Mubarak the madman? -- "I'm ready for my close up, Mr. DeMille!"
by Justin Raimondo, February 11, 2011
"The much-anticipated speech by Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak, in which he was widely expected to step down, has had the opposite of its intended effect: instead of placating the protesters, it has enraged them. Mubarak had only gotten halfway through his speech when the crowd in Tahrir Square starting hooting and booing. They held up their shoes – a gesture that our President Bush should understand the meaning of – and the roar nearly drowned out the speech (I was listening live on Al Jazeera). What Mubarak has done is thrust his hand into the hornets’ nest – and now we can expect the hornets to fly out, angry beyond measure….
Listening to Al Jazeera’s live coverage, I heard commentator after commentator – Egyptians – all wondering if Mubarak had gone crazy. The general view among Egyptians seems to be that the dictator is living in a fantasy world, disconnected from what’s happening in the country, unaware that his time is over and so is his regime. This is madness of a peculiar sort – the kind inflicted on anyone vested with inhuman power, a kind of curse that goes with the “job” of dictator, or, indeed, any high office. The Greeks called it hubris – a pride so vast and unthinking that it offended the gods themselves. To the ancients, hubris was the worst of sins, a curse that always ended in the destruction of the sinner.
The lesson of Egypt is one that our global elites fail to learn at their peril, for they are cursed in the same way and for the same reason: hubris is their peculiar occupational hazard, and here in the West we are far from immune. Indeed, Washington, D.C. is particularly rife with this affliction, but I fear the infection is too advanced for even the strongest antibiotic to do much good."
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