Read: Egypt and Democracy

From: Irish Foreign Affairs: Editorials

Date: December, 2012

By: Editorial

Egypt and Democracy

Egypt and Democracy
The democratisation of certain Arab States was considered advantageous to the globalist interests of the West—the West being the USA and the European Union—and it was actively supported by propaganda and other means. The democratisation of other Arab States was not considered advantageous to Western interests, and the West assisted in the suppression of democratic movements in them.

Some of the Arab States fostered the secular liberal values which are the official ideology of the West. Others were strictly Islamic regimes. The states in which the West helped to suppress the democratic movements were the states with feudal Islamic regimes. The States which the West played an active part in subverting were those in which the regime fostered Western values.

The Baath regimes in Iraq and Syria fostered Western liberal values. Ireland had extensive connections with Iraq in particular and the experience of Irish people who went to work there was that it was a country not essentially different from their own. Women were free to behave in the European manner there—or not to, if that was their choice. The practice of religion was free, both with regard to the different varieties of Islam, and the relations between Islam and the various forms of Christianity existed there from the earliest Christian times. The various public amenities which were taken for granted in the West were taken for granted in Baathist Iraq too. A substantial stratum of Western-style middle-class life had developed there in which people from the West felt at ease.

But the State which cultivated this liberal development, and protected it, was not democratically organised. And it was under the slogans of democracy that the West decided to destroy the Baath regime in Iraq.

Britain was to the fore in the campaign to destroy the ‘tyranny’ which fostered liberal values in Iraq.
In Britain itself the cultivation of liberal values was not done in a medium of political democracy. Liberal development preceded democratic development by a long way. The small ruling class of the 18th century cultivated liberal social values and engaged in fierce suppression of tendencies which it regarded as inimical to liberalism. The long campaign to exterminate Catholicism in Ireland—which came close to exterminating the native population in the mid-19th century—was done in the name of liberalism. It was not done in the name of democracy. The ruling class was of the opinion that democracy was incompatible with liberalism and would destroy it.

Britain was not governed democratically under the regime of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which lasted until 1832. It was governed by an aristocratic ruling class acting in the name of a monarchy which it had rendered powerless. The middle class which flourished economically and culturally under that regime began to demand access to political power. In 1832 the bourgeoisie forced Parliament to admit them to the Parliamentary process by threatening to go on economic strike. The 1832 Reform enfranchised only a small minority of the population. Further small additions to the Parliamentary franchise were made in the course of the 19th century. But it was not until the Reform Act of 1918—made politically necessary by the introduction of Conscription in 1916 to fight the Great War—that a majority of the British population got the vote.

The British Prime Minister declared in Parliament the other day that Britain had been “ bastion of democracy for centuries”. Nobody disagreed, even though everybody with any knowledge of the history of the franchise must have known it was nonsense.

The British ruling class resisted democratisation. It did not resist it merely out of a lust for power. It was concerned that democratisation would bring about the destruction of what it had constructed. Its war against the French Revolution was preached by Edmund Burke as a war against democracy, and the course of events in France was taken to be proof that democracy didn’t work.

Britain has been a democracy—in the sense of having a Government based on a Parliament elected by general adult franchise—for less than a century. What it had for centuries—about three centuries—was government by a ruling class which arranged itself into two political parties and sorted out its differences by means of periodical elections of a Parliament by a minuscule electorate. The Government was based on this representative Parliament of the ruling class. Parliament was where the ruling class threshed out its affairs. Internal government of the country was done for the most part by the powerful families of the ruling class who were supreme in their localities, regardless of which party was formally in Office.

The main business of the State was the conquest of the world. Both parties were in essential agreement about this. The Royal Navy was the chief instrument of the State and the ruling class as a whole disciplined itself into acquiring the skills of seamanship. The execution of an Admiral “to encourage the others”, satirised by Voltaire in Candide, was a serious act of self-discipline by the ruling class. Admiral Byng was judged to have acted timidly, and it was not by timid evasions of opportunities that the world would be conquered.

