Tag Archives: revolution

Lessons from Robben Island

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Nelson Mandela repairing prison clothes on Robben Island in 1966 (via ezakwantu.com)

I visited Robben Island, South Africa’s prison colony off the Western Cape, more than a decade ago when I was in South Africa with the woman who would become my wife. Then as today it is a national heritage site and it is a physical part of the extraordinary life of Nelson Mandela, who died yesterday at age 95.

Nothing is inevitable about the political development in complex societies, and fortunately the commentary about Mandela’s crucial contributions to South Africa’s transition to democratic rule have emphasized his unique abilities as conciliator and canny politician.

I remember the day he became president realizing, in 1994, that he had been in prison longer than I had been alive. I thought, How does anyone do anything under those circumstances? In 1963 he barely escaped a death sentence with his friends only to be condemned to a life term. He said he was willing to die, but how could he give his life when he was condemned to prison exile? It is important to remember he was just one man: thousands of unnamed and unsung prisoners joined him in punishment for protesting apartheid. How did they endure the uncertainty of their actions?

The tour of Robben Island is guided in part by former inmates. I was immediately struck by one of them who thanked those who visited for the international boycott that punished his country and, as some have argued, hurt black South Africans most of all during the divestment years. It was important to hear, and I learned a few things, then and now, about supporting the long walk to freedom — in South Africa and elsewhere.

Sanctions work. Economic boycotts, divestment campaigns, industrial action, coordinated sanctions — these bring real pain to regimes and nations we want to bring to heel. We’ve seen this in South Africa, Burma, now (hopefully) Iran.  Interestingly, fellow Nobel laureate Lech Walesa — who visited Washington this week on the occasion of his 70th birthday — argued that it was the deliberate economic impact of the Solidarity protests as much as the political effects that forced the communist authorities to negotiate their way out of power in 1989. Constant strike actions and work stoppages at the Gdansk shipyards, ironworks, and factories, meant that what little industrial output Poland could boast in the Comintern was at the mercy of the workers. This was an economic disaster in a country that couldn’t produce enough to eat, never mind politically untenable in the workers’ paradise. It’s a shame, of course, that somebody as forceful and articulate on the dehumanizing nature of communism as Ronald Reagan couldn’t bring the same moral clarity to the brutalizing inhumanity of apartheid.

Gestures are important. Mandela talked about the importance of the salute by Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics (it is interesting to note that fellow medalist, the Australian Peter Norman, also joined in the protest by wearing a badge to show solidarity with Smith and Carlos and also to protest official Australian policy). While it is easy to dismiss the empty, effect-less, “political gesture” — the op-ed, the speech, the demonstration, the outburst — they are incredibly important to maintain morale for those who are engaged in political struggle against authority or enormous odds, and acutely so if they are in prison. Official gestures are even more important. When the United States takes sides, or defends individual dissidents, the effect is tremendous. They are always worth the political risk. Speeches by John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan at the Berlin Wall, when they leaked to the other side, told those living under communism that we understood their reality.  But if the United States is tepid, or “balanced,” fighters for freedom can smell equivocation. Their reaction breeds resentment, suspicion and cynicism.

Information is ammunition. One amusing but poignant story told during our Robben Island visit involved the insatiable need for information among the political prisoners. They were at the head of the revolution in South Africa, but the authorities cut them off from all news and virtually all communication from the outside world. They were not just news junkies: to be effective and relevant, they had to know what was going on. And information was vital to their morale. Any sign from the outside that they were recognized, that the struggle was continuing, made their experience worth enduring.

The story was this. A priest came to lead a prayer session with a group of inmates. He arrived with an attache case, which he left casually open on a chair next to him at the front of the room. The priest invited an inmate to lead them in prayer, which he promptly did by going to the front of the room on the other side of the chair. He peeked inside the attache case and saw a newspaper. He immediately asked everyone to close their eyes and bow their heads in prayer. As soon as he was convinced everyone had closed their eyes, he pinched the newspaper and led the prayer.

President Barack Obama, in his remarks on the death of Nelson Mandela, said he spent his life studying the great man and would continue to do so. In Mandela there is the ennobling experience of an entire nation. Indeed, as we found on Robben Island, there is much more to be learned not just from him, but from the whole country.

