedom House report, How Freedom is Won: From Civic Resistance to Durable Democracy, concluded that in the last 33 years of transitions to democracy, “…nonviolent civic forces [have been] a major source of pressure for decisive change in most transitions. The force of civic resistance was a key factor in driving 50 of 67 transitions, or over 70 percent of countries where transitions began as dictatorial systems fell and/or new states arose from disintegration of multinational states.”
So what does this mean in terms of supporting or not supporting nonviolent action takers? Learning about the strategies and tactics employed by past nonviolent movements can be done by anyone and should be done by everyone who wants to find pragmatic ways to fight against oppression. But understanding and analyzing the specific context of a given conflict needed to develop an actual movement strategy – the various cultural, social, economic and political dynamics at play – can only be done by indigenous people on the ground who are actually waging the struggle, putting their bodies on the line, and will have to live with the outcomes of their actions. That’s the beauty of nonviolent civil resistance. Its success is based in large part on its authenticity; an authenticity that is compromised when foreign governments and institutions try to impose their vision of a “victory” and then prescribe the strategy other people should take to achieve it.
Successful nonviolent civil resistance is not spontaneous, but rather requires systematic organizing, strategy, and planning. Maybe a lot of people are already aware of this, but you wouldn’t assume that if you’ve spent time watching any of the mainstream media or cable news pundits. Hence it deserves to be reiterated.
The 18 days of mass demonstrations that began on January 25, and ended in the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, may have caught foreign policy “experts” by surprise, but these demonstration were a result of years of strategic brilliance and bravery on the part of several Egyptian groups and organizations – labor unions, Islamists, women’s rights activists, human rights advocates, lawyers, youth groups, Bedouins, and opposition parties. Even though the mainstream media may only have taken notice when large numbers of people occupied Tahrir square, there was a lot of coalition building, behind the scenes organizing, and unrecognized acts of nonviolent resistance that led up to the culminating days in Tahrir square.
I don’t expect the mainstream media to follow every single event that takes place in the course of a protracted struggle. But when the victory for a movement is a near certainty, I would hope that it wouldn’t all be boiled down to spontaneous demonstrations in the streets.
Lastly, the thousands of Egyptians who built this movement and the millions who supported it have made it clear that the movement is not over. More organizing, strategy and planning is needed because dissolving the Mubarak regime was just stage one. The next stage is ensuring that a legitimate democracy representing the will of the people is actually established and that human rights are protected. Given the lessons learned from nonviolent movements in the not too distant past, this kind of foresight and determination is essential. Yulia Tymoshenko, former Ukrainian prime minister and one of the leaders of Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution, recently wrote in the Moscow Times, “Egyptians and Tunisians are right to be proud of their desire to peacefully overthrow despotic governments. But, as someone who led a peaceful revolution, I hope that pride is tempered by pragmatism, because a change of regime is only the first step in establishing a democracy backed by the rule of law. Indeed, as my country, Ukraine, is now demonstrating, after revolutionary euphoria fades and normality returns, democratic revolutions can be betrayed and reversed.”
This is why the title of this post ends in “…so far.” If the numerous examples of civic pride and duty that were displayed in Egypt during and after the uprising are any sign of that country’s civil society, then the future looks good. So we end with a recent Tweet from Wael Ghonim:
As a peace advocate, I wanted to ask you why your article makes the case for a more humane and enlightened form of imperialism, or what you refer to as stability. It seems that you are promoting a concept that attempts to provide US foreign policy architects with an even more Orwellian means of managing social change; which very much follows the line pushed by Ambassador Mark Palmer in his book Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World’s Last Dictators by 2025 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003) — a book which he admits is “Most of all, … is about intervention.”
