From top to bottom: "Made in USA. Teargas.", January 28, 2011; "Untitled", January 30, 2011; "Untitled", January 30, 2011; "'The people want the regime to fall'", January 30, 2011.
All photographs by Sara Carr, from her Flickr page. Reposted here under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 License.
I don't know who Sarah Carr (the woman who took these pictures) is, but I encourage you to check out her photos.
I can't say I'm much of an expert--or even keen observer--of Egyptian politics. So I'll refer you to someone who knows a little more than I. Says one former Obie living in Egypt (though he's not there now):
Much of the organization and mobilization may have taken place on Facebook via the We Are All Khaled Said group (through which 90,000 people said they planned to attend demonstrations), but the turnout seems like it was much more diverse than the usual web-savvy crowd. I’ve been to a number of pro-democracy demonstrations in Cairo and it’s typical to see the same handful of activists at each. Yesterday seemed to attract a different crowd. A friend in Cairo who was in Tahrir Square yesterday, the site of the main protest, put it this way in a Gchat conversation: “you can find cooperation between youth with beard and girls wearing foreign clothes.”
Go, read.
My only real thought is that our support for Mubarak and the unrest in Egypt brings attention to one of the U.S.'s historical problems, viz., our government supporting tyrants and strongmen as a bulwark against (what our government perceives to be) worse tyrants and strongmen.
This is, of course, case in point: the U.S. government supports Mubarak, whom the Egyptian people seem to despise, because it fears that the Egyptian people, if free, might choose to be ruled by those who would threaten the U.S.'s security (or, the security of the U.S.'s closest ally in the Middle East, Israel.
This is nothing new. The rather sordid history of U.S. involvement in South America springs to mind. We helped to engineer a coup against Chile's Allende, and provided weapons and money for the kidnapping-turned-assination of a pro-constitution Chilean General. Why? Because as Kissinger put it in a meeting shortly after the 1973 coup:
But I think we should understand our policy--that however unpleasant [referring to the thousands of summary executions following the coup], the [Pinochet] government is better for us than Allende was.
But I don't want to dwell on U.S.-backed atrocities in South America; it's enough to know that our government, regardless of party or ideology, has supported ruthless dictators at the expense of the freedoms of the impoverished and downtrodden around the world.
Of course, that's only part of the story. The U.S. supports freedom, too, and on balance, my gut tells me we've done more to help than hinder. But if we want to be known as principled supporters of freedom and liberty, then we have to actually be principled.
Indeed, we might have less to fear from the emergence of Middle Eastern democracies if we were.
|