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Egypt 1 – Globalism 0

Forced Modernity Enrages a Traditional, Religious Culture

Let’s stipulate upfront that the Muslim Brotherhood’s Reagan-like domination of Egypt’s Parliamentary Elections is probably an international setback to the United States, Israel and most of Southern Europe. Results thus far encompass areas that were probably most friendly to the Facebook Revolutionaries and the Western World they represented.

Amongst the cosmopolitan voters over at Starbucks, the Muslim Brotherhood holds leads in 50% of the seats. Their closest competition is an Islamist Party that caters to the Salafi School of Islam. The votes taking place in the coming days will be in the Egyptian countryside where The Muslim Brotherhood may well play Mitt Romney to a way more traditionalist Salafi alternative. The Facebook Revolutionaries will have gone from overthrowing a military junta to depending upon the Egyptian Army to protect them from being beaten down like a bunch of Coptic Christians.

It would be easy to insult and belittle the People of Egypt. They are effectively casting a protest vote against the entire modern world. Thomas PM Barnett would sniff haughtily at their “Caboose Braking.” He defines this below.

The situation that arises when a country’s elites or more competitive segments (the engine) wire themselves up to globalization more quickly than the weaker portions of society (the caboose) can accommodate. The “caboose” is typically the inland, rural, more agricultural base of the population, which likewise constitutes the bulk of poverty in any country–including the US

How could they do such backward things? Who would deliberately vote for a platform that would consign the entire country to the Non-Integrated Gap? Barnett demonstrates how much more compassionate and enlightened what he calls the Functional Core is in the chart below.

To Some A Blessing, To Others A Curse

This chart tells two compelling stories. It tells one story to the committed Post-Modern, it tells another to a Traditionalist. The Post-Modern sees freedom, spreading as civilization illuminates the primeval dark reaches of benighted humanity. The Traditionalist sees a detestable rock video of some freak acting out masturbatory fantasies on a piece of stage equipment. The Post-Modern sees a cleaner, fairer and better future. The Traditionalist sees all that is holy and sacred profaned.

In practical terms, we are better served hoping Egypt joins the core. It’s been almost 70 years now since major, leading nations such as The US, Great Britain, Germany and Japan have unleashed war on each other. The Urban Legend has it that no two nations that have McDonalds Franchises can wage a major military conflict. It almost makes up for their crappy cheeseburgers and insipid fries. People die from obesity; not famine in the globalized world. Globalization succeeded where Leninism failed and the peasants have acquired their “Land, Peace and Bread.”

Yet critics would argue that Globalism also succeeded where Leninism succeeded. The birth rates plummet in the so-called functional core. Divorce rates sky-rocket, mosque, synagogue and church attendance atrophies. Cities become dysfunctional, urban war zones. This is because the culture has been sublimated to the state and religion is now increasingly viewed as the opiate of the masses. Spengler describes the sub-human Nietzschean Last Men that he sees in Western Europe.

They have no ambition but to die quietly, no concerns except for those amusements which might reduce boredom and anxiety en route to the grave. They have no passions except hatred born of envy. They hate America, a new kind of universality that succeeded where the old Christian empire failed. They hate Israel, which makes the Jewish people appear all the more eternal in stark contrast to Europe’s morbid temporality. They will pass out of history unmourned even by themselves.

So who should the Egyptians vote for? Stoning the adulterers or killing their reasons for continuing to exist? I’d feel happier having a choice between Howard Dean and Pat Buchanan. I’m not vindictive enough to accuse the Egyptians of proudly voting for a party that wants to stone adulterers and cut the hands off of all thieves. Honor killing isn’t what I would consider a popular platform – unless plan B involved my cultural identity destroyed and my values subjected to tyranny.

So Egypt has no desire to subjugate its economy to the electronic herd or wear the golden straight-jacket. They also had no desire to submit themselves to a coercive military-led junta. Like the Germans chaffing under the punitive Treaty of Versailles, the Egyptians stood ready to vote for any alternative at all that represented Plan C. The Muslim Brotherhood, in all its backward, brutal glory, checked that box.

My question for the US President who came into power in 2008, prepared to resurrect America’s image around the world, is this. Why could America find no plausible alternative to Medieval Sharia Law to support and help offer to the people of Egypt? Could it be that in the eyes of the world America now represents something far more inhuman and worse?

