i think they're getting smaller

Egyptian Protests Live Updates from Huffington Post, while CNN reports Protesters head toward heart of Cairo as tanks stand by, as hundreds of protesters gather at Tahrir Square.

It's always tanks.

I was only a kid when Tiananmen Square happened, and that wasn't the first time a government unleash them on its own people, but it was the first time it penetrated what they really meant, what they were. Bombs were scary; planes with bombs were scarier. Missiles, guns, napalm, sarin gas, the power of well-armed, soulless military unleashed; compared to a hydrogen bomb, I wasn't seeing a giant, unwieldy, slow, awkward looking metal contraption as a threat, right up until that's exactly what it was.

Granted, I was below the age of reason, but now, intellectually, if asked which I'd rather face, hydrogen bomb shouldn't be the knee-jerk choice. I'm still sitting in front of the TV watching the people who seemed so small, fragile, and it didn't seem like you could outrun that. Even if it was slow, maybe that was because they never stopped. Even when you did.

Since then, they're almost a trademark of a government's loss of control over its citizens; they roll out, slow and merciless, faceless with the message, You are now the enemy.

It's always tanks.

But now it's also the internet, as giant and unwieldy, but never slow, and powerful the way a tank can't ever be, two things that herald collapse or revolution, tanks and killing the internet, and the internet, that I get. Egypt rolled out its tanks and cut off its internet, because a tank is huge and a person may seem very small when they stand before them, but they're so much larger than can be imagined when they don't have to stand alone.

Protesters in Venezuela took over the Egyptian Embassy in a show of solidarity for the people of Egypt. They returned the embassy to Egypt after speaking with their Foreign Minister.

Egypt Protests and Twitter Reacts including this:

RT@timbray: RT@Mpegg: The Internet is sad tonight and has the porchlight on for Egypt

Anonymous is declaring war on the Egyptian government, and return to root with mass faxing of wikilinks cables to Egypt, along with a group called Telecomix offering up their dialup and going to ham radio. Then they joined forces to get the internet back to Egypt one way or another.

Tanks seem smaller than I remember. Or maybe people are just getting larger.

Comments

[twistedchick]

Tank sizes vary. I think in the US we get used to thinking of the old Sherman tanks from war movies, and those are big enough to hold several tall people inside. I remember seeing the protests in Moscow about the occupation of Afghanistan a few years ago and being amazed at how small the tanks were; the guys in them were only a couple inches taller than me, one man per tank, and the tank itself looked about the size of an armored Lincoln Continental.

[scrollgirl]

I was 9 when Tiananmen Square happened and I remember my dad watching the news constantly. Yeah, the tank versus the man with the white shopping bag--I don't think I'll ever forget that image.

Wow. I kind of love that hackers are going to ham radio. Yay for people pulling together and making stuff happen!

[seperis]

Ham radio. Just, that's beautiful.

[vito_excalibur]

Isn't it? When one door closes, PRY OPEN A WINDOW WITH A CROWBAR.

[seperis]

Ham radio, faxes, people ham radio'ing in twitter messages, all we need is a goddamn telegraph or a pigeon. Because people would, and do it well.

Or CB radios. I just keep thinking up lists of all the ways that we're so far beyond the pony express. It's amazing.

[mrshamill]

We were watching it live on Al Jazeera this morning, it wasn't pretty, and I was really, really worried about the museum being looted (and I won't take bets about who's behind the looters, actually). Mubarak is an asshole, but he knows how to play the game and it's going to be damned hard to get him out of there. He's stuck like glue, the bastard.

I have a feeling this is going to end up a lot like it did in Iran. Dammit.

[nagasvoice]

The latest I've heard (LA Times and Sac Bee) is that police have pulled back completely, to the point of allowing fires and looting.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-egypt-protests,0,3322228.story

They also reported last night that the army is much more respected by the people, not involved in the kinds of abuses rumored from the police (an interesting comment in itself, one which I have no additional data point for, and which is certainly not typical of many repressive regimes I've heard of). They reported the soldiers are not stopping demonstrators at all, so it is a different situation than was the Chinese Army at Tienanmen Square.
iven the kind of think you learn from wikileaks, I'm not sure how far to trust such sources, either.

