“My brother’s blood is crying from the grave
but you can’t hear the voice
I stand in jeopardy every hour,
Wonderin’ what reason you have to rejoice.
Look at your feet see where they’ve been to
Look at your hands, see what they’ve been into…
Yonder comes sin…”
– B. Dylan
Patrick Smith, man on fire, takes on a theme we were were discussing here the other day — the true nature and origin of terrorism in our benighted Age of Terror. In his piece for Salon.com, Smith focuses on the outrageous and brazen lies of the American political and media establishment concerning the “Arab Spring” and its disastrous aftermath. As Smith points out, in every case where Washington took a hand in events, the outcome has been catastrophe, chaos, repression and — terror. The whole piece is worth reading in full, especially the detail on the American-led imposition of a horrific tyranny in Egypt, where the people had foolishly elected the wrong person in an open democratic vote and needed to have the proper leader installed for them. From “We are the terrorists too”:
Take this apart. Everywhere there is crisis, violence and suffering, Washington has been active. Syria, Libya, Egypt, Iraq: All these fall into this category. Where the Obama administration and its covey of neoliberal evangelists in the State Department have allowed the events set in motion during the Arab Spring to take their course, there is at least some semblance of calm, if not better. Let Tunisia, now developing as a secular democracy, stand as the control in this experiment.
And let Egypt stand as the most grotesque, boldest-faced display of Washington’s anti-democratic intent to be found anywhere in the region. Here the lines are most clearly drawn. Here the generals within and the meddlers without got the subversion work done in front of our eyes. And here neither Secretary of State Kerry nor National Security Adviser Susan Rice nor President Obama has anything to say as Egyptians surrender all hope of a return to elected government in exchange for a reign of terror worse than those of the dictators who provoked the Tahrir Square protests.
A reign of terror. One grows heartily sick of this term in all its forms — terrorists, terrorism and so on. All movements opposed to Western interventions in the Middle East are terrorist. The Muslim Brotherhood, explicitly opposed to terror and violence and with a long record attesting to this, is terrorist. The dissident populations of eastern Ukraine are terrorists, for that matter. The word is deployed now merely to deprive those so named of any dimensionality or purpose that requires understanding. It cancels all historical perspective and altogether any recognition of causality. As a standing rule I never use it.
But I do in the case of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s Egypt, advisedly. This guy may sit in the presidential palace, but if Egypt since he overthrew Mohammad Morsi in July 2013 is not a horror house of terror, we better call in the lexicographers. There is simply no other way to describe Egypt as he rules it. … Mass murders in public places, middle-of-the-night arrests, show trials, the en masse sentencing of hundreds of innocent people, the blanket muzzling of the press, the coercion of an entire society into a silence Stalin could not improve upon — the list is long.
Yes, once again, in Egypt as elsewhere, the chickens have come home, the blowback has arrived, and it’s time to pay the piper: