A Global Fallacy and the Military Intervention in Egypt

More than 10 million people in Egypt mobilized against a clumsy autocrat. Yet, their mobilization ultimately led to a military-judiciary seizure of power, with the support of centrist politicians and clerics. Call this what you like: coup d’état, elegant coup, or people’s power. None of these labels change the nature of the intervention and its aftermath: popularly supported military rule, by more or less the same military-police-judicial-business elements who were in power during Mubarak’s reign and who had struck a (shaky and incomplete) coalition deal with the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Tunisian and Egyptian revolts of the recent years sparked the imagination of many activists around the globe as “leaderless revolution”s. Yet, the strange amalgam of revolution, restoration, coup, democratization, and authoritarianism that persisted throughout the Egyptian process hints that different lessons need to be drawn from the Egyptian situation.

From a people’s campaign to the reassertion of elite rule

Tamarod, an unprecedented people’s campaign, collected millions of signatures and called for the downfall of president Morsi. Huge crowds gathered all around Egypt on June 30, 2013 in order to enforce the campaign’s call. According to estimates, around 15 million people took to the streets, making this the biggest rebellion in Egyptian history.

Ironically, the main mood among the protesters seemed to be pro-military. There were even groups that openly called for a military intervention. Among the protesters were not only pro-Mubarak civilians, but also thugs and Mubarak era security personnel who came to the square in their uniforms. Actually, during the month of June, it had become increasingly clear that the military intended to use the rebellion as an opportunity to intervene (and some politicians, who had previously made fierce statements against military rule, now welcomed the possibility in roundabout ways).

There were also other hegemonic forces bent on capitalizing on the protests and reinforcing their domination. For instance, Gulf intellectuals rejoiced in the troubles of the Brotherhood. They wanted a real Erdoğan as Egypt’s leader, not a “Taiwanese” version. They chose to ignore that their criticisms of Morsi (power-grabbing, centralization, authoritarianism, etc.) applied equally to their favorite Muslim leader. Regional hegemons thus suggested that the only way out of the Egyptian crisis could be another established path, rather than a truly revolutionary one.

There were calls for a general strike during the protests of June 30, alongside the louder calls for military involvement. In fact, the national situation that set the scene for Tamarod had a class dimension, though this was not articulated firmly as a part of its platform. Moreover, some groups in Tahrir (April 6, Strong Egypt Party, Revolutionary Socialists) openly protested against the military, not just the Brotherhood.
None of this, however, culminated in a roadmap that delineated the way out of the Brotherhood-military coalition (leaving the military and its new allies as the only actors capable of dictating the famous roadmap).

The uprising’s immediate result was the resignation of six ministers. Had a revolutionary political will crystallized in Egypt during the last two and a half years, it could have capitalized on this opening and declared an early victory; that is, it would have intervened before the Kornilovs of Egypt transformed it into their own victory.

When the military intervened, a few anti-coup speeches and slogans were drowned by the overall pro-military atmosphere in Tahrir. The unfounded optimism that anti-militarist forces would remain in the square until the military left did not change the main dynamics. Nobody mobilized Tahrir to fight their erstwhile torturers. Millions came back only in order to prevent the square from the Brothers.

Ultimately, July 2013 witnessed not only the removal of an unpopular president, but the making of a full-fledged dictatorial regime: A hasty crackdown rounded up hundreds of MB and non-MB Islamists. Many television channels were closed down. And most important of all, the military appointed an old regime judiciary figure to replace the president. The massacres that followed were the necessary ingredients that accompanied any military takeover.

Misinterpretations

Most of the initial responses to the military intervention missed the crucial point: Under the Brotherhood-military coalition, Egypt was quickly moving from popularly supported authoritarian rule to popularly supported totalitarian rule; Tahrir activists had the radicalism and the will to slow down this transformation, but did not have the tools to stop it without the military’s pernicious “aid.” Procedure-focused liberal critics of the military intervention completely ignored that under certain conditions, an elected president can help build a totalitarian regime that will render all future elections simple plebiscites. The street needed to act to defend the Egyptian revolution and perhaps even to recall the president. Liberal accounts, with their pronounced fear of the mob, ruled out not only such risky moves, but all other forms of participatory democracy.

