"Similar protests are treated differently in the American mainstream media. RT's Anastasia Churkina takes a look at why riots are seen as "democracy" in Egypt, and "chaos" in Britain."

http://www.youtube.com/user/RTAmerica

I watched the above video and it got me thinking about the similarities. Just wondered what the rest of you thought.

Do you think the violence in Europe and Egypt are the same? Different? How So?

Mob violence is democracy. One man one rock.

The context is different though. Brits, Italians, Europeans have mechanisms beyond protest to redress their concerns (although personally I am sympathetic to the anger of British students). Egyptians don't. And context matters.

Of course, the way the uprising in Egypt is being portrayed is also poles apart from the way a similar uprising in Iran was. Westerners wanted Iran to fall, they don't seem so keen for Egypt to do so. This is most amusing in the case where people who were all "you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs" about destabilising Iraq for freedom or suddenly worried about Egypt becoming unstable. "Sure, freedom for Egyptians sounds nice, in theory. But it could be unstable".

So are you saying that even though you understand why the Brits were upset you don't condone their actions, but you do in the case of the Egyptians?

Essentially, yes - with regards to violence. Had I been in England, I would have voted for the Lib Dems, the junior party in the coalition. Based on the imposition of super-high fees by the coalition, I would not vote for them in future, as would many other students (the lIb-dems have traditionally done well with students). As such I am able to make my political point in future ballot boxes. I could also protest, not that it would have much effect. That avenue is not open to Egyptians. Dissent has till now been suppressed, elections rigged, opponents harassed, imprisoned, tortured. Where a government lacks legitimacy and denies means of redress, there is justification in the use of force to rectify this. Hell, America (and many other nations) were founded on this very idea.

To paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr. - If no provisions are made to permit peaceful revolutions, then violent revolutions are inevitable. Elections can certainly be seen as a form of "peaceful revolution" and they certainly also exist on a spectrum with peaceful demonstrations and other sorts of political activity in a democracy.

In other words, the British students have many options that don't include rioting or near-rioting. Thus the range of acceptable actions they can take is limited.

The Egyptians, maybe not so limited.

That's a sort of sideways take on it. The English students have far more options available to them, so it behooves them to take the best of them rather than the worst. Those worst options, however, are the only options available to the Egyptians, so they are under no similar obligation.

Well, yes and no. The Egyptians have few options, but if they immediately avail themselves of the worst ones - burning cars, looting, chucking homemade explosives, or worst of all, supporting terrorist attacks, then they will bring down all kinds of hell upon themselves. Many dictators these days will hesitate before firing live rounds upon a peaceful protest. A violent mob, or an armed militia? You'll be dead before you can say "tear gas".

The English students have real political power (inasmuch as every citizen in a democracy does), so it behooves them not to use force to achieve their goals when they have the power to achieve them without using force.

The Egyptians have little or no political power, and so may have to resort to force to achieve their goals.

I think both groups have the same options available to them. But for the Egyptians, most of those options are impotent.


I think many dictators also recognize that the occasional protest let's the population blow off steam without really threatening the dictatorship. Unless the stage management of the protests fail and things get out of control of course (ala Tunisia).

Okay, yes, the very worst options aren't any good for the Egyptians either.

And I don't see how the English Students' option of 'vote' even applies to the Egyptians in a meaningful way. We don't have the option to fly, even if we have the option to flap our arms as if we had wings.

I've been thinking about what makes a protest movement successful and the answer I keep coming back to is that in every case I can think of where the protesters won, it was because the military abandoned their loyalty to the leadership. Once the military refuses to back the regime, it's game over. Marcos, Suharto, and now seemingly Egypt. In places where the military stayed loyal or were actually calling the shots - Tiananmen, Burma, Iran - the protesters were suppressed, often brutally.

Whether or not the military stays loyal is outside of the protesters' control. They just have to hope they get lucky, don't they?

Depends. Generals and colonels and sergeants and privates are people too... perhaps a thinking protester would have gone about beforehand finding out just how happy the military was in their current position before deciding whether or not to join in, maybe even slipped a bit of propaganda into a few barracks to try to tip the balance.

Russia seems to me to be a good example of the military going along, too.

It's not just luck. What a protest movement in a country like that has to do is make sure they convince at least a few military families - and the higher ranked, the better - that their views are right. No soldier is going to fire on his wife or sister.

Do you think that the soldiers at Tiananmen were certain that they weren't shooting at anybody they knew? Soldiers will do as they're told as long as they fear the consequences of mutiny more than they loathe their orders.

And unless the protest leaders are exceptionally well-placed socially, they're not going to be able to get close enough to military leaders to win them over. You can't just pop over to a high-ranking general's house for a chat and a coffee in a closed society.

What seems to have happened in most of the "success stories" was that the military made a calculation that the political leaders had become a liability and that it would be more advantageous to cooperate with the new leadership.

I disagree with the notion that those English students had so many options. They voted, and look how that turned out! The government of the UK, along with much of Europe and the USA, seems to have taken the doctrine of imposing unpopular necessities to an extreme, an extreme at which it starts to be possible to say that they have a lack of democracy.

I mean, let me put it this way: who supported the higher fees? As far as I ever heard, nearly nobody besides the government itself (acting on accounting concerns, as I understood it) and a very small group of outright classists who wanted the universities to themselves. Most people wanted the fees kept low, but the government raised them anyway -- as our so-called "democratic" governments have been doing with many social services for a few decades now!