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In Egypt, Force v. Power (II)

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(KHALED DESOUKI AFP/Getty Images via Globalpost.com)

It’s been sickening listening to usually sensible and decent people try to justify the ugly ouster of Egypt’s first democratically elected head of state. Watch David Brooks, for example, speaking on PBS’ Newshour, contort himself into a principle for the outcome of a wholly unprincipled thing happening to somebody he hates:

I used to think, if we just have elections, that the elections will have a moderating effect on governments.

Even if you take radicals, especially throughout the Middle East, you take radicals, they have to pay attention to public opinion. They have to pick up the trash. They have to fix the potholes. The act of governing will moderate them. And, therefore, we just should insist on election after election and we should respect the results of every election.

I think the evidence from the Muslim Brotherhood, at least, is that if you have got a group which is really a radical, almost religious totalitarian group, the elections will not have a moderating influence. They will take advantage of elections in essence to end democracy.

And I think that is what they were slowly doing. They were undermining democracy to make democracy impossible. It was a self-negating election. And so I think what the coup people did was legitimate. And what all those millions of people on the street did is legitimate.

A friend of mine, Jeffrey Goldberg, had a good line. May be bad short term for democracy, good long term for progress.

I quote him at length to avoid any reductionism. Brooks sounds peculiarly like an early agitator for Communism, from which many of his friends on the neoconservative right crawled, placing any violent or repressive means at the disposition of the all-important End. Who cares if democracy is harmed, when progress – Communism’s ultimate end for all humanity! – is achieved? (To make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs!) And what good is democracy, anyway, if elections are “self-negating”? (Can’t we just throw the people out and elect a new one?)

It only gets worse. Jeremy Pressman writes that a military government may be better at “protecting minority rights, creating space for genuine and lasting political competition, and, more broadly, helping Egypt move forward.” Progress again! Couldn’t the army and police do that under a democratically elected president? Never mind that the army ultimately chooses whose rights, whose space, and which direction forward, because it controls the state. There is no real politics without moral choice, because there is no real choice out of the barrel of a gun. The concept of the benign dictatorship is a venal lie that refuses to die in the craniums of people smart enough to know better.

Joshua Keating and Ozan Varol seriously consider a “democratic coup d’etat,” as if that makes a lick of sense. Can you have an “authoritarian election”? “Totalitarian freedoms”? “Transparent censorship”?

It doesn’t take much to see all these observers’ frightening lack of faith in, and understanding of, politics and political process independent of democratic mechanisms. Even taking Brooks’ argument at face value – that Morsi was dismantling the very democracy that had elevated him to power – the protests against his rule indicated Egypt was a midpoint of the drama, not at its climax. And for anyone who would argue against this point, and to say that Egypt is better off now under military rule, we need look no farther than Turkey, where a political opposition movement has flourished against a similarly pugnacious president. The difference there is the army has, after 100 years, finally removed itself to the sidelines. While contentious and occasionally violent, Turkey’s protests have left far fewer people dead as a result. And Turkey’s democracy is still intact.

It is incredible that Brooks failed to acknowledge the inseparable actions of the Egyptian army in the coup. It was not the “people” who deposed the president, but the armed forces. Morsi is still being held incommunicado, now charged with espionage and murder. It is compelling indeed that hundreds of thousands of people took to Tahrir Square in Cairo and elsewhere to protest against the President and the ruling Muslim Brotherhood. This is as it should be in an open, free and political society. Of course we and President Morsi should take a petition signed by 22 million seriously. But now that movement and those millions have been denied their right to rein in the president on their own, by their own power, because the army has subsumed them by brute force.

Worse for the future of Egypt, this establishes a very ominous precedent, one Turkey took nearly a century to overcome: the ultimate arbiter of political rule is now the army. Having sat out the 2011 revolution and then forcefully deposed Morsi early this month, the army is effectively Egypt’s Pharaoh-maker. This is indisputably bad for Egyptian democracy and Egyptian politics, because the army may always have its metal-jacketed finger on the country’s political balance.

And it demonstrates to the Muslim Brotherhood – those whom Brooks despises so much – what they and their allies must do now. No longer content to build a true political power base in Egypt’s neighborhoods and quartiers and mosques and prisons and schools, they realize they must infiltrate the army, too. All over the Middle East, the like-minded are taking their lesson.

This is a terrible development. Because after decades of preaching the benefits of democracy, which includes the rule of law and democratic control of the armed forces, Egypt – with the tacit consent of the West – has cynically conceded that force can trump power. But that only means as long as those men with guns hold the future of political control in their hands along with their weapons, politics will be inseparably defined with violence, and bloodshed, and heartache.

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