As dangerous were the (perhaps well-intentioned) accounts that listed the abuses of the Brotherhood-military regime, but stopped short of discussing the calamities a non-Brotherhood military regime could produce. Those who called the military coup a “second revolution” quickly pointed out all the autocratic moves of the Muslim Brotherhood regime. But they did not explain in what sense the regime that would replace it had the potential of becoming a democracy. (A broader circle of pro-Tamarod intellectuals focused on the illegitimate moves of the toppled president, without going into whether and how these legitimized the moves of the military and judiciary after he was deposed).

The assertion, frequently seen in both English and Arabic, that “all the factors that render January 25 a revolution also legitimize calling June 30 the second revolution” ignored one blatant fact (along many others): 2013 is not 2011. In other words, two years have passed that have led to different social and political possibilities. During these two years, the priority could have been organizing popular power, alternative institutions, and revolutionary leadership in order to prevent (or at least slow down) the increasing authoritarianism of elected powerholders, rather than toppling them to open the way for the old enemies of the revolution.

Some commentators still insist that neither the military nor the National Salvation Front (the coalition of anti-Brotherhood centrist politicians) represents the masses in Tahrir, whose real demand is democracy and early elections. This disclaimer on behalf of the apparently pro-military millions does not alter one of the rules of thumb of politics: Those who cannot represent themselves will be represented.

The fruits of the ideology-less “revolution”

This old statement regarding the French peasantry warns us against the beautification of non-organized masses, a romanticization now in high fashion. Multiple anti-representation theses from rival ideological corners (anarchist, liberal, autonomist, postmodernist, etc.) all boil down to the following assumption: when there is no meta-discourse and no leadership, plurality will win. This might be true in the short-run. Indeed, in the case of Egypt, the anonymity of Tamarod’s spokespersons initially helped: the spokespersons (who are not leaders, it is held) could not be vilified, demonized as partisan populists. Moreover, thanks to uniting people only through their negative identity (being anti-Brotherhood), as well as to its innovative tactics, Tamarod mobilized people of all kinds. Still, the mobilized people fell prey to the only existing option: the old regime!

When the revolutionaries do not produce ideology, demands and leaders, this does not mean that the revolt will have no ideology, demands and leaders. In fact, Tamarod’s spontaneous ideology turned out to be militarist nationalism, its demand a postmodern coup, its leader the feloul (remnants of the old regime). This is the danger that awaits any allegedly leaderless revolt: Appropriation by the main institutional alternatives of the institutions they are fighting against.

It is time to globalize the lessons from the global wave of 2011-2013. Let’s start with the US and Egypt. What we learn from this case is that when movements don’t have (or claim not to have) ideologies, agendas, demands and leaders, they can go in two directions: they can dissipate (as did Occupy), or serve the agendas of others.

We are living in interesting times. Unlike the depressing three decades that stretched from 1980 to 2010, “the people want the system to fall,” as the Arab slogan goes. And the system is very likely to fall, not just in Egypt but in many other places throughout the world (if we keep in mind how reactionary and reform-averse the current leaders and elites, all the way from the White House to the colonies, are: they simply do not want, or are incapable of imagining, New Deal-type frameworks, which could in fact absorb the revolt).

Yet, it is not sufficient for the system to fall. What will replace it? We have been avoiding an answer (for meta-narratives are allegedly dead; well, all meta-narratives but liberalism). We now have to wake up and realize that if we do not develop solid alternatives (and organizations and institutions that will implement them), the downfall of the system will not mean the making of a better world.

Leaderful revolutions

What will happen now? The Egyptian military is very likely to perpetrate neoliberalism, a pro-American foreign policy, and its time-tested authoritarianism. Many sectors of the left already expect nothing from the military; they need no conversion on this issue. But just like the Muslim Brotherhood quickly alienated millions of people in one year of rule, the “new” military regime (which has refurbished itself through appropriating a revolutionary uprising) will show its real face to those who have supported the coup with naïvely democratic expectations. The democratically backed authoritarian “new” regime the military is about to build is very likely to pave the road for a third revolutionary uprising. The left (including not only socialists, anarchists, communists and feminists, but also the left-liberals and left-wing Islamists) needs to use the intervening time to organize the inescapable dissatisfaction with military rule. It has to construct solid alternatives to military democracy and conservative-totalitarian democracy. Based on its experiences throughout the last three years, it should build the leadership, the institutions, and organs of popular power that can implement its alternative vision. In short, this time around, the left needs to be ready.

