The problem is they starting bombing, full stop.
A people's Revolution
- Thread starter Avatar
- Start date
-
In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik (@Rood) is joined by CEO Duncan Drasdo and Financial Director Andy Green from the Manchester United Supporters Trust for a special episode on all things behind the scenes at Old Trafford including a brief history of MUST and their aims today, views on INEOS and Sir Jim Ratcliffe so far, and the Old Trafford regeneration.
The problem is they starting bombing, full stop.
Absolutely. They should have used all might and power to put pressure on all sides if needed, and make clear that negotiations are imperativ. The whole bloody mess could have been avoided big time.
That would have been ideal, but the truth is the Serb-dominated Yugoslavian government was doomed the second they refused to implement the neoliberal values forced on them by the US.
I've gotten back to work, now the winter is coming to a close...
Good read over the past 5 or so pages. I was with Raoul up until I came to this post.
Response: Not if you ask Noam Chomsky. One of his books outlines how the 100's of millions given to Columbia was used to clear out whole swaths of territory (people) for industry, by the most brutal means. The details are too graphic ~ even for the Caf.
Nice to see another Chomskyite on the CE, that's restored some faith in humanity for me.
State Security is being taken down in Egypt. That could be even bigger than Mubarak. Many of their HQ's are under army control now after protests since few days ago. We're planning a major protest in a couple of hours next to SS HQ in Cairo or "The Capital of Inferno" as we call it. This is like our Bastille 
If the Colonel starts to win it will be too late to intervene.
Congratulations.State Security is being taken down in Egypt. That could be even bigger than Mubarak. Many of their HQ's are under army control now after protests since few days ago. We're planning a major protest in a couple of hours next to SS HQ in Cairo or "The Capital of Inferno" as we call it. This is like our Bastille
Gaddafi's tanks moving on Zawiya. This won't end well.
..
Interesting interview with Gene Sharp here. Criticises the methods of the Libyan uprising - eulogises the Egyptians though - and unequivocally advocates against US/NATO intervention. Slightly long, hence the spoiler.
People the world over have taken Gene Sharp’s path from dictatorship to democracy
THIS IS the way the world changes. An ageing American academic with an idée fixe writes pamphlets in the jungles of Burma, which are gathered into a book in 1993, From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation.
“I thought that would be it,” says Dr Gene Sharp. “For nearly a decade it was. And then things started to move.”
An Indonesian student bought the book in Rangoon and took it back to Jakarta, where it was prefaced by a future president and used to fight military dictatorship. Another man, from California, gave it to the Serbs who drove Slobodan Milosevic from office. Sharp’s ideas took hold, fuelling “colour revolutions” across the former Soviet bloc.
In the newly liberated Baltic states, he was feted as a hero. Today, his book has been translated into 34 languages, and counting.
The Serbs of Otpor! (Resistance!) trained Egyptians in Sharp’s nonviolent ways. Peter Ackerman, one of Sharp’s former students, also trained Tunisians and Egyptians. The Muslim Brotherhood posted From Dictatorship to Democracy on their website.
Ruaridh Arrow, who is directing a film about Sharp, reports seeing Egyptians in Tahrir Square last month reading the book by torchlight in the shadow of tanks. One day, Arrow found a protester clutching Sharp’s list of 198 methods of nonviolent action. The Egyptian had never heard of the American academic.
Sharp, a retired political scientist, considered by many to be the world’s foremost expert on nonviolent revolution, lives in apparent poverty in a crumbling row house in working-class east Boston. At the age of 83, his voice sometimes trails off. He is pencil thin. His jeans are cinched up with a leather belt.
There is no plaque on the door, nothing to indicate that a man who has been spoken of as a possible Nobel Peace Prize laureate lives here. Over the years, the leaders of Venezuela, Burma and Iran have denounced Sharp. He doesn’t want his address published. Does he fear for his life? “No,” he says. “I’m not frightened, just cautious.”
Funding for the Albert Einstein Institution – named for the genius who prefaced Sharp’s first book – has dwindled. He once had 11 staff members. Jamila Raqib, a beautiful Afghan immigrant and university graduate, is his executive director and sole full-time employee. They work on the ground floor of the house Sharp bought in 1968.
With the success of the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings, in part inspired by him, Sharp’s fame has spread. A half dozen journalists beat a path to his door every day. He receives them in a room with peeling plaster, sagging bookshelves and piles of newspapers. Sally, the bear-like dog Sharp rescued from an animal shelter, rumbles in the labyrinth of document boxes. Raqib is guardian angel, watching anxiously that Sharp doesn’t slip on ice outside, offering to call a taxi when journalists overstay their allotted time.