ETA: apparently young Egyptian guys formed up a cordon to protect the Egypian Museum, but nobody put out the fire in the neighboring political building set on fire, and that may damage it if it collapses onto the museum. It was not clear to me in any ther reports that allowing that to burn was putting the Museum at risk.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2011/01/egypt-antiquities-damaged-by-vandals-neighboring-building-collapse-feared.html

[seperis]

My God, that was a random comment. Sorry! It's been on my mind. I don't even own a gun and yet a part of me feels like I'm betraying my fundamental sense of right by not like, I don't know, taking over an embassy in solidarity or something?

Christ, the museums. *bites lip* Reading.

[seperis]

And replied agian to teh wrong person.

Teh museum thing is so tensing. Dammit.

[nagasvoice]

It is. Irreplaceable things. The invasion of Iraq caused their Topkapi Museum all kinds of looting and irreprable damage. But ordinary Egyptians standing together protect it, that's amazing. One of my flist folks on lj is an archeology prof (he gives great pix) who noticed that museums really aren't valued or much visited by the folks who live there (their funding seems to come largely from Germans or Americans) in most parts of the Middle East, so this really is different.

[seperis]

I was reading on the police versus the military too, and wondering about that. It makes sense, in a weird way, if the police and military are separate institutions, actually, which in coercive regimes, they usually aren't; authority is more absolute when the domestic is treated and controlled as a foreigners would be; the assumption in a regime is the people are as much enemies as a foreign power, which makes an interesting thought experiment about a dictatorship and it's powers literally being a foreign entity occupying a country, even if they are all the same people.

If the police and the army are separate, then the army isn't trained to see the people as the enemy; if the police are being used the way dictatorships usually use their entire army, then they do see the people as the enemy. What a really terrible way to do a dictatorship.

[nagasvoice]

Yes, and the pictures look pretty convincing that the Egyptian Army and police have totally separate loyalties. Interesting stuff.
I also found this al Jazeera comment on internet shutoff capabilities was interesting.
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/01/2011128796164380.html

[seperis]

I've wondered about my own reaction--about American reaction--to revolution, anywhere. People revolt, countries revolt, it always happens, always, but despite the fact the only revolution we've done against teh government (more or less) was at the founding of our country, we practically enshrine the concept as religious canon, thou shalt overthrow thy leaders if they are evil or asshats. We don't just frame our debates in those terms, we think in those terms. It's not that other countries don't, but reading, more and more I notice the imagery is seeped into everything in our literature, even the stuff that's supposed to represent status quo, even when the message is supposed to be anything but.

It doesn't matter where, why, or how, when we hear people, revolution, we're there.

I also think Palin's oh-so-clever crosshairs were disgusting, but I wonder if it was because she framed it in hunting people with guns, not using the guns as Paul Revere intended, to revolt against the government. It's part of the reason, I think, that it got hit so hard and the defenses of it were just so bizarre and sometimes plain dumb; it's like she entirely got and entirely missed the entire reason why it's enshrined in American hearts to own weapons, and NRA can try to make it more palatable by saying hunting, and we can say it's about protection, but no. It was never the right to bear arms to hunt deer, much less people. Hence, a poster of crosshairs like a sniper, a coward, someone who shoots from trees in the dark and runs away; not a revolutionary. The perfect connection broke; imagine if she'd actually known what she was doing with that and framed it to hit the American kink dead on.

Yeah, I've been reading on this and thinking a lot. Other countries, other people have that internal revolution mindset, but they, you know, live in countries where this actually happens or has reason to happen. Two hundred something years, and we're still waiting for the other shoe to drop.

[nagasvoice]

And yet paradoxically we're also busily exporting one of the most repressive ever regimes-- all those Koch-brothers-type corporatist business models, focusing on command and control of a very few emperors over many peasants. Tanks were the old-fashioned fascist version. The newer versions show up in movies like V-- the idea of drone spies that look like bugs, the idea of censorship firewalls in China, the whole Facebook lack of privacy, no accountability for people who are arrested and "disappeared", all that feeds into their fantasy.

I still don't get where they think creating Mubarik's type of two-tier system actually works, economically. All those educated people reduced to scrubbing toilets, were we just educating them to keep them from getting bored? Don't we have more important things for capable people to do?