***

The end of the leaderless revolution does not mean the end of the Egyptian revolutionary process. But it spells the end of the fallacy that the people can take power without an agenda, an alternative platform, an ideology, and leaders.

The leaderless revolution has turned out to be the wrong substitute for the status quo and revolutions that end up in a cult of the leader. What we need is perhaps leaderful rather than leaderless revolutions.

Cairo.

Egypt is at war. More accurately, Egypt is experiencing yet another battle in its ongoing class war. The battle is so fierce because the primary combatants are the two most powerful social forces in Egypt, both factions of the capitalist class – the military as the state capitalist class and the Ikhwan (the Muslim Brotherhood) representing the competitive capitalist class.

The military’s most recent explicit intervention into the political domain is assuredly not revolutionary. Nor is it cause for optimism. It is also not the ahistorical coup of liberal commentary. As a battle between two different kinds of property in Egypt, this is a furtherdescent along the retrogressive trajectory set by the events of 25 January 2011. Egyptian politics are increasingly counter-revolutionary.

This battle marks the beginning of the fourth phase of the so-called Egyptian “revolution.” It is the new low point. The first phase was 25 January 2011 to 6 February 2011. This exceedingly brief period was revolutionary as the proletariat threatened the military’s proprietorship of the Egyptian state. The second phase lasted from 6 February 2011 until 18 February 2011. During this period the radical potential of the proletariat was curtailed and the revolution reduced, to borrow Marx’s phrase, to the bourgeois scale – witness the discursive shift in demands from “Bread, Freedom and Social Justice” to “the people demand the fall of the regime.” The Ikhwan’s involvement reduced the revolution and, in turn, made it possible for the military to safely, and to its benefit, depose Mubarak. The third phase extended from 18 February until 1 July 2013. It was during this period that the material interests of the military and the Ikhwan colluded to further drive the proletariat from the political field. This, the fourth phase, was necessitated and made possible by the preceding phase. The collusion of the state and competitive capitalist classes was successful; so successful in fact, that the working class was immiserated and disempowered past even the point of 25 January 2011. The immiseration produced economic, and then political, grievances. The disempowerment meant the predominance of populist identities over class consciousness and cohesion. The state capitalist class seized on the grievances articulated from populist positions and protected its interests, at the expense of the interests of the competitive capitalist class, through blatant manipulation of nationalist ideology. Of course, all of this was interpenetrated with dominant interests in the global political economy.

Such a materialist reading of recent Egyptian politics gets away from superficial, asubstantive notions of “youth,” “deep state” and “Islamist” and offers a number of critical insights into the essence of the contemporary moment:

First, a contradiction lies at the heart of Ikhwan discourse, at the heart of all vulgar “analysis” of recent Egyptian politics in fact. The military’s actions in 2013 are the same as they were in 2011, and that is because they follow from the same motivation. Sisi’s supposed recognition of the legitimacy of the protestors’ demands and ultimatum to Morsi on 1 July 2013 was essentially identical to Tantawi’s recognition and ultimatum to Mubarak on 31 January 2011. In both instances, the military protected its vast material interests by sacrificing the class wielding political power. Either 25 January 2011 was a revolution, and now so too are these political machinations, or 25 January 2011 was a coup, and now so too is this. It is rhetorical drivel to contend that in 2011 the military helped execute a revolution, but now is committing a coup. It is the extension of this contradiction that produces such paradoxical realities as reactionary Islamists, and they are always reactionary, claiming to be revolutionary while supposedly progressive liberals desire a military coup.

Apologists rationalizing the military’s intervention on the grounds that this supposed revolution is a corrective for the last one have different problems. They clearly do not understand that militaries are reactionary, not revolutionary; and no national exceptionalism, real or imagined, changes that. State militaries never make revolutions. They only ever commit coups. The apologists also obviously fail to appreciate that when the “people” have to turn to the military to realize their politics, it is the military, and not the people, that is powerful. If the “people” truly had the power they claim and/or is ascribed to them, there would have been no need for military intervention.

