Revolutions and civil wars

[Deleted]

As I try to pay close attention to news all over the world, I have been closely following the situation in Egypt and particularly the new backlash against the "West" for not fully supporting recent actions by the army and the police, killing even more people in 5 days than during the entire Mubarak struggle. All of the articles that I have been reading about the people who support the police have quotes about "the Muslim Brotherhood are savages and they attacked first." They absolutely do not understand why we are not applauding the elimination of bad people.

And so this got me thinking about whether we are being hypocrites or not. Many countries have had bloody revolutions and/or civil wars in history, and we appear to be just fine with a lot of them -- for example France and the United States, Mexico, Ireland or even China. In fact the citizens of those countries are proud of their revolutions, and I don't think that many people could come up with a suggestion on how the same result could have been accomplished a different way.

Then there are revolutions that people later regretted -- the Soviet Union comes to mind as do numerous messy situations in Africa.

Bloodless revolutions are few and far between, so bravo to Portugal for managing to do that, and I suppose that we can also say that India showed considerable restraint thanks to Gandhi.

Nevertheless, it is quite clear that when there is no electoral process or the electoral process is hopelessly corrupted or flawed, there are not too many options for removing dictators, bad administrations and other such things that are causing great harm to a nation. It's not as though you can just unfriend the government on your Facebook account and the problem is solved. It appears that the price of blood must usually be paid.

So here we are sitting around (should I add "on our fat satisfied arses" ?) and wringing our hands about the unpleasantness while of course thinking mostly about ourselves and not really the population of the country. We don't really know these Egyptians (at least the vast majority of us don't) so we don't know exactly what they want. It would be a lovely fantasy to believe that they want to model their country after ours, but I think that we can eliminate that possibility straight out. We will be much more upset if the supply of Egyptian cotton disappears or our children's fish fingers double in price because there is no more tilapia or Nile perch, not to mention our holidays being ruined.

I am particularly curious as to what the citizens of countries who have never had a revolution think of such revolts -- good, bad, don't care? Many of us have been lucky to live in peace most or all of our lives, but often our domestic peace came at a very high price further back in our history...

And I'm not even talking about wars with other countries!

[fumobici]

The situation in Egypt is obviously tragic and in spite of having read rather a lot about it and having seen the gruesome images I still don't have any real sense of who is in the right or wrong. It is an unfortunate fact that those in positions of power and wealth so often won't relinquish either without rather extreme violence--even if their privileged position is obviously without any legitimate basis. I guess peaceful transfers of power are more the exception than the rule in human history.

As an American I have an uneasy feeling that my government has not been without blame in much of the chaos and it is clear we have been pushing huge arms sales to profit our own arms merchants and are certainly not above interfering in other countries and propping up horrible tyrants if doing so is seen to be useful to our own oligarchical classes. I do wish we would get out of the empire and arms dealing business, it is really unsavory and fundamentally antithetical to the values we high-mindedly espouse to others.

[Deleted]

A political cartoon in today's newspaper shows an Egyptian family talking to a sea of Western microphones and cameras and saying "You don't understand anything! We needed a massacre to prevent a massacre!"