COMMENTS

  • tomatin

    Remember Hamas won in the Gaza Strip.

    I just think those Muslims can’t handle democracy like the West.

    • Repair_Man_Jack

      It’s our State Dept. that’s out there on the front lawn having sex w/ the poodle.

      • tomatin

        The point is it’s a dumb idea putting democracy in the hands of these muslim fools.

        • renl57

          The mistake the U.S. keeps making is assuming that all you need to do is have “free and fair” elections and democracy is all set, mission accomplished.

          But democracy is a lot more than having an election. It means respect for the rule of law, respect for other people to have opinions different from yours, and the rights of free expression and due process.

          Look at our own Constitution w/Bill of Rights. The parts about having elections every two years is only one small part of it.

          That’s because the Founding Fathers understood that just elections could lead to mob rule or Chavez-like popular dictators.

      • ihateliberals

        Many people in the uSA today dont understand their own government. Democracy in it’s true for like the USA means freedom. when ever people lose a little bit of freedom Democracy dies just a little bit too. when people sell their votes Democracy dies. It is really sad to see the USA back these Islamic regimes. Later on these same regimes will be turning against us. It is inevitable. What most people in thsi county can’t accept is that Islam is against anyone that is of Islam. It has always been that way and always will be that way. Egypt is a ticking time bomb and no matter what the election brings eventually Islam will rule,

    • duncer

      This elitist made some observations about the rural agricultural areas of any country. I was not aware that all countries held the real producers of material things in the same contempt embodied as our New york and San Francisco liberals that refer to those who work on farms and in factories and mines as “flyover country”. GDP of the individual states and the country as a whole are measured in dollars not tons of steel,coal,copper, barrels of oil, mcf of gas ,bushels of wheat, corn, oats, soybeans. Financial centers do not actually produce anything except services for which they are rewarded very well, but they do not produce wealth, they harvest a big piece of the action off the top, yet in the dollar denominated statistics there is no distinction but there is a great difference.

      • Repair_Man_Jack

        It’s amazing the intellectual and moral contortions it requires for a man like him to be OK with himself while he grows ever increasingly fatter off of the relative surplus value of agricultural and factory workers.

  • johnt

    The Administration, so called, couldn’t restrain themselves. But what the hell, nobody in the media to call them on it so they might as well enjoy themselves and express their solidarity.

    • Repair_Man_Jack

      are the only option this admin. still has on the table. A beaten chess player should have the dignity to resign.

  • Ausonius

    Democracy has a checkered history: the good guys do not always receive a majority, or even a plurality. Keep in mind that Egypt has a high unemployment rate of somewhere between 10 and 20%, depending on whose statistics you believe.

    Worse, literacy among men is c. 20%, and nearly half of the population lives on $2.00 a day. This is a population out of medieval times economically and intellectually, and easily manipulated with hatred and promises and superstitious beliefs.

    We have seen in America how most of the people can be fooled some of the time, thanks to MAObama! With such a population this result was easily predictable.

    The Coptic Christians have been packing up and leaving: they foresaw this as well. The Copts are the descendants of the original Egyptians: recall that the Arabs invaded Egypt and took it away from the Byzantine Empire in the 600′s.

    The Copts are treated like Afro-Americans in the Jim-Crow south. Islam in Egypt is not all that tolerant, hard to believe!!! :)

    I know several families of Egyptian Copts here in Ohio: they are doing everything in their power to bring as many Copts to America as possible. They expect at the least, and have reason to believe it will happen, a de facto religious-ethnic cleansing following the rise of the Islamic Egyptian state.

    • lizzie

      I keep hoping the millions of Egypt’s Copts create their own “state” by seizing the Sinai, starting with St. Catherine’s, the treasure of Byzantine Christianity.
      I fear the Copts can not stay in Cairo and need to think of themselves as a People with a Homeland, and Occupying Sinai would also help create a stable buffer zone.

      One of the truly tragic ironies about Syria is that their 10%, 2.3 million Christians of ancient denominations, have thrived under Baathism and the Assads. The US is about to support the Sunni-led rebellion which does have the benefit of dealing Iran and Hezbollah serious blows, but it will come at the expense of more Christians.

