Category: History

Only History Will Judge the Egyptian Revolution

egypt3Even though they never taught us this in school, one of the problems with history is it’s messy.  Timelines tend to overlap, the good guys and the bad guys change sides with surprising regularity, and pivotal events are far more complicated than the “name five causes of” exam questions we grew up with.  As I recall, Mr. Barnaby (not his real name) from Social Studies 12, droned on about The Industrial Revolution as if it started one Tuesday morning after James Watt invented the steam engine.  It abruptly disappeared when an unruly mob of starving peasants got fed up with Marie Antoinette’s “let them eat cake” attitude, tore down the Bastille and started the French Revolution.  That somehow morphed into a Reign of Terror, which ended only when Napoleon showed up and started a bunch of wars.  Oddly enough, all these events took place before Christmas and Barnaby’s musings on the American Revolution — which had nothing to do with the Industrial Revolution (because we studied that last term.)  I said all that to say that, when we’re looking at recent events in Egypt, we must use as our template real history, not the made-up variety we were taught in high school.

Real history shows us that long before Imhotep the Builder decided his Pharaoh needed a stairway to heaven, Egypt was ruled by dictators.  Stick a pin anywhere in the timeline and you’ll find (in various degrees of ruthlessness) Pharaohs, some foreign pharaoh wannabes, an assortment of kings and khedives, the British, and a string of military strongmen.  That’s five or six thousand years without a lick of liberal democracy.  That all changed, however, a little over two years ago, when, during the still misunderstood Arab Spring, the people of Egypt told their latest tyrant, Hosni Mubarak, to clean out his desk.  In was a great victory for democracy, and Mubarak wasn’t even in handcuffs before the interim government set up free elections.  Unfortunately, after a thousand generations of getting stepped on by jackboots, few, if any, Egyptians, outside a cadre of academics, had the faintest idea what that meant.  More importantly, since the first thing they teach you in ruthless dictator school is how to silence the opposition, once Mubarak was gone, the political vacuum he left behind looked like a Black Hole.  In fact, the only organization on the ground between Alexandria and Aswan was The Moslem Brotherhood.  These are the boys (girls aren’t allowed) who think the Iranians are doing a bang up job in the Islamic Republic business.  In the ensuing election, The Moslem Brotherhood slid easily into power and took the vote count as a mandate for their point of view.  And that’s the problem.

In real life — unlike in Mr. Barnaby’s Socials 12 class — not all revolutions are created equal, nor do they occupy an easilyegypt4 definable spot in time.

Egypt’s revolution was never about republican ideals, Islamic or otherwise.  It was about economic stability.  Those people who came to Tahrir Square in 2011 may have chanted democratic slogans, but their priorities were closer to home — jobs and affordable prices.  Two years later, that hasn’t changed.  In fact, if anything, the need has gotten worse.  Since the revolution, the tourist industry has collapsed – and, with it, most of the rest of the economy.  Food and fuel prices are in the stratosphere.  (Remember, Egypt does not have vast oil reserves like its neighbours.)  Unemployment is officially listed at around 14%; unofficially, it’s much, much higher.  Young people are hearing long-winded discussions about democratic ideals as their economic future dissolves into the Nile.  Ballot boxes are no damn good without bread on the table.  So they went back into the streets – in their millions — to try and get it right this time.

Unfortunately, the results were predictable: two accelerating political bodies, playing chicken, with Egypt in the middle.  The only national institution with any credibility left, the military, stepped up and told the politicos to fix it or face the consequences.  Defiant in the face of overwhelming opposition, Mohamed Morsi and the Moslem Brotherhood refused — and the rest is history.  Not that neatly-packaged history you learned in high school but real blood-under-the-fingernails history that is happening all around us.

They may occupy only a single chapter in Mr. Barnaby’s textbook, but the French Revolution took 80 years — and two Napoleons — to resolve itself.  The same was true in the United States where the great-grandchildren of Washington, Jefferson and Adams had to fight a Civil War to finally settle their political differences over the cornerstone of the American Revolution, the Constitution.  And the Russians never did get their revolution right, stumbling along for 75 years until the whole thing just collapsed under its own weight in 1991.

Tearing a society apart is easy; putting it back together again is hard work.  Two years is no big deal to the infinite march of history.  So, despite what the pundits might tell you, the Egypt revolution isn’t over.  It’s only just begun.

Miss Reed and Acts of Terror

miss reedI met Miss Reed (not her real name) many years ago in a Residential Hotel in London.  She was 80-something and lied about her age.  Strictly speaking British residential hotels are not retirement facilities, so according to her — and select members of the staff — she was 72 (and had been for more than a decade.)  The fiction was Miss Reed was looking for a part time teaching position in the area.  She had excellent credentials.  As a young woman, she’d left Britain sometime in the 30s to teach school in China – Shanghai, to be exact.  She’d vaguely spent World War II in the Far East (she redirected all my questions about the war.)  When the war was over, she slowly retreated home to London as the British Empire closed up shop; first in India, then in Kuala Lumpur and finally at a boarding school in Sevenoaks, Kent.  The London she lived in was not the London she’d left, and it made her sad sometimes.

