The OP is about Tunisians and Egyptians, who are North Africans. The “apes” racist-connotation thing is with Blacks - sub-Saharan Africans.
It was quite obviously chosen as a pecking-order comparison, not a racist one.
So no harm, no foul.
Also, in this case the regime is dependent on the huge amount of aid it gets from the US, which is only a politically tenable thing to do here because the regime at least goes through some of the motions of being democratic. Massive protests get international attention and make it a lot harder for all parties involved to pretend the country is a democracy. Doubly so if the regime uses harsh measures to suppress them.
Sorry if that’s the way I came across.
Let me try to re-frame my curiosity (and that’s all it is) with other words: If the OP had casually (and un-ironically) called an woman he interacted with a “broad” I’d also be curious to know where he/she was from, so great would I perceive the cultural divide between us to be.
Perhaps in that instance, my curiosity would not rise to the level of obliging me to post the question, but it would still be piqued.
Protests such as the ones in Egypt bring the leader’s political enemies out of the woodwork and give them an excuse to put the boot in. In Egypt’s case it as the army who came out and said they thought the protesters had a point and wouldn’t stop them. It was this that has undermined Mubarak.
This seems to me to be true, and probably the most direct cause of effectiveness of protest, do not forget that it’s really not easy to repress a huge crowd; even if they’re unarmed and you’ve got a gun, you won’t last against a hundred people who can pick up sticks and stones, if they’re willing to go far enough.
The power of police and military against a population is mostly imaginary.
They don’t always leave.
Usually when they do, it’s another elite in the power structure that tells him it’s time to go. To use your gorilla example, when the omegas start jeering at the alpha, the beta ape pounds his chest and takes over as the alpha.
So what happened in China with the Tiananmen protests? Why did machine-gunning the protesters work there?
Didn’t really work out quite that way in China though…
Communists have an inherent advantage over dictators, in that there are a lot of people who genuinely believe in Communism. At times they are a minority in their country, which is why Communist regimes need to resort to force sometimes, but there are generally a lot of them. So a Communist regime needs to make sure that key posts in the government and military are held by true believers, and they will generally be safe. By contrast, dictatorships are not something that people genuinely believe in - most of the key insiders who support them do so only out of self interest. Mass protests which suggest the possibility of regime change also change the perception of self-interest for these insiders.
The way it played out, in the Chinese case the army was loyal to the regime and was willing to crush the rebellion. The Egyptian army is apparently less willing to do so.
We should note, of course, that Mubarak has not been ousted just yet, and he must be a clever fellow to have survived in office all these years. So he may yet have some sort of survival strategy. The facts that the army is apparently neutral and that Mubarak has publicly made such significant concessions bespeak a very weak hand, but I wouldn’t completely write him off just yet.
Well he’ll need to be a very clever man indeed if he plans to overcome the election of his replacement in August. He has announced he won’t be running for reelection. Of course, if Egypt is at war with Israel in August…
I don’t take seriously the claims of politicians who say they are not running for election. If Mubarak gets things under control he might find some excuse to change his mind.
That said, it’s more likely that Mubarak is not looking to survive past the next election. He’s an old man as it is. A more realistic goal for him is to preside over an orderly change in leadership, leaving his government structure in control with some ally of his at the top, versus a collapse of his entire government. The key objectives for him here are to preserve some influence and - more importantly - to avoid being thrown in jail or worse by the next ruler. I would think this is what it’s mostly about, at this time.
I think there are several reasons for this. First, the Chinese government is much more repressive than Mubarak has ever been. They had no qualms about killing every protester they could and throwing the rest of them in prison for a very long time. They also didn’t rely on aid from the West like Egypt does. Frankly, the Communist Party didn’t give a damn what other countries thought about what they did.
The second thing I think makes a difference has to do with the degree of control the Chinese had over internal media. Things like the Internet, texting, etc. didn’t exist at the time so organizing protests outside Beijing were virtually impossible. If I remember correctly the government actually brought in military units from a different part of the country to crush the protest. These troops had no real idea what the protests were about or what their demands were, just that they were subversives who had to be stopped. I think they may not have even spoken the same language or dialect as the protesters for the most part.
I wrote this based on what I remember from the time so I may very well have mucked up some of the details but I do think I got the broader ideas right. Please feel free to correct any egregious errors I may have made.
Gary Brecher, The War Nerd recently had an article about the situation in Egypt and in part had this to say:
It’s working in Tunisia and Egypt because they’re not big enough powers on the world stage to get away with massacring their people. Aside from whatever monetary aid they may receive directly from the USA and other democratic world powers, going the full-despot route will sour relations in regard to trade relations and UN resolutions and other forms of cooperation. These governments will not operate well as international pariahs.
It didn’t work in China because China is a world power in its own right, and commands enough clout, both dilpomatic and economic, that they can weather the condemnation without any real ill effects.
A dictator in Mubarak’s situation has several options and several constraints. One of the larger constraints is that he doesn’t want to lose international support, which would surely follow if the police or military is seen gunning down civilians. Another constraint is the fear that the police or military would refuse to follow these orders. A dictator never wants to give an order to the people with the guns that ends up being ignored, because once one order is ignored, it’s very easy to keep ignoring orders, and the whole house of cards comes down.
Mubarak can try to portray the demonstrations as creating chaos, and thereby justify sending in the police to break up the demonstrations. However, the demonstrators were able to largely foil this by sheer numbers, and it doesn’t make good press for police to be seen brutalizing nonviolent protesters.
The military is even more problematic for similar reasons, plus the military is an entity unto itself in Egypt.
However, according the news last night, Mubarak has found a third option: non-uniformed Mubarak “supporters” (i.e. thugs) are doing the dirty work, which is one large reason why the protests have turned violent in the last couple of days. The Mubarak “supporters” reportedly include paid thugs and police in civilian clothes.
Syria’s reaction in 1982 to an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood:
Evidently, force can work - if applied brutally enough and without a thought for the consequences to innocent civilians. The Muslim Botherhood’s Syrian branch was broken and the Assad Regime survives to this day.
Mind you, it would presumably be a bigger deal if the Egyptian President were to flatten Cairo (the Hama Massacre went mostly unnoticed by the outside world, aside from Western national officials, who denounced it).
The fact is that the Egyptian army has shown it will not obey any such orders.
“The people you are after are the people you depend on. We cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances, we guard you while you sleep. Do not fuck with us.”
Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that if the dictator has to actively use force all the time to make people do what he tells them to do (instead of the usual situation where he can just leave the threat in the background and occasionally make an example of somebody), he’s in an untenable situation. For one thing, the former situation costs a lot more and drags down economic productivity, making for a double-whammy push toward bankruptcy.
Mass protests are a sign that the “passive threat with occasional examples” mode of dictatorship just ain’t cutting it any more.
I read it as a reference to the basic social wiring of primates (humans included), with no intent of racial overtones.
Demonstrations are the first step to violence. Usually, demonstrations are a warning that violence will follow unless demands are met.
However, if the ruling party has overwhelming force, a demonstration has no value. This is Ghandi’s gift to humanity: the force of the passive demonstration in affecting world opinion, which then causes change, indirectly.
Afaik, no demonstration has been successful unless it attracts more people than the standing army.