Second, it was under the cover of the last two years of social peace and the contrived harmony of national interests that class warfare was waged against Egyptian working people. The military and the Ikhwancolluded in this struggle against the social force that originally birthed 25 January 2011. The battles in this phase were less fierce and ignored by the corporate collaborationist media because the contest was so one-sided – two factions of capital united against a dominated and increasingly policed and surveilled labour; because they were blunted by institutions – the Political Parties Law, drafted with the assistance of the Ikhwan, prohibited the formation of class-based parties and imposed prohibitive organizational and material hurdles on workers’ mobilization; and because the victors were clients of dominant power in the global order – ostensibly Qatari capital backing the Ikhwan and American capital backing the Egyptian military.

This exposes two additional contradictions. The Ikhwan is objecting to the military’s rifles dislodging its president when it was those same rifles that installed the Ikhwan as the junior partner in the governing coalition and allowed it to conduct elections and fashion its constitution. Now, it is only political that the Ikhwan tried to institutionalize its post-2011 political dominance. All social forces attempt to “lock in,” as it were, power relations at their moment of victory. But what did it expect?; that after using its rifles against one social force the military would mothball them and not use them again against another, even more powerful social force? In not demolishing the state, but instead agreeing to turn its apparatuses against other interests in society, the Ikhwan ensured that it could be disempowered by the very rifles by which it had been empowered. Those cheering in sheeplike fashion the military’s intervention would do well to remember this for next time.

At the moment the collusion between the different forms of property in Egypt is ended and they come to blows, working people are too weak to successfully contest it as a tripartite struggle. In state capital’s moment of relative weakness, if only due to its battle with another capitalist faction, labor is even weaker. The peace between the capitalist factions was broken precisely because the dominant class did not have to worry about another productive force successfully engaging it. The tragedy of this moment is that labor cannot exploit the irreconcilability of some capitalist interests. It shows just how much more work, particularly ideological labor, the working class has to do.

Third, power in the global order is permitting this counter-revolutionary intervention because the form of state the Ikhwan was constituting was not permissible to the order. This was not because of the group’s religious ideology. The global order tolerates theocracies, see Israel and Saudi Arabia. It was not because of the group’s economic policies. The Ikhwanis neoliberal; they, like Republicans and Tories, are marketfundamentalists. The Ikhwan is being marginalized because it was not reforming the state along neoliberal lines fast enough. Because of the group’s material interests in the Egyptian political economy it was slow to accept the conditionalities of the long-negotiated International Monetary Fund loan. Global capital wanted access to Egyptian labor and resources and when financial coercion in the form of a capital strike proved unsuccessful, military coercion was exerted by an American client mechanism in the country. In a move that evidences that the global order wants a different form of Egyptian state faster, Mohammed ElBaradei, a former functionary of that very order, is now the anointed representative of acceptable change.

This intervention, too, will have contradictory consequences. Most notably, the military’s retrogressive maneuver now will result in a further neoliberalization of the Egyptian political economy in the longer term which will, as it has done in the past, threaten the military’s material interests.

It is imperative to ignore American and European diplomatic hand-wringing and recognize that the Egyptian military’s counter-revolutionary measures are very much in keeping with the practices of dominant power in the regional and global order. Politicization and mobilization of the citizenry, of any kind, makes other reactionary states in the region nervous. This is precisely why the kings of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have already sent messages of congratulations to the military’s new president (anything lauded by Saudi Arabia is never revolutionary). The US, too, needed this disciplined. The last thing its ruling financial oligarchy wants is people getting it in their heads that a node in the global network of accumulation, particularly a subservient one, can be challenged or worse yet changed from within, regardless of its orientation.

Ultimately, the events of early July 2013 have moved Egyptians further away from revolutionary emancipation. As the counter-revolution of 25 January did, so too will these events erode the limited liberal concessions won through previous struggles within the Egyptian polity; just as the workers’ and farmers’ quotas were written out of the constitution and women’s rights laws overturned in the third phase, already in the fourth phase segments of the media are being quashed. Given extant material circumstances, specifically the political economy’s ongoing dependent location in the global structure of accumulation, little better history could have been made. It is profoundly unfortunate, because Egyptians deserve so much better, but today’s euphoria will be tomorrow’s regret.

