Skip to main content

Home/ authoritarianism in MENA/ Group items tagged mobs

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Ed Webb

Egypt's Unfulfilled Revolution and Its Many Demons : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...the-demons-in-egypt.html

Egypt military opinion protests revolution

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • Depending on one’s perspective, Egypt is either in a political limbo or an extended purgatory, with the devils long contained in its national Pandora’s box having been loosened from their chains. People are murdered like sheep now, obscurely and without fanfare, in the country’s protests, and women are gang-raped viciously by crowds of men who seek to mete out their darkest desires, violently, in public. It is as if everything in Egypt must now be performed by the mob, for the mob, in full view of everyone.
  • —it has been, throughout, the military that has allowed it all to happen
  • to the generals, at least, it is a country in the process of being rescued from a descent into hell by the all-seeing, all-wise, protective men in uniform
  • Ed Webb on 06 Jul 13
     
    Very dark. Probably too dark.
Ed Webb

Was Boris Johnson's great grandfather an Ottoman traitor or a hero? - 0 views

www.al-monitor.com/...johnson-great-grandfather.html

Turkey UK Britain Ottomans Ottoman Ataturk politics history

shared by Ed Webb on 01 Aug 19 - Cached
  • Given the enthusiasm of the Kalfat villagers and the headlines in some of Turkey's major newspapers — like those proclaiming “Welcome Cousin Boris” and the “Grandson of the Ottomans” — one might think that Johnson’s ancestors were respected and beloved figures in Turkey, but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, Johnson's great-grandfather Ali Kemal was the last Ottoman minister of the interior, a well-known journalist and one of the most-hated figures in the nationalist narrative of the Turkish Republic.
  • While the mainstream papers went with the treason angle, some social media users offered more nuanced opinions of Ali Kemal. Garo Paylan, an Armenian member of the Turkish parliament, is among those who spoke up in his defense. “Ali Kemal was a conscientious politician,” Paylan tweeted. “He demanded accountability for the big crimes [committed during the Ottoman Empire] such as the Armenian genocide. Had he succeeded, the [culture of] genocide, lynching and the putsch might have been rooted out of the state. The crime remained unpunished. It is repeated today. May Ali Kemal Bey’s soul rest in peace.” Not surprisingly, Paylan’s characterization drew angry responses from nationalist organizations, including the Youth Union of Turkey. Condemning Paylan’s message, the group declared that it will continue to fight against imperialists and their collaborators, who need not be named given the context 
  • Ali Kemal, who held staunchly liberal views, supporting diminishing the state's control in many areas, was a strong ally of Sultan Abdulhamid, the last sultan to exert any real control over the Ottoman domain. Like the sultan, Ali Kemal had disagreed with and mistrusted the revolutionary Young Turks. Ali Kemal publicly expressed strong criticism of the movement for the atrocities against the Armenians and generally during the War of Independence (1919-23). He also opposed Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and his war against the European forces that invaded and then occupied the Ottoman Empire at the conclusion of World War I.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Ali Kemal fled into exile in 1909 in London and was in favor of a British protectorate over Ottoman lands, believing that a war for independence between the Turks and the imperial powers would further provoke the Great Powers and create a dark future for the Turks. Apparently he was badly misguided in this stance against Ataturk, who would ultimately lead Turkey to independence and expel foreign forces from Anatolia.
  • How Ali Kemal's life came to an end is horrific. While he was being transferred to Ankara to be tried by an Independence Tribunal, he was seized from a train and lynched by a mob organized by Gen. Nurettin Pasha, commander of the First Army. It is said that he was lynched because of his opposition to the independence war. It is also a well-known fact that during the attack, the mob called him Artin Kemal, Artin being a popular Armenian name.
  • It is said that prominent figures of the newly established Turkish Republic, among them Ismet Inonu and Ataturk, abhorred Nurettin Pasha for what he did. He was never, however, punished for that deed or the other atrocities in which he was allegedly involved as he escaped arrest. Nurettin Pasha also organized the lynching of Chrysostomos Kalafatis, the metropolit of Smyrana, today's Izmir.
  • on the one hand we need to give him credit for his being in favor of putting perpetrators of the Armenian genocide and war crimes on trial, but on the other hand we need to criticize him for his rigid opposition to the War of Independence and his unconditional support of the British back then
Ed Webb

