Workers and young people throughout the world welcome the ouster of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak with jubilation. They salute the Egyptian people for their courageous struggle in the face of intimidation, torture and repression. Theirs is the honor of having fired the opening shot in a new era of social upheaval.
One can almost feel the shudders down the spines of the remaining dictators in the Middle East, of their backers in the former colonial powers of Europe. Above all, a humiliating slap to the face of U.S. imperialism has been delivered.
It is clear that while the turmoil of the previous century had at its deepest root the rise of America to global hegemony, this century will be characterized by its fall.
But no one should overlook the expense at which the overthrow of the Mubarak government was achieved. Human Rights Watch reported that at least 302 people were killed during the protests, the vast majority of deaths being at the hands of police forces and pro-Mubarak thugs.
According to other human rights groups and reports in the Guardian, thousands of anti-Mubarak protestors were arrested, tortured, and “disappeared” by the Egyptian military – that glorified force of neutrality – during the protests. In the coming weeks, these figures are expected to grow.
In addition to praising the Egyptian military as having “served patriotically and responsibly as a caretaker to the state,” President Obama called on it to “ensure a transition that is credible in the eyes of the Egyptian people.”
Later in his short statement Friday night, Obama claimed, “Egyptians have inspired us, and they’ve done so by putting the lie to the idea that justice is best gained through violence. For in Egypt, it was the moral force of nonviolence, not terrorism, not mindless killing, but nonviolence, moral force that bent the arc of history toward justice once more.”
This comes from a president whose government supported the violence of the fallen dictator for more than three decades and stood by him up to the very morning of his ouster, to say nothing of the rape of Iraq in the name of “justice” or the escalation of violence against the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
While the anti-Mubarak protestors were not violent, it is clear that the military, security forces and pro-Mubarak thugs were.
Such talk about “democracy” and “justice” is all very pretty, but it has no connection to reality. Any real democracy requires both justice and social equality, both are in short supply in Egypt.
On the most basic level, justice calls for a settling of accounts with the former regime, including Mubarak and Omar Suleiman, and the military and security groups that administered decades of torture and repression to maintain the Mubarak regime. They will not peacefully submit to justice; force, and violence if required, will be necessary.
In foreign policy, the hated treaty with Israel, which is crucial to that government’s repression and military terror against the region’s population, would have to be annulled for “justice.”
Agreements with the U.S. government that kept the Mubarak regime in power and transformed Egypt into U.S. imperialism’s primary foreign Gulag in the “War on Terror” would have to be published and rejected as well. In carrying out such policies, the Egyptian people should expect to defend themselves against the violent retribution of these regimes.
Fundamental to the fostering of social equality, the foundation for any real democracy, is an assault on the extreme levels of wealth concentrated at the top of Egyptian society and in the hands of foreign interests. Of course, this cannot be accomplished outside of undermining the right of private property, , i.e. capitalism.
It is no accident that U.S. imperialism and the Egyptian bourgeois opposition are promoting the Egyptian military as the country’s protector.
Neither democracy nor justice and social equality can be achieved under its watch. The Egyptian people must remain vigilant, protect the gains of the Egyptian revolution, and march onward with the support of the international working class to complete victory.