Sean F. McMahon is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the American University in Cairo and editor, with Dan Tschirgi and Walid Kazziha, of Egypt’s Tahrir Revolution (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2013). He can be reached at: smcmahon@aucegypt.edu

 

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Gandhi once said that western civilization would be “a good idea.” So would black journalism. One white TV talking head said he was ready to arrest Glen Greenwald. Not to be outdone, MSNBC’s black talking heads too, are ready to personally scalp Wikileaks and put the cuffs on Edward Snowden. Public opinion, which favored Snowden early, has to be pushed in the administration’s direction. A dirty job, but somebody’s gotta do it.

The second amendment of the US Constitution guarantees “freedom of the press,” not so that government can tell us what to believe, but so that citizens can publicly receive and transmit to each other news and information about what the powerful are doing, and perhaps what they ought to do about it. Journalism is the only profession with its own constitutional amendment. But just as wealthy corporations and individuals have captured regulatory agencies, whole state legislatures, governors’ mansions, the courts, the White House and Congress, they own the media too, and what passes for journalism.

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What passes for “journalism” these days is reporters and talking TV heads who uncritically transmit the sayings of anonymous corporate, military and government officials as news, while competing with each other to discourage, defame and denounce real reporters and their sources. Thanks to the elite “diversity” of the Obama Era black America, once the stronghold of anti-authoritarian suspicion, is bombarded with attractive brown faces in elite places, faces who try to leverage the cultural and moral authority of African America to the soulless and bankrupt business of empire.

Two of the biggest names in the corporate stable nowadays are Joy-Ann Reid and Melissa Harris-Perry. Both are part of the Comcast-MSNBC plantation, and are earning their pay this month howling for the scalps of real journalists and their sources.

MSNBC talking head Joy-Ann Reid played the part of prosecutor, not reporter in a June 29 interview with Wikileaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson.

JR: “…Obviously the most important question…. is Edward Snowden still holed up in the Moscow airport?”

KH: “I can’t reveal his exact location or his travel plans.”

JR: “The Russians have revealed his exact location. They said he was in the Moscow airport. Wikileaks is paying for his travel. Do you guys not know where he is?

KH: “We of course know where he is. We do have a hand in paying for his travel from Hong Kong to Moscow, that is correct.

JR: “If he were to travel on to the next country, he’s half indicated he wants to go to South America, Wikileaks would pay for that too?”

KH: “That remains to be seen.”

JR: “But if you didn’t pay for it, who would? Isn’t Wikileaks providing him with legal counsel? Someone traveling with him?”

KH: “There is a legal aide on his behalf traveling with him. He has access to persons on our legal team and we did connect our legal team with his legal advisors.”

JR: “Who’s paying for those legal advisors?”

KH: “Our legal advisers? Some we are paying ourselves and some are working pro bono.”

JR: “I wonder if there was money from — there is an organization that raises money for Wikileaks – Freedom of the Press Foundation – . is that organization involved in paying for Mr. Snowden’s travel?”

KH: “The money that we have access to comes from various sources. One is the Freedom of the Press Foundation. We have a fund in France as well that’s collecting money on our behalf. despite the banking block on us. We have funds in Iceland from (the period) prior to the banking blockade against the organization.”

JR: “I ask that question because two journalists obviously Mr. Snowden gave some of the leaked information to are on the board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Were you aware of that when Wikileaks began paying for his travel?”

KH: “I was aware of their position on the board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, yes.”

JR: “I want to get you to react to something Lonnie Snowden, Mr. Snowden’s father, said. He essentially said ‘I don’t want him to put him in peril,’ meaning his son, ‘but i am concerned about those who surround him. I think Wikileaks if you look at its past history you know that the focus is not necessarily on the constitution of the United States, it’s simply to release as much information as possible.’ What’s your reaction to that?”

KH: “I think Mr. Snowden senior has been rather ill-informed by mainstream media in this country and he has no accurate information about the organization. We are concerned about human rights. We are concerned about the freedom of speech and –”

JR: “But he mentioned the U.S. Constitution.”

KH: “Where the U.S. Constitution pertains to these issues we would support the U.S. Constitution.”

JR: “Let me ask you whether or not Edward Snowden was ill-informed about Wikileaks in 2009. When he was in a chat room overseas he essentiall accused the New York Times – we’re gonna put up the graphic – that was his screen name. ‘thetruehooha’ he was calling himself, he was talking about a previous leak in a January 10, 2009 report that President Bush turned down a request from Israelis for bunker busting bombs that it wanted to use to attack iran’s main nuclear site. he put up ‘wtf, new york times, are they trying to start a war? Jesus Christ, they’re like Wikileaks.’ Then he talked about anonymous sources, he said those people should be shot in the chicarrones. Was he essentially ill-informed as well when he said essentially ‘the New York Times’ was like Wikileaks in a bad way for leaking information?”

