Orderly transitions

February 1, 2011

THE REVOLTS in Tunisia and Egypt are momentous, and could be the first in a row of dominoes that includes Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other Arab autocracies. There is some suggestion it might even extend to China by pushing up the price of crude oil to intolerable levels and undermining the country’s economy.

We now start to hear phrases like “orderly transitions” and one wonders how the 83-year old Hosni Mubarak could possibly consent to such a move. He probably already dreams of the lavish tributes the grateful people should rightfully pay to him when he finally dies, and will be reluctant to depart and thereby acknowledge such popular hostility, which he probably imagines has been stirred up by malicious troublemakers.

Mubarak has been propped up for years by the United States, and his security forces have been involved in such egregious and squalid acts of terror and mendacity that many of his opponents have naturally been driven to extremes like the Muslim Brotherhood, an unpleasant movement made famous by the spiritual leader of Islamic fundamentalism, Sayed Qutb, and filled with all of Qutb’s pathological revulsions about modernity and the uncleanliness of change. Nevertheless, as Slavoj Zizek comments in today’s Guardian, Islamic fundamentalism has been conspicuous by its absence in the revolts in both Egypt and Tunisia. Fundamentalism is, clearly, the last resort of an immiserated, ill-educated, resentful population – the reflex of a people who have nothing left to lose and escape into the unrealities of religious dogma. 

But despite the fears about extremist Islamism, this isn’t solely an Arab matter. China has centuries of this – centuries of oppression followed by decades of rebellion followed by several more centuries of oppression. One hopes there can be “orderly transitions” towards something more democratic but it doesn’t always work out like that.

The only way the hopelessly downtrodden masses can rebel is through an obsessive, paramilitary elite that ends up creating a new class of relentlessly and hopelessly downtrodden citizens once it wins power, as happened with the Taiping rebels in the nineteenth century and the Communists in the twentieth.

The oppressive state creates the conditions for the emergence of a backward but thoroughly disciplined organisation like the Falungong, whose identity – in a dialectic process – is sharpened and intensified and made more extreme by the violence of the state. As Lu Xun once put it, the revolutionaries of today become the oppressors of tomorrow. The pressures build up and spill out. Rage has to find its outlet.