Before the 1832 Reform the political parties were loose groupings of powerful families. The Tories opposed the Reform but, once it was enacted, they organised themselves into something like what we now know as a political party in order to function in the enlarged electorate, and the Whigs followed suit.
Historically, the Tories derived from the opponents of Cromwell’s Puritan Revolution—from the Cavaliers. The Whigs derived from the Cromwellians.

The Tories stood for the Landed interest. The Whigs, while being large landowners, stood for the money interest.
The Tories were in Government at the start of the Irish Famine in 1846 and they took it to be the business of the Government to prevent the Irish populace from starving. The Whigs (often called Liberals by this time) came to Office and, in a resurgence of the Cromwellian spirit, which combined utility with piety, they saw it as their business to assist Providence in its obvious intention of removing the Irish dross which stood in the way of the redemption of the world.

The 1832 middle class was moulded to the political structures of the ruling class, and its more ambitious and successful elements were absorbed into it. An upper stratum of the working class was enfranchised in 1867 and absorbed. The problem of how to admit the mass of the populace to the franchise without having the state threatened by a raw democracy, enthusiastically motivated by illusory expectations, was solved by the Great War.
The Liberal Government, crucially assisted by the Irish Home Rulers, managed to generate a millenarian conviction in the mass of society that this was a war against a powerful force of Evil in the world and that if this Evil force, based in Prussian Germany, was defeated there would be perpetual peace. Scripturalist Utopianism, which had only been having forty winks beneath the militant Darwinism, revived with redoubled force. But it was the Darwinist, H.G. Wells, who gave the most appealing expression to the illusion of the moment with his pamphlet—his atheist Millenarian tract—The War That Will End War.

The unexpected strength of the German resistance led to the intensification of the crusading spirit in Britain. The entire populace was drawn into it. In 1914 Votes For Women was out of the question. There was a male apprehension that women stood for some different kind of politics. But the part played by the suffragettes in “white feathering” reluctant men into the army was reassuring and women were given the vote without question by the 1918 Reform Act, though at a higher age than men for a few years.

British democracy, the most stable in the world, was not established as the realisation of an ideal. It was brought about, under ruling class hegemony, as a long, slow adaptation to changing social circumstances. Each measure of electoral enfranchisement consolidated the power of the existing State. The final measure was organised in a popular atmosphere of Imperialist militarism in the midst of the Great War that was launched by the oligarchy in 1914 and was then embraced by the mass of society.

The Peace Settlement made by the British democracy in 1919 was a very bad settlement because it was driven by the millenarian passion by which the masses had been roused to fight the war. The enemy had been demonised in the course of the war and therefore he was punished rather than settled with at the end of the war. When the ruling class had freedom of action a hundred years earlier, after the defeat of France, it had made France an active party to the post-war settlement arranged by the Congress of Vienna. In 1919 the ruling class was bound by the virtuously vindictive passions of the democracy that had come into being in the course of the war, so the evil enemy was excluded from the peace process. He was plundered and humiliated for the good of his soul, so that the cosmic scales of Justice should be balanced. And he was required to disown the viable state of the pre-war era and construct a new state according to an ultra-democratic ideal.

The British ruling-class state was altered gradually into a democracy within the structures of state established by the ruling class. The state which the victorious Entente Powers required the German democracy to destroy in 1918-19 was already a democracy in substance—or was at least as much of a democracy as the British Empire was. The new German democracy required of the Germans by their conquerors was without foundations—it was not a further democratic reform of the substantially democratic German state which had been evolving since 1871. The new democracy, repudiating the State through which Germany as a political entity had come into being and developed for close on half-a-century, could only be an ultra-democracy based on first principles. And its task—the task imposed on it—was not to democratise a State but to form a State.

The German Revolution of 1918-19, carried out in the hope of conciliating the victorious Allies, was the true Revolution of Destruction.

The German Republic, proclaimed in the midst of ultra-democratic anarchy early in 1919, was chronically unstable throughout its fifteen years of existence. It never succeeded in becoming an actual State. The powers which need to be combined in a functional State remained dispersed among the populace. Ultra-democracy might be defined as democracy which lacks the essential attributes of a State.