KH: “It has not been confirmed this is actually from Mr. Snowden.”

JR: “Actually, it has been confirmed.”

KH: “If so, he’s obviously changed his position in 2009 and every person should be allowed to change his opinion in a positive way as he has done.”

JR: “I want to open it up to the panel. one of the additional countries added to the potential country hopping that Mr. Snowden is doing is Venezuela which has said they’d gladly accept Mr. Snowden. So now we have a trifecta of countries that might not be the most savory, in addition to Ecuador.”

At this point, Melissa Harris Perry, Reid’s fellow Comcast-MSNBC talking head jumps in. If Reid has played the prosecutor thus far grilling Wikileaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson, Harris-Perry played the bad historian and hostile cop in a free form diatribe against whistleblower Edward Snowden.

MHP: “I am constantly shocked by this story over the course of the week in that we have clearly an international group of people who are providing resources to keep someone who’s broken American law from having to stand for justice in this country…

“The level of sort of privilege associated with such a discourse suggests that we should not be taking this seriously. I wonder if we’re even taking it seriously enough, the idea that this individual, who as far as I can tell his opinion has changed, primarily to save his own skin. It seems clear to me that his willing to take refuge in countries whose stand on public information, on human rights is in fact worse than the United States of America, for whom I have many important critiques. And yet the idea that the human rights violations in China, in Venezuela, in Ecuador, in Russia would somehow be less relevant to him is clearly simply because he’s only saving his own skin.

“In this country those who have decided to take a position of civil disobedience, because they love and care about their country and want to extend the constitution have always done so with a recognition that doing so also means standing for the consequences of breaking those laws and when they have done that, they have changed the country. But this going on the run thing? This is different. this is dangerous to our nation.”

JR: “And I want to clarify, the Venezuelan president Nicholas Medoro said his government would almost certainly grant Mr. Snowden asylum if he should apply. Do you want to respond to Melissa’s point?”

KH: “I think she has to think a little bit more about the Constitution. As I understand the Constitution and what is at stake here, I have a reflection back to the Nixon era when President Nixon sat in the infamous interview with David Frost when he said well when the president does it, it means that it is not illegal [10]. That is the issue –”

At this point, the heads of both prosecutor Reid and tough cop Harris-Perry simultaneously imploded. They both lost it, unintelligibly shouting over each other for more than ten seconds. After they stopped shouting, Hrafsson tried to say the issue was the substance of Snowden’s revelations, that the US government was illegally collecting, literally every email, text message, phone call, facebook post and electronic brain fart on the planet and storing it for future data-mining reference. Bad cop Harris-Perry would have none of it, angrily declaring that the issues were Snowden’s illegitimacy, because he won’t turn himself in, and his possible contact with foreign countries who might mean “to do us harm.”

Prosecutor Reid replied to the Nixon quote with unintentional irony, asserting that Snowden didn’t reveal any illegal behavior, because of course the government had done nothing illegal, and as host, ended the segment.

The camera cut away quickly, maybe so we couldn’t see the Wikileaks guy laughing.

A day or two later Harris-Perry channeled the cop again, with a Snowden segment on her own show. Harris-Perry insisted from her comfy TV chair, that any whistleblower or dissenter who failed to meekly submit to whatever punishment authorities deign to mete out is illegitimate at least, possibly self-serving as well, though just how the self is served in such cases was unclear. She brought up Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, the state senator who filibustered in Texas, and the folks who get arrested for “Moral Mondays” in North Carolina every week, and later in the show, Dan Ellsberg..

Harris-Perry might be a bright professor, but on TV she’s a lousy cop and a worse historian.

Nelson Mandela was on the run for years, a fugitive inside and outside South Africa, before being caught. The ANC maintained camps and facilities in African countries neighboring South Africa quite openly during the last decade or two of the apartheid regime, while receiving substantial aid from many African countries and most notably from the Soviet Union. They got none from the United States, by the way. Martin Luther King was arrested many but usually refused bail for a day or two while the press and religious leaders successfully clamored for his release. Dr. King never faced the prospect of felony time except once, briefly, for breaking a silly law against boycotting. King’s longest stretch in jail was 11 days, during which he was allowed to write a short book, Letters From a Birmingham Jail, while receiving phone calls and interviews from people around the world.