Here one might take the case of Kosovo and the ouster of Slobodan Milosevic which Palmer cites as a “clear-cut case for the use of force.” But the use of massive violence is of course not the only imperial tool that can be used to strengthen the power of nonviolent protest; and he argues that more thought should be “given to applying international law enforcement and/or military force very narrowly tailored to the task of ousting a dictator.” Modeled after NATO, Palmer additionally suggests that the international community needs to coordinate their promotion of overthrow movements by creating a “global democratic security structure or alliance” which would be equipped to use force if need be — as “of course the capacity to use force yields enormous leverage.” That said, Palmer concedes that despite all this power, “The fight for democracy cannot be successfully directed from without — only assisted and advised.” Thus the role of the ‘democracy promotion ‘national security cadre — coordinated by the likes of the National Endowment for Democracy — is to ensure that only the right-thinking democracy activists receive support. (Palmer, Breaking the Real Axis of Evil, p.30, p.31, p.45, p.59)
I guess this helps explain why your boss at the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, Peter Ackerman, was acknowledged in Palmer’s book as one his main inspirations for his attempting to rethink the US’s foreign policy And lets be frank about this, as Palmer is in his own book, Ackerman is no peacenik. One need only observe his current leadership role (alongside Palmer) at “Spirit of America” — a neoconservative nonprofit which for the past eight years has sought to enhance the power of the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan. For further details, see http://www.swans.com/library/art17/barker72.html
I will look forward to your response, especially to the latter article I refer to.
Yours peacefully, Michael Barker.
Michael Barker’s guilt-by-association attacks on Peter Ackerman have made him the object of amusement among a growing number of scholars and commentators on nonviolent struggle, and such attacks suggest that his claim to be a “peace advocate” is pretense, inasmuch as the results of more than 60 successful nonviolent movements in the past century have largely been to produce peaceful, democratic societies, governed from a rainbow of different ideological standpoints — though Barker insists on personally disparaging many of the scholars (such as Stephen Zunes as well as Peter Ackerman) whose work is helping to accelerate that gratifying and increasingly relentless effect. He shouts into the wind of history and calls it the work of demons.
Most political activists in societes like Tunisia, Egypt and Palestine (thousands of whom have used Ackerman’s materials), who are transforming nations right before our very eyes, could care less about the tired shouting matches between capitalist-denouncing Marxists and communist-hating imperialists of the last century, as they have set about winning rights and clearing away corrupt, oppressive institutions. But Barker still seems trapped in that obsolete discourse, throwing around epithets like “Orwellian” at the endeavors of people whose accomplishments he is in no position to judge. As for the distraction of his latest guilt-by-association mud-slinging, that Peter Ackerman is a warmonger for sitting on the board of Spirit of America, the credibility of the charge is — how shall I put this charitably? — dubious, inasmuch as it’s doing things like shipping soccer balls and sewing machines to Afghan civilians: http://www.spiritofamerica.net/site/afghanistan
This is gruel for conspiracy theorists, not serious students and thinkers about the history and future of nonviolent resistance.
Michael Barker, come on down!
Explain to the people why you, Mr. Barker, are so evidently stick-up-your-ass uncomfortable with the popular removal of Mubarak.
Explain your tired defenses of dictators like Ahmedinejad in Iran, and attacks on grassroots citizens of those countries as if somehow they can’t think for themselves, as if it takes gringos to make them do what they conclude is in their own self interest.
While you are at it, I can’t wait to hear your position on the Gadaffi regime in Libya, sending fighter jets to massacre its own citizens. Where do you stand on that, self-promoting “peace advocate”?
Michael Barker is an Internet stalker, trying to make himself relevant by posting comments on other people’s websites with the sole purpose of promoting his little-read McCarthyist smears on advocates of authentic change.
Anyway, Michael, I really really would love to hear your take on Libya.
Al Giordano
I am constantly surprised how people who criticize my work seem unable to actually respond to what I have written. Instead time and time again all I seem to get is a mud-slinging extravaganza. Thus in my first sentence addressed to the author (Daryn Cambridge), I asked a valid question, I wrote: “why [does] your article makes the case for a more humane and enlightened form of imperialism, or what you refer to as stability”? But as per usual, no one has responded to my question. Surely there is someone who reads posts at this web site who can do better than Paine or Giordano.
