Daily Times

“You shall read,” says Cosmus, the Duke of Florence,”we are commanded to forgive our enemies, but you never read that we are commanded to forgive our friends”. “We”, Nietzsche adds,”should also respect the enemy in our friend”. From Julius Caesar to Mohamed Morsi, this important lesson of history has always eluded those in the position of power; hence, the price is paid in blood and tears.

From Brutus to el-Sisi, the President and hangman of Egypt, no enemy-friend has ever left the sea of betrayal unchartered. Trust can be a terribly lethal weapon if poked as a dagger in the chest meant to defend.Pakistan, in shape of Ayub and Zia, has its homemade, unrefined, illegally cultivated examples.

“The great armies, accumulated to provide security and preserve the peace”, AJP Taylor says,”carried the nations to war by their own weight”.However, in times of relative peace, thedesire to grab power can become an alternate obsession. Fanon anticipating the danger stated, “care must be taken to avoid turning the army into an autonomous body which sooner or later, finding itself idle and without any definite mission, will ‘go into politics’ and threaten the government”.

To avoid the threat becoming a reality, Fanon demanded the state to educate the army politically, to nationalize it, and to build the militia – in other words, a Red army equipped with class-consciousness.For Egyptians as for Turks, contrary to other developing countries,the army hada different connotation, that of a redeemer, which helped itto overthrow the yoke of a dynasty and imperialism, a double whammy gnawing at the flesh of the masses.

Naguib and Nasser, the ‘free officers’ who were actually free from the germs of rot left behind by imperialism made it a mission to cast aside the fetters shackling their country. The Egyptian masses took the British, French and Israelis head-on. Nasser, instead of seeking personal gains, nationalized the Suez, built Aswan dam, distributed the lands and established cooperatives for farmers. In 1962, under a new arrangement of Arab Socialist Union, fifty percent representation was given to workers and peasantsin both the party and the parliament.

The ever haunting and daunting dilemma of all religious parties regardless of their faith is that they share the sanctity of property and the persistence of its relations with the ruling class no matter, which layer, the master or its protectors, is in power

It was the era of Arab nationalism, barring Saudi Arabia, the flag of the socialist economy was unfurling in the Middle East.Contrary toWesterndemocracy, the Egyptian experiment was Gramsci’s progressive Caesarism, which brought a massive social change by annihilating the old feudal structure for new state capitalism. The state in its dynamics remained bourgeois and coercive and unleashed its wrath on both Islamists and Marxists.

The next Arab-Israeli war, in reality, outright Israeli aggression, changed the dynamics of the Middle East. Nasser’s death was the death knell for Arab nationalism. Sadat, Mubarak, Morsi, and el-Sisi followed the neoliberal path. Under Nasser, the growth rate that surged andremained at 9% for a decade (Osman, T., 2010) could never be achieved again.

For embracing overt capitalism, Sadat embraced all those elements having anunshakable belief in property relations. He chose the “Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood to counterbalance the unwanted influence of the Nasserite and leftist element” (Ibrahim. E.S., 1996). The alliance with the US-Israel nexus, especially with neo-liberalism, requireda multi-party democracy; since then, the number of political partiesin Egypt has toucheda three-figure mark with no democracy in sight.

The only brief democratic flirtation, otherwise a tabootamperedbrieflyin 2011,brought Morsi into power but was that an election with real options? People were not offered even a Hobbesian choice; they had to choose between Brotherhood and Ahmed Shafik, a remnant of the ousted regime. Abjuring such a choice, in reality,was the only choice and nearly half of the voters did not participate in the election thinking it a farce; their point was vindicated when a year later Morsi was toppled.

While analyzing Morsi’s election, the late Samir Amin, a renowned thinker, found it “a gigantic fraud. The Muslim Brothers”, he stated, “were mobilized to occupy the voting places and made impossible for others to vote, to the extent that the Egyptian judges who usually followed the election were disgusted and moved out and gave the election to the Brotherhood. Despite that, the US Embassy and Europe declared the election was perfect” (Amin S., 2013).

“His elected presidency,” Robert Fisk says,”which lasted less than a year, was shambolic, itself corrupted, increasingly brutal and very, very arrogant. The Muslim Brotherhood has always suffered from vanity, which is why it stayed out of the 2011 Egyptian revolution until Mubarak’s fall was certain – and why Morsi himself began talking to the army (his future nemesis) before the violence had ended”.

The ever haunting and daunting dilemma of all religious parties regardless of their faith is that they share the sanctity of property and the persistence of its relations with the ruling class no matter, which layer, the master or its protectors, is in power. In a country where “about half the population lived on $2 a day or less” and “you have one of two options, you either become a beggar or a thief, the people sent a message: We are not beggars, and we do not want to become thieves” (The Seattle Times, 2011). Morsi did not heed to the message, and people were in no mood to wait in silence.

Akin to nearly all reactionary forces, Brotherhood – havinga following in the middle and capitalist segments of Egyptian society – suffers from the same malady of seeking dominance by conspiring with the dominant forces. It was a sheer compulsion or class character that el-Sisi was appointed as defense minister in Morsi’s cabinet, making him fully complacent in thelatter’s crimes.

For Freud, this elopement of religious forces with the army could have been consequent either upon guilt -an acknowledgment of dependence on the covert backing of guards for their existence – or upon castration fear;any dealignment with the interests of the dominant force is inimical not for their fascist designs but for their very survival too.

Morsi carried his infantile neurosis along.Instead of looking to solve the economic plight of masses, he opted through a new constitution to impose his religious doctrine on them. People were not unaware; finding one kind of conformism replacing another, 3.3 million people found their way to the Tahrir Square, and the rest is history. The opportunity to curb the political impetuosity of the army was lost, andto maintain the status quothe Bonapartes took the saddle again.

Egypt, subdued, subordinated, subject to imperialism’s unreason is anironclad guaranteeto its hegemony in the entire Middle East. For the US-Israel nexus, Egypt is strategically more important than Saudi Arabia.During the Persian Gulf War, Egypt joined the anti-Iraq coalition and was duly rewarded.”The United States and its allies forgave half the $20.2 billion that Egypt owed them”(The New York Times, 1991). By that generous act, “West”, Yahya Sadowski of Brooklyn Institute said, had”taken their foot off Egypt’s trachea”. Iraq’s poison became Egypt’s meat.

Any instability, a movement of liberation in Egypt would compromise the interests of the US in the Gulf while simultaneously thwarting the terroristic annihilation of the Palestinians by Israel.To avoid the Red revolution, imperialism will continue to support several pink revolts. Egypt under capitalism suffers the ‘Pharaoh’s curse’, seized by the neck ‘like a bird, fear is cast unto it’.

The writer is based in Australia and has authored books on socialism and history