Egypt, Freedom, and America

Regular reader, commenter and friend-of-the-blog Ben Abbott forwards a particularly egregious hijacking of American history, comparing the recent events in Egypt to the American Revolution.


Well, it warms the hippie heart to see hundreds of thousands of "the people" in the street chanting and Raging against the Machine. Surely they are on the side of the angels! [Unless it's a pro-life rally, which can be safely ignored but that's another story, int it...]

I'll hold off on the warm & fuzzy for the moment. We don't even know yet what sort of "freedom" the "Egyptian street" is demanding. Perhaps it's to live like Americans in a bourgeois neo-liberal democracy [or let's say Swedes, whose society is so much warmer & fuzzier than ours, eh?]. Or perhaps it's to start up again with the Jews and to live in a less secular state. Or perhaps it's just that grain prices have gone through the roof. Riots over the price of bread are as old as civilization itself.

In 2011, after the incompetence of Yeltsin-era freedom, the Russkis are back with some relief to KGB veteran Vladimir Putin, because liberty is useless without order.

And despite the rather expansive claims and comparisons to our Founding Fathers' own fight for their and our liberty, Egyptian youths Twittering or standing in a park screaming at an army that won't shoot back is no analogue to actually fighting for one's freedom---dying---actually getting shot at, or suffering through a deadly winter at Valley Forge.

There were no Storming of the Bastille moments, or the fall of the Berlin Wall, or Yeltsin-on-a-tank. [Not even toppling Saddam's statue, albeit quite clumsily, as we recall.]

From 1000s of miles away, we certainly can't pretend to know what the Egyptian people want, where they want to go from here. What I suspect is that they don't know either.

"Soldiers, officers, generals," [Yeltsin] boomed. "The clouds of terror and dictatorship are gathering over the whole country. They must not be allowed to bring eternal night."

Yeah, yeah. Mankind has been there, done that, over and over and over again. That's not how the American Revolution went down. Unlike America, Russia suffocated on its newfound freedom and brought back a Putin. The Storming of the Bastille resulted in Emperor Napoleon.

This American wishes Egypt and the Egyptians the best. All men chafe against tyranny. But opposing tyranny is not the same as fighting---and dying---for freedom. One fights for freedom not just for himself, but for his fellow man and woman, and for his children and their children.

"THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value."
---T. Paine, The Crisis, distributed to Washington's troops at Valley Forge, Winter, 1776