Daniel Ellsberg was released on bond after no more than a day or two in custody, and the “Moral Monday” folks are typically booked for disorderly conduct or some such trivial offense.

None of that compares with the way the US treats political dissidents, and even suspected political dissidents today. Bradley Manning has been confined almost 3 years, the entire first year naked and in solitary confinement, no letters, no interviews, no phone calls, no writing materials, and a gag order slapped on his lawyers. What’s a gag order mean? It means you can’t talk about the case publicly or privately, sometimes that you can’t tell an outsider the defendant says “happy irthday” to so-and-so. Veteran civil rights attorney Lynne Stewart is about to die in a federal prison for transmitting an innocuous public message from a defendant convicted of terrorism.

King was allowed to write a book in prison. Iman Jamil Al Amin, who as H. Rap Brown led SNCC and risked his life to start freedom schools, organize co-ops and register voters in rural Alabama was finally framed for the shooting of a deputy in Atlanta. To keep him from family and other Georgia prisoners, he was moved to federal custody and is now in an underground supermax cell half a continent away in Colorado, allowed one phone call and one letter to family per month. California prisoners found with just the name — not his books, just the scrawled name — of Black Panther leader George Jackson or other political items are classified as “gang members” and placed in automatic solitary confinement for the remainder of their sentences, which may also be lengthened due to that classification.

This ain’t the sixties. Snowden won’t get bond any more than Manning has. If captured he may face life imprisonment. The government has done all it can to limit public access to Bradley Manning’s trial, has gagged his lawyers and prohibited contact with the outside, so it’s reasonable to assume they’ll do the same to Snowden. When Harris-Perry remarked, “hey, it’s not like we’re gonna waterboard him…” her mostly passive guests finally balked, reminding her as meekly as possible that the US DOES torture, and more.

Amazingly, Harris-Perry declared that

“…At this point, if he’s arrested, with all the public view on him (the likelihood of) something particularly bad happening to him is very low… we give a lot of this information to google and other sort of organizations that have no democratic elect — I mean I get the fear of big government, I truly do, but I guess I don’t quite understand why we’re so pissed that our democratic government, for which we assume there’s at least some sort of check, have information that we willingly give away to private corporations that we know have no check…”

After that she tried to lead the discussion away from Snowden, the NSA and government wrongdoing back to the safe and familiar liberal territory of blaming Bush, Republicans, and the Patriot Act, without mentioning that her president has twice extended the Patriot Act in the White House and voted for it in the Senate before that, but only after originally campaigning for the US Senate against it. I won’t bore you with how that went, check out the video yourself below, or at http://www.nbcnews.com/id/46979745/#52350212 [11]

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So why is Joy-Ann Reid trying to indict Wikileaks? Why does Melissa Harris-Perry want to personally slap the cuffs on Ed Snowden? Because they’re climbers in the diversity-riddled sphere of corporate media, which always has room for black spokespeople willing to tow the corporate and government lines. It’s their job, they’re well paid, and they know nobody’s career has ever suffered for sucking up to a president. Having talking heads, especially black and female ones, to hammer home this line every time people of color turn on the TV looking for our reflected selves, is massively important. Public opinion, including black public opinion has to be moved, consent has to be engineered.

When the NSA news broke in early June, polls indicated that more Americans thought Snowden was a hero than a traitor. As Snowden himself has pointed out, the government isn’t afraid of him or Wilileaks. It’s afraid of the people. Corporate media exist to substitute themselves for genuine civic conversation. Branded and approved black TV and radio personalities, from Oprah to Jay-Z to Prosecutor Reid and Bad Cop Melissa are not on TV to represent the race. Prosecutor Reid and Bad Cop Melissa are here to tell black people what to think, what not to think and how not to think it, and being black (like the president) they give lazy liberals the excuse to embrace empire as well.

Only time will tell whether or how well they succeed.

Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and a member of the state committee of the Georgia Green Party. He lives and works near Marietta GA and can be reached via this site’s contact page, or at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

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