Paine ‘responded’ by explaining how we live in post ideological era where the ruling class (of which Ackerman is a bona fide member) send footballs and sewing machines to the planet’s most violent war zone, well, just for the hell of it. If he stopped to think for just one second he might realize that something was amiss here. As I note in the introductory paragraph to my article, which critically examines the full background of Peter Ackerman’s ‘humanitarian’ Spirit of America (not just the footballs it sends), what isn’t mentioned on their web site is that the other goods they sent alongside their toys include equipment like a prototype “handheld fingerprinting device which Iraqi soldiers… use[d] to assemble an insurgent database.” (as observed in a glowing report in The Wall Street Journal).
Just the other day I asked Paine why he continues to fail to address the content of my criticisms, but he seems unable to respond. See our recent exchange at Jim Lobe’s web site here http://www.lobelog.com/matt-duss-on-herzliya-or-neocon-woodstock/
Al Giordano on the other hand demonstrates his unwillingness to engage with my work by simply making stuff up. (I wouldn’t call them lies because he seems quite unaware that he is doing it.) Thus he writes: “Explain your tired defenses of dictators like Ahmedinejad in Iran”. My response is that I have never defended Ahmedinejad in Iran, if you can prove otherwise then please let me know.
Likewise I have never made any “attacks on grassroots citizens”; although I have of course drawn attention to the major problems that arise when activists obtain support from the US government’s leading imperial ‘democracy promoting” agency, the National Endowment for Democracy.
To correct another point, I am not “an Internet stalker”: in fact, I rarely post comments after other peoples articles. That said in the past few week I have made comments on a handful of articles because I want to draw attention to the massive problems associated with the work of the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict — a group which one should note Giordano works with closely. If anyone could be accused of being a malicious internet stalker it would be Giordano himself, who in the past sent an email, which was cc’d to me, that said he wants to give me “the full journalistic proctological exam of the kind we give to hostile sources and subjects in our investigations.”
“He [Michael Barker] doesn’t seem to realize that what goes around comes around, and we’re, of course, superior investigators to him. I would like to know everything that is knowable about this guy and more. Obviously we will cover whatever costs are incurred getting his credit history and other information. Let me know what you dig up.” (December 1, 2009) http://www.swans.com/library/art15/barker38.html#07
For further details of our correspondence that Giordano submitted to Swans Commentary, see
http://www.swans.com/library/art15/letter181.html
In Giordano’s most recent bout of nonsense, he writes: “Explain to the people why you, Mr. Barker, are so evidently stick-up-your-ass uncomfortable with the popular removal of Mubarak.” (Note his evident obsession with my anal passage.) I can only say that if Giordano had cared to do even the most preliminary internet search he could have found my two articles on this subject. Furthermore, given that he calls me an internet stalker, I can only assume that he had seen one of my few recent posts relating to Stephen Zunes’ misleading work on the history of nonviolence. In this post I link to my article which answers Giordano’s question. http://www.truth-out.org/credit-egyptian-people-egyptian-revolution67850
Once both Paine and Giodano have taken the time to read my work I will look forward to responding in full to their hopefully convincing criticisms; but I should make it clear now that I will not respond to any more of their ill-informed slurs.
Mr. Barker complains that his critics haven’t read his work. Regrettably, his work is exceedingly tiresome, so rife is it with various kinds of ad hominem criticism and dissimulation, such as trying to discredit people on the sole basis that they sit on boards with other people who he secondarily claims are reprehensible — without offering persuasive evidence that the other people have ever materially influenced the work of those he attacks. This isn’t research, it’s looking up lists on the internet and then indulging in name-calling. In an earlier era, he would have made a perfect researcher for the House Unamerican Activities Committee in Washington, which tried to discredit dozens of outstanding American writers and political activists on the basis of their supposed associations with communists. Stephen Zunes had the last word about this favorite technique of Mr. Barker, almost three years ago: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-zunes/the-left-also-embraces-th_b_141845.html
One more point: In his reply above, Mr. Barker confesses that he has been making rather a lot of blog posts in the past couple of weeks, in an effort to assail the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. It’s not hard to realize why: That organization, along with others that help people learn about nonviolent resistance, has been in the news since it was reported that they helped Egyptian activists who were involved in removing Hosni Mubarak from power. Of course that simple fact discredits most of Mr. Barker’s previous “work”, inasmuch as the latter is based on the theory that that center’s purpose is to aid the goals of the U.S. ruling class. Since educating the Egyptians who brought down one of the U.S. government’s chief allies does rather do the opposite of proving that Zunes and his colleagues are imperialist running dogs, it sticks an enormous crowbar into the spokes of the wheel of Mr. Barker’s conspiracy theories. His accusations have been punctured by events, which is why we see him on this and other blogs, struggling to re-inflate them. Thus does history render its own happy or unhappy judgments on the theories of those who end up on one side or another of its empirical evidence. As the old proverb goes, “By their fruits, you shall know them.”