Our Digitally Undying Memories - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

chronicle.com/...63747

memory history review Chronicle internet forgetting

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Feb 10 - Cached
  • as Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argues convincingly in his book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton University Press, 2009), the costs of such powerful collective memory are often higher than we assume.
  • "Total recall" renders context, time, and distance irrelevant. Something that happened 40 years ago—whether youthful or scholarly indiscretion—still matters and can come back to harm us as if it had happened yesterday.
  • an important "third wave" of work about the digital environment. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, we saw books like Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital (Knopf, 1995) and Howard Rhein-gold's The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Addison-Wesley, 1993) and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Perseus, 2002), which idealistically described the transformative powers of digital networks. Then we saw shallow blowback, exemplified by Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason (Pantheon, 2008).
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • For most of human history, forgetting was the default and remembering the challenge.
  • Chants, songs, monasteries, books, libraries, and even universities were established primarily to overcome our propensity to forget over time. The physical and economic limitations of all of those technologies and institutions served us well. Each acted not just as memory aids but also as filters or editors. They helped us remember much by helping us discard even more.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 06 Feb 10
       
      Excellent point, well made.
  • Our use of the proliferating data and rudimentary filters in our lives renders us incapable of judging, discriminating, or engaging in deductive reasoning. And inductive reasoning, which one could argue is entering a golden age with the rise of huge databases and the processing power needed to detect patterns and anomalies, is beyond the reach of lay users of the grand collective database called the Internet.
  • Even 10 years ago, we did not consider that words written for a tiny audience could reach beyond, perhaps to someone unforgiving, uninitiated in a community, or just plain unkind.
  • Remembering to forget, as Elvis argued, is also essential to getting over heartbreak. And, as Jorge Luis Borges wrote in his 1942 (yep, I Googled it to find the date) story "Funes el memorioso," it is just as important to the act of thinking. Funes, the young man in the story afflicted with an inability to forget anything, can't make sense of it. He can't think abstractly. He can't judge facts by relative weight or seriousness. He is lost in the details. Painfully, Funes cannot rest.
  • Just because we have the vessels, we fill them.
  • the default habits of our species: to record, retain, and release as much information as possible
  • Perhaps we just have to learn to manage wisely how we digest, discuss, and publicly assess the huge archive we are building. We must engender cultural habits that ensure perspective, calm deliberation, and wisdom. That's hard work.
  • we choose the nature of technologies. They don't choose us. We just happen to choose unwisely with some frequency
  • surveillance as the chief function of electronic government
  • critical information studies
  • Siva Vaidhyanathan is an associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia. His next book, The Googlization of Everything, is forthcoming from the University of California Press.
  • Nietzsche's _On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life_
  • Google compresses, if not eliminates, temporal context. This is likely only to exacerbate the existing problem in politics of taking one's statements out of context. A politician whose views on a subject have evolved quite logically over decades in light of changing knowledge and/or circumstances is held up in attack ads as a flip-flopper because consecutive Google entries have him/her saying two opposite things about the same subject -- and never mind that between the two statements, the Berlin Wall may have fallen or the economy crashed harder than at any other time since 1929.
Ed Webb