For those of you unfamiliar with British residential hotels, they are all basically the same.  There are rooms upstairs, reception, a dining area and a lounge/bar which usually opens at six.  Actually, just think Fawlty Towers.  There is always a Basil in there somewhere, a Manuel and at least one Major.  The place we stayed at had several.  It was these various ex-military residents and the IRA’s propensity for revenge that made our hotel a “soft” target for terrorism (although nobody called it that in those days.)  It was The Troubles and it wasn’t open to academic debate.  We were shown the evacuation routes, told not to leave our bags unattended and generally advised to be cautious during our stay.  I had no idea what cautious looked like.  After all, I hadn’t been threatened with violence since Betty Jones and her big boyfriend decided my lunch looked more interesting than hers back in second grade.   However, being in a foreign country, I wanted to do my best, so, after the first couple of days of getting the lay of the land, I took the nightly residential gathering over drinks in the lounge to ask around.  Most of the advice was the usual; hide your wallet sort of thing, although one fellow did tell me it was best not to speak to Irishmen.  Then there was Miss Reed who usually had one gin before dinner.

“Nonsense,” she said, “Here we are, young man, and here is where we intend to stay.  We haven’t drawn the curtains and turned down the lights.  One cannot hide from those who would do us harm.  So we must go about our affairs as best we can.  In the High Street every day, there are automobiles and buses whizzing about and any one of them can strike you down in a second.  So what do we do?  Stand at the kerb and wait for them to go away?  Return home and lock our doors?  No, we cross.  We use caution and look both ways — but we cross.”

So Boston, it’s time to take your place with London, New York, Madrid and Oklahoma City.  It’s time to open your curtains and turn on the lights.  The madmen, who wish to do you harm, are not going to go away.  They live on fear and the only way to defend yourself is to take that away from them.

The next day, Miss Reed put on her hat and her gloves and went out, as she did every afternoon, to have tea on the High Street.

The Victoria Cross

victoria2On a sunny summer day in 1857 (June 26th to be precise) a disciplined line of 62 officers and men lined up in Hyde Park, London, to await their Queen — Victoria.  She was coming to award them a new military medal — one which would, along with the Congressional Medal of Honor in America, become one of the highest military honors in the world – the Victoria Cross.  These men had just recently fought for “Queen and Country” in the Crimea, a nasty little war, distinguished only because it was the first “living room war.”  Foreign correspondents from Britain had been on the scene at Sebastapol, Balaklava and the Alma River.  They saw and they wrote.  Their stories told the British public about disease and filth, inadequate clothing, obsolete equipment and idiotic orders, but what captivated the country was the nobility and the bravery of the common soldier.

Even though the public now loved him, Great Britain had no way to recognize its ordinary fighting man.  There was the Distinguished Conduct Medal, instituted in 1854, and staff officers were decorated all the time, but for most soldiers, the best they could hope for (aside from not getting killed) was a mention “in dispatches.”  Several officials took up the cause.  Liberal MP Thomas Scobell brought a motion to parliament suggesting an “Order of Merit…to which every grade and individual from the highest to the lowest… may be admissable [sic].”  Meanwhile, the Secretary of War wrote to Prince Albert about “a new decoration open to all ranks.”  His letter was enthusiastically received by both Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, who wrote back to suggest the name be changed from “the Military Order of Victoria” to “the Victoria Cross.”  Victoria also took a hand in the design of the medal itself, changing the motto from “for the brave” to “for valour” and recommending that, even though it was to be symbolically made from ordinary metal, it should be bronze, not copper.

The drawings and specifications, along with Her Majesty’s “suggestions,” were given to the jewelers Messrs. Hancock of London,victoria where H. H. Armstead is credited with the actual design.  It’s unlikely that he was the one who decided to make the medals out of the bronze from Russian cannons captured in the Crimea.  It was probably just cost cutting, but at the time, this extra bit of symbolism was not lost on the British public.  Hancock and Company still make the Victoria Cross today from the same lump of bronze, safely stored in the vault of the Royal Logistics Corps, in Donnington.  The cannons, two 18-pounders, are still at Woolwich Barracks, where anyone can plainly see that these “Russian” guns are, in fact, Chinese.

Since that first sunny day in June, the Victoria Cross has been awarded only 1,357 times to 1,354 recipients throughout the British Commonwealth – which, given the number of wars and warriors over the last 150 years, is not a lot.  It has been won by 4 sets of brothers, 3 times by fathers and sons and 3 men have won it twice.  Incredibly, during World War I, it was won by three men who all lived on Pine Street in Winnipeg, Canada.  Pine Street is now named Valour Road.  The youngest recipients were Andrew Fitzgibbon and Thomas Flinn, age 15, and the oldest was William Raynor, 61.  Legend has it that, at the first ceremony, Queen Victoria, stretching awkwardly from the side-saddle of her horse, actually pinned the first medal through Commander Henry Raby’s chest.  Popular Victorian fiction says he didn’t even flinch.  A fitting beginning for the Victoria Cross.