'People power' backfire

DIE HARD III
Herman Tiu Laurel
4/11/2011



Only two-and-a-half months after the Egyptian uprising on Jan. 25, 2011, forces of the US-Egyptian ruling establishment have started to devour the revolution’s children. As I start this column, international cable and Internet news have started flashing clips of the Egyptian military’s dispersal of protesters at Tahrir Square , the site where the so-called Egyptian “people power” began.

Since a “transition government” took over after Mubarak’s fall and despite the holding of a constitutional plebiscite, innumerable voices of dissent have been raised against the new government’s direction — with the same old Mubarak generals in charge and the same old US domination of that part of the world.

The resurgent protesters were engaged in a sit-in and defied the imposed curfew. When a smattering of military officers started to join them in protest, the Egyptian army cracked down heavily on the crowd, which led to two deaths (though the number is believed to be bigger).

The Egyptian people power against Western-backed dictator Hosni Mubarak went off to a very heady Twitter start but lacked the effective clarity in ideology and organized political-military leadership to consummate a revolution. While Twitter and Facebook can indeed rouse the young and the middle class, and even draw in the masses, these social media simply do not have the wherewithal to seize and maintain government power and wage a programmed restructuring of society, thus laying them open to opportunistic predators.

I remember issuing a warning in my column, “From US frying pan to US fire,” that unless the spontaneous combustion of the Egyptian revolution was being fanned by a clear nationalist civilian-military leadership (with emphasis on “nationalist”), the people power there would just end up like the one we had here, where the people were made to suffer worse conditions under the continued control of the US and the old oligarchy.

Even today, with the US calling the shots, Egypt is already sending arms and military trainers to neighboring Libya, a country that has double its per capita income and standard of living, to fuel the Libyan civil war while it has yet to sort out its own problems. What proof does the world — or the Yellow bleeding hearts rooting for the so-called Libyan “rebels” — need in order to realize that worse things have come upon the Egyptian people today after their so-called “revolution,” no different from what has happened here since 1986?

In a decade or so, Egyptians will have nostalgia for Mubarak — for the relative calm and stability of his period, for the poor but survivable neo-colonial economic conditions, and for the relative predictability of the whole of North Africa and the Middle East then. What the US and its Egyptian lackeys have in store for Egypt is simply the complete deconstruction of its stability, security, and economic leverage. This backfire is to be seen in the coming years.

Like the Edsa “people power,” the long line of US-engineered or abetted destabilizations, coups and putsches have all been about maintaining Western political-economic hegemony — from the CIA Iranian “people power” project in 1953 against Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh for nationalizing Iran’s oil fields to the fake Libyan “pro-democracy” rebellion, which, according to Italian journalist Franco Bechis, was actually planned by French intelligence services in November 2010, a year after Moammer Kadhafi threatened to nationalize joint ventures with the West.

The French plan was actually rehashed in the context of the Arab “people power” when Washington took over with its own counter-revolutionary goals. In October 2010, Nouri Mesmari, Kadhafi’s protocol officer, turned himself over to the French secret service with plans against his former boss. He then led them to Libyan air defense Col. Abdallah Gehani who was ready to collaborate. But it was recent defector former Libyan Foreign Minister Moussa Koussa who is being held responsible for the earlier defections of Mesmari, et al.

Thus, similar to Egypt, where Mubarak’s former intelligence chief rules the roost today, in Libya, former Kadhafi officials are the chief collaborators of the US and Nato posing as “rebels.” The new Benghazi-based rebel government recognized by France, Italy, Qatar, etc. already ships oil to these countries and the rest of Europe. It is therefore pretty clear that these “rebel” rulers, being complete underlings of the West, will absolutely be unable to bargain for any favorable terms for Libya and its people.

Let’s not forget Côte d’Ivoire, where French and UN forces bombed President Laurent Gbagbo (who was nationalizing the cocoa industry) and his forces in support of former IMF country manager Alassane Ouattara, a once unelected prime minister and presidential candidate in the recent disputed elections. With economic sovereignty ceded to Western powers by their lackeys, isn’t it still obvious that these countries will be reduced to worse penury like the Philippines?

Under the Yellow governments, the Philippines has grown hungrier each passing year since Edsa 1986, with its national economy regressing terribly from an incipient state of industrialization and agricultural self-sufficiency. A March 2011 SWS poll showed an astounding 70-percent increase in hunger to 20.5 percent of the population from a 12-year average of 13.8 percent. PeNoy was reportedly “shocked,” showing how out of touch he is.

And so the backfire in the Philippines is now burning rapidly — incontrovertible evidence of which is what Amando Doronilla desperately fretted of in his column, “Marcos rehabilitation bandwagon,” together with Commission on Human Rights Chief Etta Rosales’ discombobulation over Marcos being voted by the people as one of the nation’s “Top 10 Heroes.”

But then, the whole elitist, holier-than-thou Yellow army — from Jim Paredes, Leah Navarro, Dinky Soliman, Etta Rosales, ABS-CBN, to PeNoy — still choose to bear down on someone like Willie Revillame over his mindless, albeit sadistic, entertainment (more likely for his outburst during live coverage of Cory’s wake) when their failures for the past quarter of a century have sent more Filipinos to desperate straits than ever before.

(Tune in to 1098AM, Monday to Friday, 5 to 6 p.m., and Sulo ng Pilipino, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 6 to 7 p.m.; TNT with HTL, Tuesday, 8 to 9 p.m., with replay at 11 p.m., on GNN, Destiny Cable Channel 8, on “NFA Privatization: Grains of Tears” with the NFA union; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com for our articles plus select radio and GNN shows)