Democracy Now!While Sen. John McCain said that Mubarak must step down on Wednesday, he now is expressing his fear of the pro-democracy movement in Egypt and the potential that it may spread throughout the region. In an interview with Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren, McCain actually equated the nonviolent movements against authoritarian regimes in the region
Mohammed Ghobari and Khaled Abdullah, Reuters, February 3, 2011Tens of thousands of Yemenis squared off in peaceful protests for and against the government on Thursday during an opposition-led "Day of Rage," a day after President Ali Abdullah Saleh ...
By Michael Nagler When is a whistleblower not a whistleblower? When he’s a scapegoat. Pfc. Bradley Manning is an unfortunate – and a challenging – case in point, and to understand why we need to see it in context. The military and large corporations — two institutions that play defining roles in our industrial civilization — tend
We’ve written a lot on this blog about the importance of appearance at protests and the potential negative consequences of wearing body armor—namely that it is more likely to inspire violence and draw sympathy away from the cause. But the pictures of makeshift helmets worn by Egyptian protesters that surfaced in a recent Daily Mail
Tens of thousands have been demonstrating in Tahrir Square, Cairo, in the “day of departure” today, with few reports of violence. Hosni Mubarak, despite mounting international pressure, has still refused to step down. He said in an ABC News interview that he’s “fed up,” that “if I resign today there will be chaos,” and that
What lessons are we beginning to consider as worth learning from the uprising in Tunisia that has prompted such change from the grassroots to the rulers and back again in the Arab world? I doubt we've actually 'learned' much yet, except the advisabilit...
In Egypt today, violent clashes between the pro-Mubarak thugs and the pro-democracy protesters continued throughout the day. According to Al Jazeera’s online producer in Cairo: “The battle for downtown Cairo on Thursday has taken on an almost medieval quality, with protesters erecting makeshift barricades and building homemade catapults to launch rocks at each other. “Close-range
Just last week I found myself falling asleep to a seemingly unending White House press conference about Egypt aired in its entirety by CNN. When I came to and switched over to the live feed on Al Jazeera’s website, I saw that the most-watched news channel on the Internet didn’t bypass its amazing coverage for
In his essay Voluntarism and Social Masses, Antonio Gramsci argues that “the actions and organizations of ‘volunteers’ must be distinguished from the actions and organisations of homogeneous social blocs, and judged by different criteria.” He d...
I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of hegemony, and reading Antonio Gramsci. I’ll be posting a few reflections as I go. This is the landing page for this series. You can bookmark it and check back for new posts, which I’ll be linking ...
In the US, our reality shows judge contestants on the skills that we apparently expect our celebrities to have: a rather inhuman body, ruthless guile, some dance moves, and a decent singing voice. When Egypt picks its “Idol,” though, the criterion is poetry. Elliott Cola—who taught Arabic literature when I was at Brown, and is
One just can’t wake up each morning these days without finding something crying out for a Waging Nonviolence post. Today, with a bit of a lull after the fighting in Cairo yesterday, and with peaceful protests and counter-protests in Yemen, some notice is being paid to a fifth country (Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan…), about which Twitter has
“Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together. … Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance.” — Hannah Arendt Hosni Mubarak has just used the last tool
I wrote yesterday that, given the situation he’s in, Obama’s utterances on Egypt have struck a predictable balance between support for reform and caution with a longtime US ally in a precarious situation. The Egyptian military remains a strong and uncertain presence on the streets, and Congress controls the foreign aid that has kept Mubarak’s
A question worth exploring is how the Egyptian pro-democracy protesters can nonviolently deal with agents provocateurs – which is what the pro-Mubarak “demonstrators” appear to be. The use of agents provocateurs is a very common tactic employed by governments to try to discredit their nonviolent opposition and justify state repression. The protesters in Cairo today
In Egypt earlier today, pro-Mubarak crowds clashed with the protesters who have been peacefully calling for the president to step down in Tahrir Square in central Cairo. Several hundred have been injured and at least one person was reportedly killed. Now it is evening in Egypt and the live footage shows a calmer scene than
