February, 2011 archive

I don’t know enough to comment on it. My knowledge of Egyptian history is probably slightly more than that of the average American, what with being trained as a historian, but that delineates the difference between somewhat ignorant and profoundly ignorant. I do know not to base my opinions on anything in Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Jewel of the Nile.

I do recall that, back in the olden days, when computers had tubes and took up entire buildings, an Egyptian medical doctor gave a talk on Egypt to the older grades at my elementary school (the local hospital welcomed immigrant doctors looking earn licenses in the States). At the time, Nasser had been in power for about a decade.

The doctor told us (I’m paraphrasing),

In Egypt, we have democracy, but it’s not like your democracy.

We do not have candidates running against each other. We hold up a candidate for president and say, ‘Do you want him?”

If the people say “No,” we hold up another candidate.

Even then, that sounded fishy to me, so fishy that I remember it almost five decades later.

I’ve learned not to believe what I hear in the news when events are moving quickly on the other side of the world, or even next door. Remember all the lies about New Orleans during the Katrina Army Corps of Engineer Floods–I fell for those and once bitten etc.

It’s not that I think major news organizations are falsifying stuff, but that, in the rush to fill airtime and column inches, they can fall into the trap of relying on guesswork, rumor, and wishful thinking.

This is certainly the case in the blogosphere, left, right, and middle. Andrew Sullivan’s giddiness over the Green Revolution in Iran, which petered out to nothing, amply illustrates this. (Indeed, a friend of mine with Iranian friends tells me that they have told her that the level of repression in Iran is now far greater than it has been in years.)

Sullivan’s changing his website’s banner to green as a show of solidarity had little effect on guns and beatings half a world away.

In reporting fast-moving events, an unverified twit may be worse than no twit at all.

Nevertheless, I know enough about American history to pretty much agree with the Rude One: our history of supporting dictators in the name of realpolitik has repeatedly come back to bite us in the behind and that laying low and letting events run their course is probably the best policy for the United States (Warning: Rudeness at link).

For an unusual perspective on events in Egypt, see the Linux Outlaws special podcast. It’s weighted towards reviewing the influence of “new media” and the internet in events in Egypt (two Linux geeks podcasting internationally via Skype and an internet connection–what else would you expect?). It also provides some international perspective Americans are unlikely to get first-hand, as one of the podcasters is from the U. K. and the other is from Germany.

The discussion of Egypt starts about 13 minutes into the broadcast.