I borrowed this photo from Baheyya:
This is a demonstration in support of the independence of the Egyptian judiciary, and one of the protestors is waving a picture of Nasser, the perpetrator of the eternally infamous mazbahit el qodah, or "massacre of the judiciary", and the totalitarian dictator whose cronies unabashadly declared that "the law is on vacation". The man whose zowwar el fagr, literally "visitors of the dawn", kidnapped, tortured and indefinitely imprisoned any Egyptian with a hint of an independent intellect. You can tell from the uneasy smile on his face that even he feels he doesn't belong there. How stupid is the Egyptian opposition? And they wonder why they have no support in the street. Damn morons.
To all respectable people from the Egyptian left, I say dissociate yourself clearly from the slayer of modern Egypt and his lot if you wish to maintain a semblance of respect for your movement in the eyes of the Egyptian people. This is my humble opinion, and at least until then you will never have my vote, or even my support.
I can only leave you with this segment from El Masry El Yom's interview with 86 year old Mohamed Helal, who was among the founders of the Muslim Brotherhood:
What are the real reasons for the deterioration of relations between the Brotherhood and Nasser?
He who knows the truth about Abdel Nasser and his family circumstances that he lived, fully knows that he was mentally sick and that the war between the brotherhood and him started early. I remember that I was sitting attending a meeting of el-Hodeiby [former Supreme Guide of the Brotherhood] with Nasser who said: "I want to have two buttons; to press on the first one and the people rise and get angry...and press on the second one and the people quite down and settle." And when Hodeiby asked him for the reason of this, he answered that this goes back to his whim. So Hodeiby learned that the man was mentally troubled, and came out of that meeting assured that Nasser is not fit to lead a nation and informed the Brotherhood of this. And the proof of this was that Nasser turned on all his friends and got rid of them all either through imprisonment or murder, and the incident of Abdel Hakim Amer [former Field Mashal who is thought by many to have been murdered, or "suicided" ] is known after the defeat of 1967 and the performance that he made, which is known as "the abdication."
And let me let you in on an event regarding the abdication. I was imprisoned then, and orders were issued for the security soldiers to exchange their military clothes so they can go out in demonstrations, or "the performance", so all they did was confiscate the civilian clothes belonging to the thousands of imprisoned brothers and went out to the street chanting "Don't abdicate...Don't abdicate". These clothes were in the prison deposits, and this is an event I saw with my own eyes, especially that they took my clothes as well.
[*Speaking of mentally ill, it was Nasser's personal physician who first diagnosed him as such. He observed that he was obsessed with following reports of the suffering of his opponents (and not really his opponents but people that just differed from him in their opinions nonetheless) that he had had imprisoned. Unfortunately the physician let word of this get out to his family and friends, and he was soon murdered himself. At least this is what I read somewhere, incidentally in a book arguing the case that Abdelhakim Amer was himself murdered by Nasser.]
"I want to have two buttons, to press on the first one for the people to rise and get angry...and press on the second one for the people to quite down and settle." - This is Big Brother personified. I hate to take on Baheyya - I respect everything she says in regards to our culture and its pioneers - but I can no longer bear to swallow her irrational portrayals of Sadat, the liberator and peacemaker of Egypt (from the legacy of continuous occupation and war of, guess who: Nasser), as some kind of erratic Pharoah, while portraying Nasser as a great man in the ranks of Saad Zaghlul.
I hate to tell you what Saad would have done to him if he were alive to see him (and really this grouping makes absolutely no sense when it was Nasser who disbanded the Wafd and threw Zaghlul's successor Mustafa el-Nahhas under house arrest for the remainder of his days, in fear of his undisputed popularity among Egyptians).
Baheyya speaks so often of the Orwellian world we live in today, yet fails to see that she herself is the ultimate victim of Orwell's brilliant prognosis of double think. She, and even the pillars of the Nasserist party on which its paper and party today relies, belong not to the older generation which witnessed the era of the King and the subsequence of the revolution; she and they belong to a younger generation which didn't even witness the days of Nasser, but came into mature being in the age of the left-wing upheaval of the 70s against Sadat; she and the Nasserist generation of today are the ultimate institutionalized product of Big Brother's factory of double think; unlike Winston, the lead of 1984 who reluctantly gets broken down by Big Brother only after years of horrifying torture and humiliation at his hands, and who as a result finally comes to genuinely love him by the end of the story, Baheyya and her generation are the youth squads of double think.
Baheyya, I am in full confidence and admiration of your integrity, but I hope you keep your promise to your readers to follow in the footsteps of our ancient god of wisdom, Hermes; Tut; Djehuti - and re-read matters of our history, and rethink them in a clear conscience and unbiased logic.
Until then, when I see some moron waving a banner of Nasser in a demonstration that is calling for the independence of our Judiciary, the inheritor of Maat, symbol and Goddess of Justice, I really will enthusiastically chant: "Ofrom, Ofrom ya Sadaat!"
May Reason be with us,
Seneferu
7 comments:
It is a real pity that dead dictators like Nasser continue to rule us.
we did try to explain that to the nasserists in the protest to no avail, anyways that's the price of a loosely organized bypartisan movement, it has advantages though and fighting over these things will get us no where.
I'm glad to hear that at least your intentions are good, but in practical terms I think you are mistaken.
Good post. I cannot understand how there are still people who believe that Nasser was good for the country when it is so obvious that his rule laid the groundwork for the complete decay of Egyptian society that we are witnessing these days.
Thank you, Global Cairene. They are a minority, but a loud, and may I add; biggi7, minority. For this reason I think we should speak up to prevent them from doing any further damage than they have already done to the country.
actually i went through baheyya and she says nothing to defend nasser.
Guys, for the last time I am not targeting Baheyya personally with this post. I am just saying that she, like many of her generation, think very highly of Nasser, and I am arguing that they as a generation that grew up under the totalitarian shadow of that era, were genuinely brought up to believe that his controlled reality was the truth. And so any deviancy from it was naturally viewed as political apostasy, kufr and treason, hence their strong animosity towards Sadat's policies and his peace treaty. I don't mean to caricature them, but read 1984 if you hadn't and compare the youth scouts to the older generations.
I can't find the references either, and for some reason I can't see her archives on her site, but at least I'll describe them. At one point she refers to Sadat as lacking the intelligence and charisma of his predecessor, and in another post she was speaking of a politician (can't remember which one) who hung pictures in his office liking himself to Egyptian greats Saad Zaghlul and Nasser.
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