cracks in the american bloc

Once upon a time, a nuclear-armed superpower ruled over a host of client states by backing brutal dictators, who used state-controlled media, prisons, torture, and vast armies of secret police to repress dissent among their populations and ensure that the superpower's economic philosophy and foreign policy aims could be carried out unimpeded.

These dictators ruled for decades.  Any revolt was swiftly and violently crushed.  Their regimes seemed unshakable.  And then, within a year, all of them collapsed beneath the tide of a mass, democratic, nonviolent popular movement.  The movement not only swept away the tinpot client dictators, but washed back over the superpower itself and caused massive changes there.

I'm talking, of course, about the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989-91.  But surely you see where I'm going with this.  Today the "American bloc" in the Middle East is being shaken by a titanic wave of struggle that may be only in its earliest phases.  The Tunisian people overthrew a US-backed dictator who had ruled for 23 years--and have continued to toss out multiple interim governments that contain members of the old guard.  Protests (smaller, certainly, but still significant) have erupted in Algeria, Libya, Jordan, Syria, Yemen--even Saudi Arabia.  Not all of these nations are ruled by US-backed dictators, but their people all face similar, interrelated problems: a lack of basic democratic freedoms, skyrocketing food prices, infrastructure and social services gutted by IMF-mandated privatization and austerity, and chronic unemployment, particularly youth unemployment, while a handful of cronies at the top enrich themselves by selling off the country's natural resources to the Global North.

While all of these revolts have galvanized the Middle East, and the world, none has created so much hope and joy, and so many problems for the US, as the intifada that is shaking the cornerstone of America's imperial control of the Middle East, the most populous Arab country--Egypt.  Egypt's "president" Hosni Mubarak has ruled for 30 years--longer than two thirds of Egyptians have been alive.  His state security forces are ubiquitous, violent and terrifying.  His country was the first one the CIA turned to when setting up its torture-outsourcing extraordinary rendition program.  His government cooperates with Israel to maintain the siege of Gaza, against the wishes of the vast majority of his population, and is rewarded with $1.5 billion a year in US military aid.  After Israel he is certainly the US government's most important strongman in the region.  And now he teeters on the brink of being toppled.  For six days now, protesters have defied tear gas, water cannons, rubber bullets, live ammunition, savage beatings, mass arrests, threats of curfew, tanks in the streets and helicopters and fighter jets in the sky.  They have effectively driven Mubarak's internal security apparatus off the streets--not just in Cairo but in Alexandria, Suez, and many other cities across the country.  In a nation where political gatherings of more than five people are illegal, the people own the streets.

While these uprisings may appear to have erupted out of nowhere, like all mass struggles they are the result of contradictions in the system that have built up over many years, of long-suffered grievances and the learning curve of many small struggles.  The revolutions of 1989 seemed sudden and unexpected, even to people who participated in them.  But in retrospect we can see some of the signs that spelled the demise of the Eastern bloc a decade before its final collapse, things like the Solidarity movement in Poland and the disastrous Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.  (Hmm, sound familiar?)

Looking back, it's clear that the current round of revolt against the US agenda in the Middle East started with the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000, when young people all over the Arab world, born in the '80s and '90s, saw other young people just like them standing up to the tanks and bullets of a US ally.  In Egypt, the last three years have seen large, militant strikes by many sectors of the country's working class, which is diverse, powerful and well-organized.  What the revolution in Tunisia provided was hope.  Tunisia was the last place anyone expected a revolt, and yet just four weeks of protests drove out a dictator who had ruled for more than two decades.  It was only logical for people all over the Arab world, facing similar conditions, to ask "If they can do it, why can't we?"

Let us be clear on some things.  These are real revolutions in progress--the Muslim world's first revolutions since 1979--the first living revolutions many of us have seen in our lifetime as political activists.  They are democratic revolutions--against torture and police brutality, against one-party rule and for free elections, free speech and free assembly, and other basic civil liberties.  They are not social revolutions that battle the ruling class for control over the economic system...yet.  And no matter how much mainstream media pundits may froth at the mouth about "radical Islam," none of these movements are led or controlled by Islamists.  They are movements of Muslims, Christians and atheists, young and old, workers, students and unemployed.  Instead of being driven by one particular religious ideology, they are destroying the divisions between them.  On New Year's day a bomb ripped through a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria, killing 21 people and injuring dozens more.  Today on the streets of Cairo one of the most popular chants is "Muslims, Christians, we are all Egyptians!"