Dear Mr Pain
Stephen Zunes has not “had the last word” about my so-called “favorite technique” of guilt by association. As I pointed out to you in the past, I have already demonstrated that Zunes’ critique was complete rubbish — see the comments section of the original version of his article here: http://www.fpif.org/articles/the_cooties_effect
Again Paine illustrates his ignorance of my work, when he talks about the contradiction of my having drawn attention to the role of Stephen Zunes and the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict in training pro-democracy activists in Egypt. If only he had read the comment I had linked to in my last post (see above) he wouldn’t have wasted his time (again): http://www.truth-out.org/credit-egyptian-people-egyptian-revolution67850
COMMENT WHICH I POSTED AFTER STEPHEN ZUNES’ ARTICLE: “Credit the Egyptian People for the Egyptian Revolution.”
I have a couple of major problems with Zunes’ analysis .
In the introductory paragraph he suggests that the ouster of Marcos in the Philippines (in 1986) was a major success for real democracy, yet arguably it was more of a success for the imposition of a violent form of low-intensity democracy (i.e., neoliberalism). This is important to highlight given the similarities between the peoples movement in the Philippines and the current insurrection in Egypt.
As Kim Scipes the author of KMU: Building Genuine Trade Unionism in the Philippines, 1980-1994 (New Day Publishers, 1996) pointed out last week:
“[R]eplacing Marcos with [Cory] Aquino left a brutal state apparatus intact, which Aquino used to kill peasants, workers and the urban poor. In fact, KMU leaders told me that the human rights abuses under democrat Aquino were worse than under dictator Marcos: she couldn’t control her generals. However, whether she couldn’t control them or if she didn’t want to control them — Alfred W. McCoy in Policing America’s Empire (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009) claims the latter — the fact is that unless the brutal state apparatus is dismantled, and especially the Police and the torture agencies, the repression could be re-instituted.” http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/barker150211.html
Zunes’ unreflective celebration of the powerful people movement in the Philippines has meant that he excludes from his analysis any mention of the role of the US government’s ‘democracy promotion’ establishment in coopting the movement. This is highly problematic on a number of levels, and it is a topic that I address in a forthcoming article (published in the next few days) which reviews a book chapter Zunes published in 1999 titled “The Origins of People Power in the Philippines.” In fact as I demonstrate in my article Zunes not only vastly downplays the role of radical labor groups in the people’s movement, but he also celebrates the role of one of the major Filipino groups that was funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) — without of course mentioning the group’s well-known connection to the NED and the CIA.
However, with regard to current situation in Egypt, Zunes writes that the “small amount of US ‘democracy’ [provided by the like of NED] assistance did not include any support for training in strategic nonviolent action or other kinds of grassroots mobilization that proved decisive in the struggle, and the key groups that organized the protests resisted US funding on principle.” This is disingenuous to say the least. I say this because in May 2007, he popped over to Egypt to lead a seminar on nonviolent civic strategies at Saad Eddin Ibrahim’s NED-funded Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies. (This trip was organized through his work with the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, a group headed and funded by Council on Foreign Relations board member, Peter Ackerman.)
One might note that Saad Eddin Ibrahim is a board member of Canada’s version of the NED, a group called Rights and Democracy. Furthermore, more recently despite being widely celebrated as a leading Egyptian pro-democracy activist, Ibrahim joined the advisory board of a neoconservative group called Cyberdissidents.org, whose web site says they are “dedicated to supporting human liberty by promoting the voices of online dissidents.” Founded in 2008 this project is headed by their cofounder, David Keyes, who previously served as coordinator for democracy programs under the right-wing Zionist Natan Sharansky while based at the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies.
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