Expanding ACLED's Bahrain Data: 2016-2020 | ACLED - 0 views

acleddata.com/...-acleds-bahrain-data-2016-2020

Bahrain protests data mapping demonstrations authoritarianism

shared by Ed Webb on 17 Mar 20 - Cached
  • At the height of the Arab Spring in February 2011, a mass protest movement took to the streets in Bahrain calling for democratic reforms, human rights protections, and an end to corruption. Nine years ago this month, the Bahraini government, backed by a contingent of Saudi and Emirati security forces, declared a state of emergency and launched a violent crackdown, destroying the site of the main protest encampment and the symbol of the movement at Manama’s Pearl Roundabout (The Guardian, 18 March 2011). The authorities killed dozens of protesters and arrested hundreds of activists, critics, and religious leaders, dissolving opposition political groups and closing all independent media outlets
  • Nearly a decade later, new data confirm that despite severe restrictions on free press, expression, and assembly (Human Rights Watch, 14 January 2020), hundreds of protests and riots continue across the country every year
  • Peaceful protests account for the vast majority of the newly added events, with over 4,400 recorded since 2016. More than 140 of these events faced some form of intervention, such as police firing teargas or detaining activists. Nearly 2,600 new events are riots, with more than 1,800 violent demonstration events and over 700 cases of mob violence
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Demonstration events account for 99% of all disorder in the country, with the remaining 1% consisting of violence against civilians, predominantly perpetrated by state forces; rare clashes between the authorities and anti-government militia groups, such as Saraya Al Ashtar; and sporadic bomb attacks. More than 20 fatalities are reported between 2016 and early 2020
  • The most active group involved in demonstrations is the February 14 Coalition, a decentralized organization primarily consisting of youth activists. Named for the start date of Bahrain’s 2011 uprising,3 the Coalition is not affiliated with any formal political groups and contains both Shiite and Sunni members
  • Many demonstrations are also led by the Shiite community at large
  • Despite accounting for a majority, the Shiite community is marginalized and often faces discrimination by the government, which is dominated by the Sunni royal family
  • The data show spikes in demonstration activity around executions and extrajudicial killings committed by the government
Ed Webb

Ten Theses on Revolutions by Mohammed A. Bamyeh - 0 views

endnotes.org.uk/...ten-theses-on-revolutions

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • The move away from exploring the source and promise of such novelty, and back into the more ordinary, more familiar psychology of “realism,” encourages thinking of the revolutionary act as no more than means to ends.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 06 Jun 23
       
      Very important distinction: are revolutionary moments simply means to an end, or are they more broadly generative?
  • To their participants, a revolutionary gathering exceeds any single demand: it addresses a felt need for a total social renewal. The mission then seems greater than simply replacing one ruler by another. At that moment, the ordinary person is in the revolution precisely because that is where she is not being ruled. There, she finally discovers what seems like an inborn, organic capacity to act as a sovereign agent: without instructions, without authority, even without a guiding tradition.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 06 Jun 23
       