[seperis]

And this, too. I was thinking individually as Americans, but that also discards American economic attitude, which is very much teh foundation of our current political climate, where "democracy" means "can get new avenues of cheap outsourcing", among other things.

I still don't get where they think creating Mubarik's type of two-tier system actually works, economically. All those educated people reduced to scrubbing toilets, were we just educating them to keep them from getting bored? Don't we have more important things for capable people to do?

There's an interesting theory on education and how to go about it to get the right kind of population. Unfortunately for regimes, keeping them illiterate and on the farm to subsistence scrubbing is no longer possible, but a certain amount of education can effectively neuter the population. I do not remember much more--it was a side note in political theory in college--but it was fascinating that a well-educated population can be paralyzed in teh same way that a serf-based one is. Its' almost the equivalent of educational profiling.

[vito_excalibur]

Damn, I would love to hear more about this.

[seperis]

I"m trying to remember if I even kept my books from then, or where they are. It was one of those throwaway points in the book that I always meant to follow up on, because it makes sense. I do wonder if there's ever been a working study combining education and political activism--not education level, which people seem to focus on, because we're not in a world anymore where control can be kept by ignorance, or we're fast approaching a world where that's not possible. It makes sense that the focus should shift to accommodate that.

(I'm actually googling this, but honestly, I'm not even sure what I'm asking for at this point.)

[the_future_modernes]

I'd totally love to hear more about this, if you ever find that book.

[the_future_modernes]

I really love this post and its comment section. Would you mind if I linked it to politics?

[seperis]

Go ahead! And thank you!

[harborshore.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this. ♥

[archaeologist-d.livejournal.com]

I can understand a little bit of why they are protesting. I went to Egypt last year on a cruise and the garbage hadn't been picked up in months, the canals had dead animals in them and yet people were still fishing there and corruption was rampant. I'm not sure that will change with a new government but hopefully things will get better for them.

[be-a-rebel.livejournal.com]

I think it's a time of breaking points. I live in a nation where oppression is the name of the game and we don't even blink as our rights are infringed. But I think breaking points are being reached across the world and no one cares about the tanks anymore. There comes a point in one's life where you are so beyond miserable, where life is so hard and such a struggle every moment of the day that the risk of death seems nothing compared to the risk of continuing to live like this.

I wish we'd march on our streets like they are marching on their's. I'm so proud of them.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I was researching your country's stock market! With two dictionaries! Islamabad Stock Exchange, sorry, it just hit me when I was answering your comment that three days ago I was trying to find English-language sites on the Pakistan and Lebanon markets.

I think it's a time of breaking points. I live in a nation where oppression is the name of the game and we don't even blink as our rights are infringed. But I think breaking points are being reached across the world and no one cares about the tanks anymore. There comes a point in one's life where you are so beyond miserable, where life is so hard and such a struggle every moment of the day that the risk of death seems nothing compared to the risk of continuing to live like this.

I feel weird saying I hope so, but it's honest--I do hope so. I hope, I guess, that it's good and peaceful, and no one gets hurt, but mostly, I hope its successful, that people are able to exercise their right to self-determination and end governments that are as much their enemy as any foreign power could be.

Tunisia and then Egypt start revolutions, all in a month; Tunisia still floors me. In an embarrassing way: I was researching stock markets and found one for Tunisia, was all irritated that it wasn't listed in Wikipedia, because hello, small or not, they had a stock exchange dammit, and then was utterly floored as I hit google to find their site that they'd decided that day to stage a revolution. One that no one had seen coming.

Apparently Anonymous saw it coming. And Telecomix, for that matter. I keep being surprised by people being surprised; Anonymous were always revolutionaries. I'm just surprised it took them so long to realize that themselves.

*hugs* Good luck.

[be-a-rebel.livejournal.com]

With us, we have so many internal matters in terms of religion/sects that the chance of us uniting under anything is just.....unthinkable. That's what makes us pathetic. We have democracy but we abuse it. It's not just our politicians who abuse it, it's us ourselves. I'm afraid I'm at a point of no hope.

But Tunisia and Egypt. They've floored me (interesting use of phrasing I know).

As for our stock sites....oh boy. Did you find anything in the end? I once tried to find out if a company was registered as a public limited company with the Islamabad Stock Exchange. At the end of the day, I almost cried. So I can understand your pain.