The uprising in Egypt is a source of pride to Sharp. It’s almost a textbook case, and he wrote the textbook. “The Egyptians did what Gandhi said: they cast off fear, chanting, ‘peaceful, peaceful, peaceful’,” Sharp says. “They did it amazingly well, for a demonstration of more than one million people”.
Sharp’s books emphasise the central importance of planning. The Chinese students he met on Tianamen Square in 1989 “didn’t use their brains,” he says. “They should have followed the first vote of the students to leave, declared victory and dispersed. There were demonstrations in 50 Chinese cities. People thought the government was about to fall.”
He has visited Tibet and met the Dalai Lama. “The Tibetans haven’t developed a plan, a strategy,” Sharp says, alluding disparagingly to the Dalai Lama’s gentle “middle way”.
But in Egypt, Sharp says, “It looks like there might have been a master plan.” It is better, he adds, if there is not one leader but many.
In two specific ways, the Egyptians seem to have followed Sharp’s rulebook. They refused to negotiate with Mubarak and they won over the military.
Sharp’s admonition never to negotiate with dictators “was not a popular viewpoint” when he wrote it. “It’s hard realpolitik,” he explains. “If a dictator wants safe passage to an international airport, you can give him that. Dictators will always negotiate to strengthen their own position.” The Egyptian opposition identified and neutralised Mubarak’s principal “pillar of support,” the military, as advocated by Sharp. But, he warns in Dictatorship to Democracy, military coups against dictators often go wrong because they “leave in place the existing maldistribution of power between the population and the elite in control of the government and its military forces”. The core idea of Sharp’s do-it-yourself kit for nonviolent revolution is that one cannot fight a dictatorship on its terms. “By choosing to compete in the areas of military forces, supplies of ammunition, weapons technology and the like, resistance movements tend to put themselves at a distinct disadvantage,” he writes.
Sharp believes nonviolent action can be effective against the most reprehensible regimes, even Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gadafy, if protesters are willing to sacrifice their lives. “People are always trying to find the limits [of nonviolent protest],” he says. “People believe in violence, almost as a religious principle.” Sharp claims no paternity for the uprising in Libya. “I don’t know how it started, but I presume they were imitating Egypt,” he says. “Things are not looking good in Libya . . . The Libyans are not acting according to my writings.” What should the US do? “Stay out!” Sharp says emphatically. “Don’t mess it up! The US can make pronouncements, as long as they do nothing.”
This frail old man gives his books away on the internet, because he wants to spread his ideas. But he is not a pacifist. The son of an itinerant Protestant pastor, he says he was disappointed with the Quakers in his youth. “I was a pacifist, but I went beyond that,” he says. “Pacifists are identified by what they will not do . . . You don’t get rid of violence by telling people what not to do. You don’t get rid of war by telling people it’s wicked. You only get rid of war if people have something else they can do which works better. Gandhi was not a pacifist; he was a pioneer of war without violence.”
Sharp rejects the very word “nonviolence”. “It’s sloppy,” he says. “It means anything you want it to mean, or nothing that you want it to mean. It’s important that it be nonviolent action, nonviolent struggle, nonviolent resistance – people power.”
Sharp won’t let me photograph him in his rooftop orchid garden. “It helps people who have a stereotype; there’s this weirdo who does this nonviolent thing and he also grows orchids and you don’t have to take him too seriously,” he explains. But he’s happy to pose beside the torn picture of Gandhi that an Indian student gave him in 1949. He had it at Oxford, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on The Politics of Nonviolent Action in the 1960s.
After Egypt, Sharp says, “The assumption that you have to invade a country to free people from a dictator doesn’t hold up anymore.” Before that, “The billions of dollars spent on Nato did not liberate one person in eastern Europe or the Baltics. They liberated themselves. The secret is to liberate yourself.”
THIS IS the way the world changes. An ageing American academic with an idée fixe writes pamphlets in the jungles of Burma, which are gathered into a book in 1993, From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation.
“I thought that would be it,” says Dr Gene Sharp. “For nearly a decade it was. And then things started to move.”
An Indonesian student bought the book in Rangoon and took it back to Jakarta, where it was prefaced by a future president and used to fight military dictatorship. Another man, from California, gave it to the Serbs who drove Slobodan Milosevic from office. Sharp’s ideas took hold, fuelling “colour revolutions” across the former Soviet bloc.
In the newly liberated Baltic states, he was feted as a hero. Today, his book has been translated into 34 languages, and counting.
The Serbs of Otpor! (Resistance!) trained Egyptians in Sharp’s nonviolent ways. Peter Ackerman, one of Sharp’s former students, also trained Tunisians and Egyptians. The Muslim Brotherhood posted From Dictatorship to Democracy on their website.
