The LA Times ran an article (Feb. 1st) about the role of boys & young men in the Egyptian revolution. It was a disrespectful & disingenuous article describing them as “boys with runny noses,” “angry young men & grade school dropouts without jobs, prospects or political ideologies,” “persistent as horseflies, an endless buzz at the edge of protest,” & “a disparate collection of lost boys & anarchists, including jobless waiters & laborers, university students, hard-core soccer fans known as Ultras, looters & thugs.”
The article might have been useful if it had described why Egypt is producing such large numbers of disgruntled young people. Could it be the nearly 22% unemployment rate among youth? Or that 7% of children between 7 & 14-years-old are forced to work? Or that nearly one-half of Egyptians live under the poverty line which the World Bank sets at $2 a day? ? In response to the LA Times, we can only ask: who the hell else makes revolutions!?
The article tried to make a connection between the legions of young unemployed workers & the anarchist Black Bloc which recently emerged in public protests. Like the Black Bloc elsewhere, Egyptian anarchists wear black masks & employ Molotov cocktails, firebombings, property damage & vandalism as political weapons for bringing down the state. (In a few hundred years of existence, they haven’t been able to describe what they’ll do once the state comes down.) Anarchism is a pessimistic & elitist doctrine which has no trust in a massive, democratic movement & tries to substitute itself with acts of terrorism. Because anarchism resorts to violence, it is riddled with police agents & used by the state to justify repression against the mass movement. Nobody who recognizes the military power of modern states & the arsenal they have at their disposal or who understands the complexities of social transformation has a soft spot for the methods of anarchism.
It’s not clear who the Black Bloc in Egypt is comprised of since they are new on the scene but if youth are attracted to them in large numbers (& it is not certain they are) it is because the coalition of opposition parties in the National Salvation Front is led by disreputable relics of the Mubarak regime like Amr Moussa & opportunists like Mohamed ElBaradei. Such is the crisis of political leadership in Egypt.
The US & Europe are alarmed at Egypt's political crisis & its deep financial problems. The Morsi regime is caught between the stock market & the revolution. In December, the IMF was negotiating a nearly $5 billion loan package entailing draconian austerity policies as in Greece, Spain, Portugal, & elsewhere. The Morsi regime is now trying to wrangle $3.2 billion out of the IMF. When Morsi went to Germany last week, he hoped Merkel would forgive Egypt’s debt of $324 million & proceed with millions of dollars in development projects in Egypt. He came back empty handed with a lecture by Merkel on curbing his arrant anti-Semitism. Until they see which way the Egyptian revolution is going, the IMF & European Union will be parceling out loans quite cautiously. That’s why US military aid is so vital to maintaining the Morsi regime which is indistinguishable from the Mubarak regime.
The media didn’t report much about the tens of thousands of people who protested all over Egypt last Friday to again massively assert the demands of the Egyptian revolution. The LA Times article showed a photo of a Friday protest in Port Said that appeared to be only male. This photo on the same day is from Tahrir Square, Cairo clearly showing the disgruntlement with the regime includes both genders.
We stand in full solidarity with the disgruntled young men & women of Egypt. They remain a beacon of resistance to tyranny around the world. End all US aid to Egypt!
(Photo by Mohamed Omar)
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