It is far too early to tell how far things will go in the Middle East.  In Egypt, Mubarak totters but has not yet fallen.  The role of the army remains decisive and no one is quite sure how things will play out.  It is too early to start calling this the Arab world's 1989.  But it is not too early to imagine it.

I've written a lot and yet I'm not sure I've been able to convey the explosive joy radiating from Egypt's appropriately named Tahrir [Liberation] Square, the blaze of hope and courage and power and liberation that has lit up not just the Middle East, but the whole world.  But this video does a pretty good job.

their power and ours

There are at least three kinds of power.

1. Power over, which we might also call dominance, violence or force. This is the kind of power we normally associate with the term, because it is everywhere in our world. It's the kind of power that bosses and the state use to keep us under their control: the ability to extract a price for disobedience. In its milder form it may be the threat of being fired from one's job; in its more virulent strains it is imprisonment, torture, political murder. It is not quite accurate to think of this type of power only as violence, although violence is at its root. Really it is force and the threat of force, combined and working together. The threat of force has kept far more people in line than any actual act of violence.

2. Power with, which we might also call solidarity. The power of communities united in struggle, of collective self-activity, self-organization and self-defense. The practical application of the maxim "An injury to one is an injury to all." Solidarity is not just a slogan; it's a concrete weapon against attack by those with power over. Solidarity means both the most vulnerable and the most visibly militant are protected. A high degree of solidarity means a low number of collaborators, which is why oppressors will always do everything in their power to destroy solidarity--to break up communities, stoke divisions and mistrust, apply pressure to the weak and make examples of the strong.

3. Power within, which we might also call will. We're not talking here about the willpower not to eat that cookie (life is short--eat the damn cookie!) but about political will--the strength to keep fighting in the face of the various punishments those with power over can deliver. This is not an abstract quality delivered in a fixed measure to a person at birth, but something that can be nurtured and developed.

Will and solidarity are the secret weapons of the oppressed--the weapons that those who rule by force will never understand and therefore always underestimate. They are unlimited, renewable, and indestructible. They are shareable and giftable, available for use by any who are willing to share the risks of struggle. They may be smothered under the weight of repression for years or even generations, but they're never completely extinguished.

Will and solidarity are mutually reinforcing. We draw strength from others' strength, from the support of our friends, allies, comrades and community, from the knowledge that we're not fighting alone but are part of a whole much greater than us. Individual acts of courage and defiance inspire others, and communities keep individuals strong in the face of repression. This is why oppressors work so hard to isolate leaders, organizers and agitators--through prison, exile, intimidation, smear campaigns, etc. They understand that activists rooted in communities have a power far beyond their own individual actions.

This not to say that our side, the side of the oppressed and exploited, cannot or should not use force. I'm not a pacifist. I think if you're being attacked you have a right to defend yourself by any means necessary. It's not that we cannot use the tools of force--it's just that much of the time, we don't need to. Violence is not the last word when it comes to power. Even in situations of armed conflict between oppressed and oppressor, the oppressed side is never going to be able to match their oppressors gun for gun and bomb for bomb--the lion's share of the means of destruction will always be on the oppressing side. We make up the difference with the other weapons we have.

When dictatorships fall and empires collapse, the people who run them are often genuinely surprised. That's because they don't understand that there are kinds of power other than their own. Seeing only the value of power over, utterly convinced to the very last moment of the unbeatable supremacy of their array of tanks, guns, bombs, prisons and torture chambers, they have no idea that those they oppress could have weapons of their own, weapons more powerful than any they wield. They never realize, until we prove it to them and to ourselves, that we are stronger than them. 

Hat tip to Lisa Fithian, from whom I stole the basic framework for this post.