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

[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.