January 31, 2011

"Screw Your Mother!" - Links and comments on the Egyptian situation

If you have not been completely glued to the reports about the current situation in Egypt, then you need to get on it now. The Huffington Post has been a great resource for up to date reports also Graham Harman's blog has been amazing on providing on-the ground analysis and definitely worth keeping track of.

The Scu has a good post at Critical Animal relating this to the Iranian Revolution, and providing an intriguing distinction between a demonstration and an experiment.

It is good to see that the Egyptian population is not satisfied by reforms and concessions that the state is willing to offer. They are in full realization that the government is not "their" government but owned by the very outside forces that benefit from an illegitimate sovereignty. I think the we are not just on the cusp of a revolution here in Egypt but on the cusp of a global movement as a whole, the situation in Egypt in a great example of a global revolutionary resonance machine that began with the 06 riots in France, to the 08 Greece demonstrations, and now to Egypt. Jean Baudrillard phrased it best in his 06 article The Pyres of Autumn:

"The superiority of Western culture is sustained only by the desire of the rest of the world to join it. When there is the least sign of refusal, the slightest ebbing of that desire, the West loses its seductive appeal in its own eyes. Today it is precisely the ‘best’ it has to offer—cars, schools, shopping centres—that are torched and ransacked. Even nursery schools: the very tools through which the car-burners were to be integrated and mothered. ‘Screw your mother’ might be their organizing slogan. And the more there are attempts to ‘mother’ them, the more they will. Of course, nothing will prevent our enlightened politicians and intellectuals from considering the autumn riots as minor incidents on the road to a democratic reconciliation of all cultures. Everything indicates that on the contrary, they are successive phases of a revolt whose end is not in sight"

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