      Just like Iraq.

      I am Jewish, and I seem to care more about the ME christians than either Bush43 (who never said a word about their mass refugee from Iraq), or Obama who I still think is a secular humanist who should move to Norway.

      Where is the outrage for all the Christians of the Middle East? The Pope wimps out. The Eastern Orthodox patriarchs wimp out. No elected leader has any courage.

      Occupy Sinai! Protect St. Catherine’s! and then turn Gaza into a bustling beach resort with offshore natural gas and send all the islamists to Aswan.

      • nathanalbright

        …but I’m a Sabbetarian Christian who keeps the seventh day Sabbath, so that makes me a lot more similar to the Assyrian and Coptic Christians than many. I agree that a buffer state between Israel and Egypt would be best. They’re getting massacred and it’s a tragedy, but the Pope is too busy trying to win Muslim support for his “culture of life” than he is standing up for Christians who just don’t happen to be under his banner of Catholicism.

  • MikeG

    n/t

    • http://stevemaley.com Steve Maley

  • robobbob

    I strongly disagree with this article. Do not look at this situation from a modernists/premodern perspective.

    Look at this situation from a big government, statist, socialist, globalist, leftist , wealth redistribution, appeaser mentality.

    The Islamists believe in a powerful central government to impose their worldview, so do statists. The Islamists want to take their beliefs global. So do the socialists. Islamofascists and Islamocommunists aren’t just niffty sloggans. They are very descriptive of who we’re up against. It also implies that they have many ready made allies in the west who are willing to overlook the Islamists temporary regressiveness as a price to moving the overall agenda forward.

    The middle east has been controlled by marginally secular dictators. the Islamists are under their thumb and unable to impliment their globalist muslim caliphate. They blame you-the west, for propping up these dictators, and commenced to wage a war of terrorism and propaganda against the west.

    With the support of the west, what has happened?

    The dictators are gone, and by marginally democratic means, the Islamists are taking control. they can longer blame the west for their troubles. They will be quickly moving to unify their societies. Once they have supressed their opposition, then it will be time to reach out to their muslim brothers around the world. Spreading joy, peace, compassion for the poor, brotherhood to all.

    Like every socialist engineering plan, the repression, bigotry, racism , violence, and shattered lives are just unfortunate side effects that can be solved over time.

    The leftists think that they have made a deal. Whats a little temporary suffering in the march toward globalist utopia?

    • Repair_Man_Jack

      It reminds me of the famous poem on the Holocaust Memorial.

      “They first came for the Jews.
      I wasn’t Jewish, so it didn’t concern me….”

  • aesthete

    Our side seems to be perfectly willing to ignore when the same thing happens in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    The truth is, open and honest elections are a waste of time without the systems, institutions and cultural norms that:

    1) Guarantee that the individual has some basic measure of humanity and dignity apart from a collective.

    2) Hold people responsible and accountable.

    3) Allow property rights.

    4) Prefer non-violent resolution of everyday conflict.

    5) Create stable families.

    Most of these things can’t be created through government fiat, and to be frank the cultures and governments in the Middle East, with very few exceptions, fail on all counts. It was and is a fools’ errand to believe that more education and a UN constitution would make Afghanistan the Central Asian Switzerland.

    • Repair_Man_Jack

      The best thing that can come out of the failed Arab Spring would be the following:

      1) We start taking a much harder line on people who trash our image abroad. We return the favor visciously and never let a slight against the honor of America go unpunished. If it goes unpunished; people in traditional cultures believe that it is obviously true. (I’ll have to throw up a blog on that later….)

      2) We stop thinking people in bumfrikastan *want* American culture. Culture is a form of moral and social software. You have to effectively demonstrate how it will upgrade the life of other people. Otherwise, they’ll be damned if you rip out what already works and sell them a different OS just because it is *Your* OS.

    • Common_Cents

      They want to skip the hard ground work, go right to “free and fair” elections. With the lazy left, the ends justify the means. That is why they unabashedly pursue redistribution of wealth, discrimination in form of affirmative action, etc….

      the left elitists suffer from guilt trips and get easily sucked into this thinking.