Never What They Seem

Americans, as we see time and time again, are incredibly naive about
world politics. By and large, they accept government propaganda, no
matter how absurd. They bought the Cold War script, the drug war script,
and the War on Terror script, mostly without a second thought. They
even bought the Hope and Change script, electing a Wall Street toady to
fight as their champion against the powers that be.

Apparently,
American gullibility knows no bounds. As evidenced by the popularity of
the color-coded revolutions myth, they enthusiastically embrace the
notion that a few thousand people armed with nothing but iphones can topple dictators, replacing them with authentic democracies due solely to their sincerity and good wishes.

Of
course, power vacuums are filled by those who are prepared, not to
mention connected. And when you’re talking about reorganizing a society
of tens or hundreds of millions of people, those connections — be they
economic, religious, or military — count. How many times have we seen
righteous indignation betrayed by notorious factions in cahoots with the
IMF, World Bank, or CIA?

Whatever one might think about Egypt’s
Mubarak or other dictators who’ve fallen out of favor with the US and
the EU, popular uprisings have political backgrounds, social context,
and often unintended consequences. And when you’re talking about regime
change within totalitarian states, there is always a back story of
international intrigue, as well as conspiracies to seize power.

In
other words, things are never what they seem, especially if one’s
sources of information are the governments of intervening world powers,
or the corporate media that does their bidding.

To state it
bluntly, when the U.S. government and the former colonial powers of
Western Europe decide to abandon dictators and proxy governments, they
have to fabricate a narrative that conceals their sordid past, as well
as reveals disingenuous outlines of their desired future. Both require
distortion of the present. In the case of Egypt, that distortion is
aided by not asking key questions.

Jared Israel examines the media narrative of the insurrection in Egypt, what it does and doesn’t tell us, and how it is even contrived to fit a preconceived pattern.