Ruaridh Arrow, who is directing a film about Sharp, reports seeing Egyptians in Tahrir Square last month reading the book by torchlight in the shadow of tanks. One day, Arrow found a protester clutching Sharp’s list of 198 methods of nonviolent action. The Egyptian had never heard of the American academic.
Sharp, a retired political scientist, considered by many to be the world’s foremost expert on nonviolent revolution, lives in apparent poverty in a crumbling row house in working-class east Boston. At the age of 83, his voice sometimes trails off. He is pencil thin. His jeans are cinched up with a leather belt.
There is no plaque on the door, nothing to indicate that a man who has been spoken of as a possible Nobel Peace Prize laureate lives here. Over the years, the leaders of Venezuela, Burma and Iran have denounced Sharp. He doesn’t want his address published. Does he fear for his life? “No,” he says. “I’m not frightened, just cautious.”
Funding for the Albert Einstein Institution – named for the genius who prefaced Sharp’s first book – has dwindled. He once had 11 staff members. Jamila Raqib, a beautiful Afghan immigrant and university graduate, is his executive director and sole full-time employee. They work on the ground floor of the house Sharp bought in 1968.
With the success of the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings, in part inspired by him, Sharp’s fame has spread. A half dozen journalists beat a path to his door every day. He receives them in a room with peeling plaster, sagging bookshelves and piles of newspapers. Sally, the bear-like dog Sharp rescued from an animal shelter, rumbles in the labyrinth of document boxes. Raqib is guardian angel, watching anxiously that Sharp doesn’t slip on ice outside, offering to call a taxi when journalists overstay their allotted time.
The uprising in Egypt is a source of pride to Sharp. It’s almost a textbook case, and he wrote the textbook. “The Egyptians did what Gandhi said: they cast off fear, chanting, ‘peaceful, peaceful, peaceful’,” Sharp says. “They did it amazingly well, for a demonstration of more than one million people”.
Sharp’s books emphasise the central importance of planning. The Chinese students he met on Tianamen Square in 1989 “didn’t use their brains,” he says. “They should have followed the first vote of the students to leave, declared victory and dispersed. There were demonstrations in 50 Chinese cities. People thought the government was about to fall.”
He has visited Tibet and met the Dalai Lama. “The Tibetans haven’t developed a plan, a strategy,” Sharp says, alluding disparagingly to the Dalai Lama’s gentle “middle way”.
But in Egypt, Sharp says, “It looks like there might have been a master plan.” It is better, he adds, if there is not one leader but many.
In two specific ways, the Egyptians seem to have followed Sharp’s rulebook. They refused to negotiate with Mubarak and they won over the military.
Sharp’s admonition never to negotiate with dictators “was not a popular viewpoint” when he wrote it. “It’s hard realpolitik,” he explains. “If a dictator wants safe passage to an international airport, you can give him that. Dictators will always negotiate to strengthen their own position.” The Egyptian opposition identified and neutralised Mubarak’s principal “pillar of support,” the military, as advocated by Sharp. But, he warns in Dictatorship to Democracy, military coups against dictators often go wrong because they “leave in place the existing maldistribution of power between the population and the elite in control of the government and its military forces”. The core idea of Sharp’s do-it-yourself kit for nonviolent revolution is that one cannot fight a dictatorship on its terms. “By choosing to compete in the areas of military forces, supplies of ammunition, weapons technology and the like, resistance movements tend to put themselves at a distinct disadvantage,” he writes.
Sharp believes nonviolent action can be effective against the most reprehensible regimes, even Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gadafy, if protesters are willing to sacrifice their lives. “People are always trying to find the limits [of nonviolent protest],” he says. “People believe in violence, almost as a religious principle.” Sharp claims no paternity for the uprising in Libya. “I don’t know how it started, but I presume they were imitating Egypt,” he says. “Things are not looking good in Libya . . . The Libyans are not acting according to my writings.” What should the US do? “Stay out!” Sharp says emphatically. “Don’t mess it up! The US can make pronouncements, as long as they do nothing.”
This frail old man gives his books away on the internet, because he wants to spread his ideas. But he is not a pacifist. The son of an itinerant Protestant pastor, he says he was disappointed with the Quakers in his youth. “I was a pacifist, but I went beyond that,” he says. “Pacifists are identified by what they will not do . . . You don’t get rid of violence by telling people what not to do. You don’t get rid of war by telling people it’s wicked. You only get rid of war if people have something else they can do which works better. Gandhi was not a pacifist; he was a pioneer of war without violence.”
Sharp rejects the very word “nonviolence”. “It’s sloppy,” he says. “It means anything you want it to mean, or nothing that you want it to mean. It’s important that it be nonviolent action, nonviolent struggle, nonviolent resistance – people power.”