When fascist movements developed amidst the democratic post-war anarchy and one of them established functional States, it was welcomed by the Powers which had precipitated the anarchy by foisting ultra-democratic principles on their defeated enemies which they never applied in their own affairs.

Three generations later—three generations during which the world was occupied by World War, Cold War, and anti-Imperial war—there is a recurrence of a propaganda of dysfunctional ultra-democracy by functional democratic states. A most bizarre idea of democracy was broadcast around the world for the purpose of disintegrating the Libyan State. And, at the moment of writing, every effort is being made to prevent the revolution in Egypt from stabilising itself by establishing a functional State which accords with the outlook of the great bulk of the population.
When Britain detached Egypt from the Ottoman Empire it did not govern it. As Lord Cromer grandly explained, Britain “governed the governors” of Egypt. After the governors of Egypt had been compelled by the British Ambassador to give Britain the use of the country in two World Wars, an Egyptian national movement ousted Britain from the government of the country which it had never governed. It did not need to declare independence: Britain had declared that Egypt was independent under its “government of the governors”. The Egyptian Government was an independent Government that did what it was told by Britain.

In 1972 it stopped doing what it was told. In 1956 Britain entered into conspiracy with Israel and France to invade it and reduce it to subordination. The United States, which was still in Anti-Imperialist mode at the time, threatened to wreck the British economy financially if it did not desist. During the period of substantial independence which followed, Egypt prepared to make war on Israel, an expansionist Jewish colonial state which had been imposed on the Middle East, against the opposition of all Governments of the region, by a resolution of the UN General Assembly and arms supplied by the Soviet Union and the USA. The assault across the Suez Canal in 1972 almost succeeded, but failed. In the aftermath of failure Egypt was obliged to make peace with the Jewish conquest—a conquest that had spread far beyond the area allocated for a Jewish State by the 1947 UN resolution.

A second period of indirect government followed. This time it was the US that governed the governors. The main business of the domestic government was to secure Israel’s border for it on that side, and to prevent the predominantly Muslim character of Egyptian society from determining the conduct of the state.

A middle class stratum which mimicked the Western middle class developed in the shelter of the military rule by which the indirect government was conducted. The military government was not representative of Egyptian society, and the Westernised middle class stratum did not seem to know what Egyptian society was.

The Arab Spring in Tunisia—which ran its course quickly and lightly—found an echo in the flimsy Westernised Egyptian middle class, which seemed to be unaware that it was a dependency of the “tyranny” against which it began to demonstrate.

The “tyranny” was the condition of existence of the socially-detached, hothouse, Western sophistication of this middle class. The social element with relation to which it actually was a tyranny was the 90% majority, which lived its life, underneath the oppressive State, in the social networks of the Muslim Brotherhood.

A year after the Revolution, there is an imminent ‘danger’ of its being consolidated in the form of a viable democracy.
Middle class protest that the revolution is being “hijacked” is being broadcast around the world by the Western media. The BBC has even said who it is being hijacked from: secularists, liberals and Christians.
We do not know to what extent the Christians were active in the revolution. They had a relatively secure niche under the old regime, and their leaders then had a social function as an educated but conservative middle class. It should have been evident to their leaders that their position would not be improved by democratic nationalist revolution. But the Western media, as usual, presented democracy in fantasy terms—and authentic revolution sweeps people along regardless.

As to the secularists and liberals—they had secularism and liberalism under the tyranny.

It is being complained that Morsi, who has taken the revolution in hand to stabilise it in representative structures, is breaking the law by his Decree that he will not allow the Judges set up by the tyranny to pass judgement on the affairs of the elected Constituent Assembly.

The Western media has been full of The Revolution, The Revolution, The Revolution. Suddenly the Revolution is declared to be in breach of law. But where could the law come from in a revolution, but out of the revolution?
The construction of functional Muslim democracy in Egypt—which is what was always implicit in the revolution—would not be in the Western interest. Permanent revolution, which ran on freely until it exhausted itself in chaos, would.

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Egypt and Democracy

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