      This is an optimistic, individual-level/grass-roots take on the legal-political "state of exception"
  • This total spiritual condition suggests to everyone involved that the revolution is greater than any particularism. The consciousness of totality makes its appearance as a sudden revelation, comparable to prophetic vision: the moment when a hitherto unseen truth illuminates the whole existence
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • This explosive spirituality resides in the necessity of doing what must be done, with only imagination, rather than plan
  • another major question rears its divisive head: have we really overthrown the regime? To answer this, we realize that in our temporary unity, we avoided this question too: what was the regime? That we need now to know, because the answer will help us have some plan as to where to go from here, to determine how much of “the regime” is gone and how much still needs to be uprooted so as to arrive at the “goals of the revolution.” For some revolutionaries, the regime was simply the head of the regime. For others, it was an entire corrupt class surrounding it and benefiting from it. For others still, the regime is everyday life—the rotten head has infected all of society, and caused all society, its mores and social relations, to become equally rotten. For those, that society, too, needs to be overthrown. The old society, all of it, was “the regime.”
  • In an unjust world, there are always alternatives to revolt: the idea of fate; personal hedonism; intellectual immersions; criminality; clannish solidarity; the morality of fortitude; mind altering substances; soothing rituals; suicide; nihilism; graduate study. A revolution, therefore, is always a choice among other choices.
  • The revolutionary decision therefore is a choice to disregard reality and realism. It is a choice to act as an agent, to act freely and to feel freedom not as a theoretical principle, but as a new force that is itself creating this new person doing what a day before the revolution seemed to be outside of all realism. Revolutions, therefore, are primarily decisions against realism, and as such they create the free person who undertakes them and, in the process, empirically verifies a principle that previously had lacked credibility: that a different world is possible.
  • A common strategy of betrayal takes the form of the monopoly of memory. Monopoly of memory means that the revolution, along with its memory or heritage, has become monopolized by one faction against all others. In this case, those who see this betrayal will say that the “goals of the revolution” have been abandoned, or that the revolution has strayed from its path. But revolutions may have as many goals as they have revolutionaries, and consequently as many imagined pathways. Here, “betrayal” will be seen in someone’s choice to highlight one goal and disregard another, in someone’s feeling that a preferred path was not taken, even though it could have been, or that the revolution has stopped short, when it could have gone further.
  • the greatest enemy of all revolutions is forgetfulness, because it attacks the core of the revolutionary experience: how it defied odds, reality, rationality, and all that had seemed ordinary, solid and eternal
  • the revolutionary pattern of each era corresponds to where power has become porous then
  • The Arab uprisings of the current era, namely those of 2011 and 2019 (but not the civil wars that followed), reveal shared patterns: they all start out first in marginal, neglected areas, from which they migrate into the well-fortified center. They rely on spontaneity as their art of moving, not on organization, structure, or even a plan. They are suspicious of vanguardism, and seem to intuitively reject any strong idea of leadership. They prefer loose coordinating structures, and “coordinators” emerge as a new revolutionary species, indicating that revolutions now need sharing of information more than centralized guidance. They operate largely at a distance from political parties, and in fact give rise to no party that can claim to represent or embody the revolution. The agent of the revolution and the maker of history is the ordinary person, not the savior leader.
  • those revolutions spoke in the name of a vague and large entity called “the people,” not of any sub-group, class, tribe, sect, or even the “meek of the earth.” That generality expressed their character as a meeting place of all grievances.
  • The regime did not know any game other than that of the established system, and thought of the revolution as a passing noise that will dissipate in due time. The main mode of governing had become autocratic deafness, across the entire region.
  • the counter-revolution already knows that repression alone would be unable to save it from revolution. Thus it needs to fortify itself against the nascent revolutionary culture by promoting counter-revolutionary culture, aimed at the spirit of the revolution. For example: in place of the ordinary person, counter-revolutionary culture elevates the savior leader as the only worthy maker of history; in place of the belief that had emerged in the revolutionary moment of “the people” as an enlightened and noble body, counter-revolution fosters an image of peoplehood as a savage, illiterate mob, to be feared and policed, rather than provided with freedom and entrusted with capacity.
  • Culture and ideas, therefore, become central battlegrounds in the age of counter-revolution
  • Just as in the Arab case, where the revolutionary wave met counter-revolution, so did the global wave meet a global counter-wave. Both took place across dispersed geographies, indicating that like the revolutionary wave, the counter-revolutionary wave was inspired by a spreading feeling of threat or creeping disorder. The rise of an inter-linked right-wing populism globally after 2011 may indeed be an expression of a learning process of reaction, indicating the seriousness with which the revolutionary, or at least transformative, challenge was taken. And just as in the Arab case, the global counter-revolution learned from its encounter with revolution, real or imagined, that the old order must be defended in more authoritarian ways in the realm of policing and law, and more vigorously in the realm of ideas and culture.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 06 Jun 23
       
      The counter-revolution is global
  • Ordinarily, epistemological imperialism tends to be a practice of an established mighty authority that, by virtue of its longevity or scope of its power, has become too confident of itself. But epistemological imperialism may also be a practice of opposition that, from long life under a certain power, could only think of revolution as an expression of a right to the same power.
  • The universal is always imperialistic when the only knowledge sought through it is confirmatory rather than transformative knowledge.
  • Discovery, therefore, has from the point of view of epistemological imperialism only quantitative rather than qualitative promise: it adds more of what I already know, not more to what I know.
  • there was a revolutionary person residing deep inside the conformist, traditional person one had seen earlier. If we do not know how to see that hidden person, we will not see the revolution.
1 - 6 of 6
Showing 20▼ items per page