We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Egypt Under Empire, Part 2: The “Threat” of Arab Nationalism [with a link to Part 3]

Click here to access article by Andrew Gavin Marshall from The Hampton Institute. (Note: I do not always re-post all parts of any series, only those which are particularly relevant to the focus of my blog. However, I've found that anything that Marshall writes about is very useful in understanding the social-economic forces that shape our world today.)

By examining many independent historical resources including declassified US government documents, this researcher provides us with the intellectual tools to understand the hegemonic thinking of US Empire directors during the post-war launching of their global empire project. Today we don't have access to current government documents because they are classified, however we can extrapolate from documents from this earlier period what informs the thinking of today's Empire directors as they continue their hegemonic policies to secure their ruling class's access to resources, cheap labor, and markets.
This is no less true today than it was when Nasser was in power. Perhaps the most important quote regarding the spread of Arab Nationalism in the 1950s - from the perspective of American imperial strategists - was when the NSC declared in 1958 that the United States should "seek to guide the revolutionary and nationalistic pressures throughout the area into orderly channels which will not be antagonistic to the West and which will contribute to solving the internal social, political and economic problems of the area." Indeed, one could imagine such a statement appearing almost verbatim in the internal documents of the Obama administration related to Egypt's ongoing revolution.
More specifically the series provides an understanding of post-war Egyptian history in relation to the Empire that has lead to 2011's massive popular resistance. It is a story where we see the effects of the policies formulated by behind-the-scenes Empire directors to "guide" the political affairs of Egypt to serve Empire interests. Read Part 3 here.