Now that Egypt has had its revolution, to ask in which direction it should go is to ask a question along the line: “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” There is a reason why someone has asked this question in the first place. It is because we have a situation where two objects are tied so inextricably together that each has become both the parent and the offspring of the other. It so happens that we have a similar situation in human behavior where the countries that call themselves benevolent democracies are inextricably tied to the practice of savage colonialism. It is, therefore, tempting to ask: “Which came first, the claim to democratic rule or the urge to dominate and loot?” Britain, France, Spain, Holland, Belgium, Portugal, Japan, Turkey, America and Israel have at one time or another bathed in the pool of blood which they caused their victims to shed. And while everyone of these countries has ended the savage practice, Israel which is a neighbor of Egypt, continues to act at the same old level of savagery. It is acting badly in Palestine, a country and a people it has occupied for several decades already. Unfortunately, this is the background against which Egypt has lived its recent history and the background against which it will live for the foreseeable future.
Consequently, it is important to take a close look at the relationship that exists between colonialism and democracy -- all the more so because the regimes that practice colonialism fiercely call themselves democratic, a name they have adopted to communicate the sense that they are helpful to others, not harmful to them. To prove their point, the people who run such regimes have argued that democracies do not fight each other; the criterion that they want you to believe is the most important to consider when evaluating the behavior of nations. Well, even if we do accept this reasoning, we should not be surprised that those nations would be reluctant to fight each other -- it is that they have other more lucrative alternatives. In fact, what the colonial powers did more often than not was to get together, fight those who could not defend themselves, colonize them and exploit them to the maximum degree under the guise of helping them develop. For example, after signing the Sykes-Picot Agreement to cut up the middle East and share it between them, Britain and France who used to fight each other viciously – something they did for centuries -- became the best of friends. But after they had grabbed the colonies they coveted for a long time, the two countries claimed to have turned democratic. In the meantime, when Germany tried to negotiate a share of the South African natural resources to supply its own growing industrial base with raw materials, Britain and France said no deal and a war ensued.
A history that runs along this same line has unfolded almost everywhere in Africa, in the Americas and in South Asia where the colonial powers made peace among themselves and launched wars of aggression against the indigenous people they occupied and looted. As to the Asia-Pacific theater, this is where America and Japan have clashed while competing to satisfy their national ambitions with regard to the natural riches of China, the Philippines and a few other places where they fought to colonize and exploit the indigenous people, not to democratize them or help them develop as was the original claim. Of course, we can ask a series of “what if” questions and come up with a number of scenarios as to what would have happened if Japan or Germany had won the war. One of the scenarios might show that having secured a steady feed of raw materials for their industries, the previously autocratic regimes were pressured by their own people to open up the system and democratize it. Another scenario might show that the defeated democracies have descended into an autocratic form of rule to cope with the harshness of life, having lost their colonies and being left with no one to exploit which made it necessary for them to live by the sweat of their foreheads not the foreheads of the people they said they came to help.
Yes, knowing what might have happened under one scenario or another would have gone a long way to answer the question: “Which came first, the claim to democracy or the urge to dominate and loot?” But since we cannot be certain of something that has not happened to events that have come and gone, we are left with only our intuition and our human logic to help us solve the riddle and come up with an answer. To this end, the first thing we do is look to see how democracies get into a war and how they exit the thing. Simply stated, the democratic regimes get into a war when they whip up enough popular appeal for it – a practice known as demagoguery -- and they exit the war when they begin to lose it or when a stalemate develops. When this happens, the long drawn combat begins to bore the public and goes on to erode its confidence. At this point, the war becomes a political liability and the politicians who used to promote it by demagoguing everyone and everything in sight now run away from it and disappear in thin air. Thus, it can be stated with confidence that the wars which the democracies launch begin with a solicitation that is based on a false premise and they end up in a stalemate or end up in the defeat of the democracy even if a few victories are scored by the forces of the latter at the beginning of the war.
At this juncture, we cannot help but note that Hitler was elected democratically, that he became one of the greatest demagogues of all time and that he was defeated in the war that he started. And while the American President Lyndon Johnson was not a demagogue, his administration had engineered the Gulf of Tonkin incident to escalate the American involvement in Vietnam and turn it into a full scale war where America was ultimately defeated. Also, whatever George W. Bush was, the people who ran the White House in his name have conspired with the Israelis to make it look like Iraq had weapons of mass destruction upon which the Bush people started a war in the Middle East with the view of serving the interest of the Israelis. But when America got caught in a military stalemate, the top brass mounted a piece of theater they called the “Surge” to save their own skins and the reputation of their military. They rode on the back of this surge to accede to the demands of the Iraqi insurgents without appearing to surrender to them. The Americans even declared victory and started to exit Iraq having accomplished nothing that would serve their own interest or the interest of the Israelis. All in all, the American adventure in Iraq turned out to be a horrendous waste of money and of the lives that were lost on both sides but no one in America bothered to grieve because having celebrated a false victory at an earlier time, they could not bring themselves to grieve the bitter defeat.
Thus, it can be seen that treachery is the hallmark of the relationship that a democracy maintains with the rest of the world. In fact, treachery is also the relationship that a democracy maintains with its people. This can be verified by the way that the subject of human right is treated in the democratic regimes as opposed to the way it is treated in the autocratic ones. In a nutshell, the autocracies will give you a list of the rules by which to play and a list of the punishments that go with the breaking of each rule. You break one rule and the state will punish you as promised; and will do so in the open to set an example for others to see and be warned. As to the democracies, they will give you a list of the rights they say are inalienable to you but then whisper in your ear what you must do to pay for the privilege of being granted each inalienable right. If you decide to test the sincerity of the system and agree to go along with this diabolic scheme by doing what they tell you to do, they will renege on their word and raise the price they ask you to pay. And they will keep raising the price for as long as you will agree to pay a higher one. This is why societies eventually clamor for someone like Hitler to rise among them and put an end to a system gone mad.
What this says is that the way the art of democracy is practiced nowadays is a bad one or that the concept of democracy itself is a false concept. Which is it? To answer the question we must begin by reminding ourselves that to join the civil service is to acquire the power to govern over the public and to serve at the pleasure of that same public. Thus, the politician of the democracy is by profession both the boss and the subordinate of the public. In other words he or she is the chicken and the egg rolled into one. This being the case, every politician learns that to last in this profession they must be of two faces and must learn to speak from both sides of the mouth. In short, they practice hypocrisy and call it politics. And when they move from the local arena to the international one, they take that lesson with them and deal with their foreign counterparts in the same double-faced way. This translates into the quest to dominate every situation in which they find themselves while pretending to adhere to the rules of openness and democracy. If and when they get to be the dominant player, they engage in such democratic practices as to facilitate the looting of the weaker jurisdictions. This is the modern form of democratic colonialism that is slowly replacing the gunboat diplomacy of olden days.
In the final analysis, what this means is that because the word democracy remains badly defined, every charlatan and his apprentice hides behind the word and uses it to characterize what they do when, in fact, they practice political Satanism of the most abhorrent kind.
Which brings us to the original question: In which direction should Egypt go now that it has had its revolution? The answer is simple: don't be chicken when it comes to trying something new but in the end make sure not lay an egg or get eggs all over your faces.