It has been exactly a year since current president Mohammad Morsi took office in Egypt and a little over two years since Egypt's revolution. Now they are back on the streets to express their discontent. Brazil continues to resume their portests as the finals are staged for the confederations cup. Protests are happening in Turkey. Saudi Arabians are being jailed for urging protest on facebook. A poet cries out that the world is misinformed about Syria. Air strikes are happening in the district of Homs of Syria. Bombs. A car bomb kills 46 in Pakistan on the day Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and British Prime Minister David Cameron met to discuss security.
The Vatican is stirred by gossip of a lobby of gay, senior churchmen inside the Vatican, running a network of patronage, a convicted paedophile priest accussing Vatican clergy hiring underage rent-boys for sex. Thailand is shaken by their buddhist monks indulging in iphones and starbucks coffee in the U.S.
German prosecutors looking over allegations of the U.S. spying on its allies. The U.S. is both enraged over voting rights/racial issues and jubilant (or annoyed depending on the political/religious spectrum one is on) about the recognition of gay marriage (although not without a stint from Prop 8 supporters, which was rejected by SCOTUS). Meanwhile, San Diego is prosecuting anti-bank slogans scribbled in chalk in front of Bank of America (like wtf?). And President Obama is in South Africa, paying his respects to Nelson Mandela and simultaneously facing protests for the hypocrisy of U.S. imperialism.
In South Korea, U.S. soldiers are being reported of drunken disorderly conduct - fighting Korean civilians and one U.S. solider strangling, yes strangling, a taxi driver and punching him while the man was driving! Just passing the anniversary of the Korean War, the U.S. recently misrepresented its role in the Korean War attempting to subvert responsibility and claim that their troops are under UN control.
The news have never been so juicy with social and political upheaval. There's nothing explicit that connects all of these recent events of the past couple days. But what underlies them all is the manifesting cultures/habits of power and reactions to them. Violence and discontent pervades the world. We are witnessing people all over the world upset at current systems and a demand for a more participatory democracy outside of the singular act of voting. The Vatican is in a process of cleaning house and the fact that these accusations of sex-rings are surfacing within the Vatican are indications that it is indeed a new era of Catholic leadership. The entitled status of U.S. soliders and the degrading manner in which they conduct themselves in South Korea is not new to Koreans. Their drunken acts of violence have been around for quite some time. A by-product of U.S. troops occupying another country as a result of war.
A little over two years ago, I wrote a piece for the Simpleton, a post-revolution critique of Egypt highlighting the divide-and-conquer tactics via religion and voting, which was coupled with the potential recurrence of corruption from a superficial change in governance. From the revolution in Egypt:
"Some of the demands included: "changing the constitution so as to mitigate the president’s sweeping powers, dismantling the former ruling National Democratic Party, the trial of all corrupt figures including the ousted president Mubarak, ending the state of emergency, releasing political prisoners and lately many have been demanding an end to military prosecutions of civilians, after it had become a common phenomenon since the military took over power."
What was interesting during this time was the use of religion to divide the people. Initially there was a unified front of discontent with the government. Both Christians and Muslims embraced each other. However, with allegations of one side attacking another: "The pendulum swung from the time of a unified front composed of both Muslims and Christians during the period of revolution, to a position of amnesia. Violence in the name of one is quick to nullify the bond built amongst two. The situation is a statement of in-group/out-group dynamics." From the beginning of such divisions, we observed that the candidate (current President Morsi) upholding the interests of the Muslim brotherhood win the election. A year later we are witnessing the same discontents and the product of a created division (via media and religious loyalty) rebounding to another mass protest. It would seem that the culture and habits of power in Egypt had not changed and we are seeing the discontents with its reconstitution. From the article, I highlighted Foucault's critique of revolution, which I'll repeat (emphasis is added):
"One of the most
urgent tasks, before everything else, is that we are used to consider,
at least in our European society, that power is in the hands of the
government and is exerted by some particular institutions such as
local governments, the police, the army. These institutions transmit the
orders, apply them and punish people who don't obey. But I think that
the political power is also exerted by a few other institutions which seem to have nothing in common with the political power,
which seem to be independent but are not. We all know that university
and the whole education system is supposed to distribute knowledge, we
know that the educational system maintains the power in the hands of a
certain social class and exclude the other social class from this
power. Psychiatry for instance is also apparently meant to improve
mankind and the knowledge of the psychiatrists. Psychiatry is also a
way to implement a political power to a particular social group.
Justice also.
It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions, that appear to be both neutral and independent;
to criticize and attack them in such a manner that political violence
has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so
that one can fight against them. If we want right away to define the
profile and the formula of our future society (without criticizing all
the forms of political power that are exerted in our society): there is a risk that they reconstitute themselves."
- Michel Foucault, from the Chomsky-Foucault 1971 debate
Indeed, what is happening in Egypt is that reconstitution. From here I would wonder about the tensions created by making religious differences apparent and the reproduction of a culture and habit of power. In this sense I wonder what is happening in Libya post Gadaffi? What about the protests in Turkey? Montreal in Canada? And the protests of Toma la Plaza in Spain? And where is the Occupy movement of the U.S.? What happened in these movements or rather, what did the government do in these movements to quell discontent? Are things any better?
While religion does not strictly play a role in all of these movements, but the ideologies behind money and value is certainly there. In this sense it may be appropriate to talk about a religion of money and how different cultures and different socio-economic classes hold ideologies about currency as well as its place in society as the form of merit. My question would then be: what does this kind of religion entail for the culture and habits of power that we see manifest and reacted against so readily represented in the news today?
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