[vagabondage.livejournal.com]

a tank is huge and a person may seem very small when they stand before them, but they're so much larger than can be imagined when they don't have to stand alone.

I... just... YES! FUCK YES!

::Zen gives you a kiss on the forehead::

[apetslife.livejournal.com]

Something about that post in anonNews, with the cheerful thanks to anyone attacking testing their new host, just made my entire morning. Reading about the faxes and the radio signals, the people running workarounds through Tor, through the AUC servers that had outside proxies set up already, and off satellite phone signals, made me realize just how close we all are now. And how much harder it is to keep things secret and silent.

That can only be a good thing.

[wrenlet.livejournal.com]

From here (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/world/middleeast/30-egypt.html?_r=2&hp):

While some protesters clashed with police, army tanks expected to disperse the crowds in central Cairo and in the northern city of Alexandria instead became rest points and even, on occasion, part of the protests as anti-Mubarak graffiti were scrawled on them without interference from soldiers.

“Leave Hosni, you, your son and your corrupted party!” declared the graffiti on one tank as soldiers invited demonstrators to climb aboard and have their photographs taken with them.

*breathes*

There are a lot of things that make this different: Egypt isn't China, 2011 isn't 1989. But still, like you, when the tanks start to roll I hold my breath.

[trobadora]

Thank you for this post.

[stardustonsable.livejournal.com]

Tanks seem smaller than I remember. Or maybe people are just getting larger.
tears.

[yoiyami.livejournal.com]

I had not heard about the last chunk of information. Thank you!

Whenever I see a tank, it's always a sign of the originator's despair. Like, it's the last ditch effort because it worked once (worked horribly horribly once) but every time afterwards its gets increasingly less effective.

There's also the nightmare mental images of them being turning into moving coffins for the people inside, but that's probably only me.

(OT, but what is the best way to get a hold of you?)

[edana-ni-emer.livejournal.com]

The funny thing? If Anonymous ends up in the history books as other than a tiny footnote, I'll be utterly shocked. And yet... when they do shit like this, (as opposed to the horrible sociopathic bullshit they pull sometimes) they exemplify everything that's awesome about the internet, and everything that's awesome about the people who use it. You got a question? Someone on the internet knows the answer. You got a problem? Somebody on the internet's got your back.

I think I might be developing a little faith in humanity. ...it stings a bit. XD

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

But the wondrous thing about these tanks: The military is opening them up, stepping outside onto their tanks, and joining the protesters

The tanks, for once, are on the right side of history.

(Source: Al Jazeera film shown on AJ English last night) the protesters climbing onto the tanks are kissing and shaking the hands of the soldiers, not attacking them.

A fun response on one of the message boards I'm on:

There was a short scene from Alexandria (I think) which I felt was quite heartening. There was a tank in the middle of a sea of protesters. Soldiers were up on the tank and a civilian clambered up on the tank and stood on top of it, beaming with happiness. One of the soldiers went and spoke to him, motioning him off the tank. I think the conversation went something like this.

Civilian: I'M ON A TANK!
Soldier: Please step down from off the tank, sir.
Civilian: I'M ON A TANK!
Soldier: Please, sir, remove yourself from the tank.
Civilian: I'M ON A TANK!
Soldier: Sir, get off the tank.
Civilian: I'M ON A TANK!
Soldier: Get off my tank!
Civilian: I'M ON A TANK!
Soldier: GET OFF MY GODDAMN TANK!
Civilian: I'M ON A TANK!

The Army was also asking the citizens to disperse: so that they could tell distinguish between the protesters and the looters (the looters are presumed to be the police).

GO ARMY!

[clari-clyde.livejournal.com]

I was in grade school when Tiananmen crushed me. And I couldn’t understand why or how because only a few years earlier, People Power happened in the Philippines. And looking back, I am amazed at how much organizing happened without the internet and in a country and in a time where most people didn’t have phones.

I think the difference was that the filipinos knew how a free press worked even if they didn’t have it anymore. Likewise, there is an entire nation of Egyptians who lost internet for a night and might lose it again but not their memories of how a free internet works. The press and the internet are just tools. Here’s hoping that govt’s don’t catch on that what’s more important is how emboldened and entitled citizens feel.