Sharp won’t let me photograph him in his rooftop orchid garden. “It helps people who have a stereotype; there’s this weirdo who does this nonviolent thing and he also grows orchids and you don’t have to take him too seriously,” he explains. But he’s happy to pose beside the torn picture of Gandhi that an Indian student gave him in 1949. He had it at Oxford, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on The Politics of Nonviolent Action in the 1960s.
After Egypt, Sharp says, “The assumption that you have to invade a country to free people from a dictator doesn’t hold up anymore.” Before that, “The billions of dollars spent on Nato did not liberate one person in eastern Europe or the Baltics. They liberated themselves. The secret is to liberate yourself.”
The BBC is saying that the Qaddafi supporters have Zawiya under siege right now. Anyone know if food and supplies could possibly to be shipped in since it's on the coast?
fecking hell, this could invite chaos. Normal Egyptian Citizens are inside State Security Main HQ now and found many files/Hard Drives/ Folders..etc.. Supposedly they are just protecting the papers till the DA comes, but def. many will be leaked. This could be dangerous for the country as a whole
Sounds like a bit of anarchy at the moment
Not to that extent.. Things are improving not going backward. main problem we have now is that the police and the people are uh.. pissed from each other !!
This morning's Sunday Times is reporting that an SAS unit and a British diplomat have been taken 'hostage' in Libya. This is going to highly significant, if accurate. Not least embarrassing for the supposedly most elite force in the world.
If true, how did they manage to get captured? They didn't go in in full battle gear with guns and everything waving the Union Jack around, did they? You would think the SAS would be a little more subtle and work on their disguise to blend in. Given the chaos, how difficult would it be to get 9 people in dressed as rebels with AKs and find some hole in the wall while they try to set up a meeting with the rebel leadership?
Shit happens, it's not as though the lines of communication are that reliable around there
I can't believe these guys didn't blend in with the Libyan rebels:
Technically they've succeded by getting captured as they've made contact with the opposition
So the British Govt are now saying, they were a small 'diplomatic team' sent to talk to Rebel Leaders.
Nice nice....
Nice nice....
The reason they got captures is pretty simple they probably were arranging meetings with rebel leaders and then were caught.
I posted a few pages back that it comes as no surpriuse that Libya is crawling with foreign agents trying to weasel their way into whoever comes to power next. The west care not one iota whether the Libyans get democracy as long as the oil and money flows through Europe / US.
I posted a few pages back that it comes as no surpriuse that Libya is crawling with foreign agents trying to weasel their way into whoever comes to power next. The west care not one iota whether the Libyans get democracy as long as the oil and money flows through Europe / US.
Mubarak's name in English on his suit.Clip in Arabic, but doesn't matter
That's piss-taking gone to a new level.Saudi Arabian troops enter Bahrain as regime asks for help to quell uprising | World news | The Guardian
Ruling families sticking together. The sooner the Middle East rids itself of these parasites, the better.
Disgraceful. Utterly disgraceful.
A protester has supposedly shot dead a Saudi soldier in Bahrain, as a result a State of Emergency has been declared indefinitely.
Things are going to be very very ugly now.........Look out for loads of dead Shias.
Things are going to be very very ugly now.........Look out for loads of dead Shias.
Iran has warned against any attacks against Shia in Bahrain.
This is becoming tense
This is becoming tense
Breaking News: The Notorious Egyptian State Security apparatus has been disbanded !!
Yes, but has the State of Emergency been lifted? It was in place for 30+ years was it not?
yes. but the new constitutional amendments and the new constitution will lift it.
That would be the excuse US needs to flat them if they attack the Saudis.
A lot of huffing and puffing for internal consumption. There are too many US assets around the Gulf for Iran to do something silly
The Bahraini Government are apparently moving closer to a Qaddafi-esque model of violent crackdown, which will definitely cause a lot of bloodshed, particularly with Saudi military now coming to do the King of Bahrain's dirty work.
The Libyan rebels are going to be routed and Bahrain restores order through Saudi support. People want freedom and the EU in particular sits on its hands.
This feels like Iraq in 1991, especially in relation to Libya. It wouldn't surprise me if 15 years down the line an expensive and costly intervention occurs to remove Gaddafi, even though it could and should have happened now. I am not looking forward to reading about the crackdown and suppression.
This feels like Iraq in 1991, especially in relation to Libya. It wouldn't surprise me if 15 years down the line an expensive and costly intervention occurs to remove Gaddafi, even though it could and should have happened now. I am not looking forward to reading about the crackdown and suppression.
This is what I feared the Iraq war would do - make it too difficult politically to intervene when we actually need to.
It should have happened 20 years ago when he was connected to Lockerbie and the IRA.
Can someone please assassinate his son already?
First bombing raid on Bengazi at the moment.