Best Blog Post on Egypt I’ve Read
Glenn Greenwald’s The Egyptian mirror:
Not even American propaganda could whitewash the fact that the U.S. has imposed Hosni Mubarak’s regime on The Egyptian People for decades. His government is not merely our ally but one of our closest client regimes. We prop him up, pay for his tools of repression, and have kept him safe for 30 years from exactly this type of popular uprising — all in exchange for his (a) abducting, detaining and torturing whom we want, (b) acting favorably toward Israel, and (c) bringing stability to the Suez Canal.
And yet it’s remarkable how self-righteously our political and media class can proclaim sympathy with the heroic populace, and such scorn for their dictator, without really reconciling our national responsibility for Mubarak’s reign of terror. Thanks to this Look Over There genre of reporting, we’re so accustomed to seeing ourselves as The Good Guys — even when the facts are right in front our noses that disprove that — that no effort is really required to reconcile this cognitive dissonance. Even when it’s this flagrant, we can just leave it unexamined because our Core Goodness is the immovable, permanent fixture of our discourse; that’s the overarching premise that can never be challenged.
Greenwald is one of those bloggers who often makes me wonder why I even bother.
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