A VERY GOOD PIECE
By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times
""The unity of China was more important than the people of Tiananmen Square."
"It's impossible for the youth to follow anyone else. If not Gaddafi, who else would they follow? Somebody with a beard?"
By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times
""The unity of China was more important than the people of Tiananmen Square."
"It's impossible for the youth to follow anyone else. If not Gaddafi, who else would they follow? Somebody with a beard?"
Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, February 22
Talk about The King's Speech; this was The African King of Kings' Speech. A furious, delirious, possessed, prophet-as-psychopath Muammar Gaddafi may have improvised the ultimate lunatic rant to send chills down the spines of the Libyan people and the whole world - delivered right from the family house bombed by the United States under president Ronald Reagan in 1986. His message: there will be blood.....
The blood on the regime's hands as well as the humbling courage of the Libyan people, are self-evident. The self-described "Liberated Eastern Region of Libya" - with the people in Benghazi, for instance, organizing themselves in civic committees - and great swathes of southern Libya have already fallen; the Gaddafi state does not apply anymore.....
Back to 1848
Talk about The King's Speech; this was The African King of Kings' Speech. A furious, delirious, possessed, prophet-as-psychopath Muammar Gaddafi may have improvised the ultimate lunatic rant to send chills down the spines of the Libyan people and the whole world - delivered right from the family house bombed by the United States under president Ronald Reagan in 1986. His message: there will be blood.....
The blood on the regime's hands as well as the humbling courage of the Libyan people, are self-evident. The self-described "Liberated Eastern Region of Libya" - with the people in Benghazi, for instance, organizing themselves in civic committees - and great swathes of southern Libya have already fallen; the Gaddafi state does not apply anymore.....
Back to 1848
Few may remember then-US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice's 2008 northern Africa tour, when she said that US-Libyan relations were entering "a new era of cooperation". Libya left rehab only in 2003, when Gaddafi agreed to abandon his nuclear program and open up to salivating foreign investors in oil and gas; then in 2006 Gaddafi merrily embraced free market and geared up for the usual International Monetary Fund/World Bank "structural adjustment" prescription pills......
Blame it on that self-immolation in Tunisia. The great 2011 Arab revolt is very much like 1848 - the people's spring that in a few months took Europe by storm and turned the political system of the Congress of Vienna upside down. The problem is the "domino" revolutions of the time, from the Sicily of the Bourbons to the Paris of Louis Philippe, failed. But still - what a pleasure today to reread Karl Marx as a journalist and editor of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, expanding on revolution and counter-revolution. His ultra-sharp analyses still apply.
Would Marx be facebooking and tweeting today he would see Arabs, everywhere, fighting for their dignity and self-expression. He would see how the young protester in Tahrir Square in Cairo, the Shi'ite lawyer in the Pearl roundabout in Bahrain or the anti-Gaddafi teacher fighting for his life in Benghazi have erased the caricature of the bearded terrorist - which now only exists in Gaddafi's imagination (and the nightmares of US neo-conservatives).
No religious fanaticism; no single-minded nationalism. Just like the Europeans in 1848, the Europeans in the 1940s fighting fascism, the Europeans of 1989 getting rid of the Berlin Wall. And Marx would probably predict how those poor conscripts in Libya - just like in Egypt - would rather join their compatriots than smash them with a Tiananmen option. "
Blame it on that self-immolation in Tunisia. The great 2011 Arab revolt is very much like 1848 - the people's spring that in a few months took Europe by storm and turned the political system of the Congress of Vienna upside down. The problem is the "domino" revolutions of the time, from the Sicily of the Bourbons to the Paris of Louis Philippe, failed. But still - what a pleasure today to reread Karl Marx as a journalist and editor of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, expanding on revolution and counter-revolution. His ultra-sharp analyses still apply.
Would Marx be facebooking and tweeting today he would see Arabs, everywhere, fighting for their dignity and self-expression. He would see how the young protester in Tahrir Square in Cairo, the Shi'ite lawyer in the Pearl roundabout in Bahrain or the anti-Gaddafi teacher fighting for his life in Benghazi have erased the caricature of the bearded terrorist - which now only exists in Gaddafi's imagination (and the nightmares of US neo-conservatives).
No religious fanaticism; no single-minded nationalism. Just like the Europeans in 1848, the Europeans in the 1940s fighting fascism, the Europeans of 1989 getting rid of the Berlin Wall. And Marx would probably predict how those poor conscripts in Libya - just like in Egypt - would rather join their compatriots than smash them with a Tiananmen option. "
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