THIS was the defiant and revolutionary message that came out of Egypt from demonstrators, and was shown in the western media, in response to the intervention of the ‘Butcher of Iraq’, Tony Blair, into their affairs.
Blair had insisted that the situation in Egypt has to be ‘managed’ to suit the interests of the western powers, and has sought to make the Muslim Brotherhood into a bogeyman that the Egyptian masses have to be saved from.
The message to the western powers and their servants continued: ‘We are marching to get Mubarak out. Stop being your normal hypocrites and support the Egyptian people for once.’
Replying to the attempt to frighten the world with the spectre of the Muslim Brotherhood, the demonstrators added: ‘There are Communists, Muslims, Christians, atheists, men, women and children marching here. This is not the Muslim Brotherhood.’
Blair, fresh from advocating war with Iran at the Chilcot Inquiry, insisted that the Egyptian national revolution could not be allowed to decide who ruled Egypt.
Blair said that the process of change had to be managed so that there was stability and not chaos, and that this had ‘vast implications for the state of Israel’.
Refusing to call for Mubarak to go, he added that the EU and the US ‘had to get into partnership’. They ‘must not just commentate’ but had to be ‘part of the process of change and manage it carefully’.
He added ‘What we need is an expression of change’ to get ‘to proper elections in a certain point of time’. The issue is ‘how it should be managed to produce democracy with stability and not chaos’. Just like democracy in Iraq, no doubt!
Blair continued that Mubarak and his new vice-president, Suleiman, were pillars of the peace process which had to be defended.
Blair’s imperialist intervention will no doubt have a military side to it since it is Mubarak who, in reality, guarantees the security of the Jewish state. This would not be the first such military intervention against Egypt. Do not forget the French, UK, Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956 when Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal!
Yesterday, the Egyptian masses gave their reply to Blair and Co with the million strong march through Cairo and the other major Egyptian cities.
The Egyptian masses, at whose core is the working class, are determined to tear down the whole of the Mubarak dictatorship.
There is already the call for a general strike by the working class and the masses of small shopkeepers.
Since the imperialist powers and the Egyptian ruling class are not willing to concede even a bourgeois democracy, the working class is taking the leading role in the struggle.
The general strike is a huge weapon.
Another is the establishment of workers, small farmers and soldiers councils in every city and town. This is the road that the working class will take in its leadership of the struggle for democratic rights, for bread, jobs, a living wage and land. This will provide the basis for a workers and farmers government, and a socialist Egypt.
The developing Egyptian revolution is truly historic. Blair has quickly recognised that an anti-imperialist government in Cairo constitutes a death sentence for the Zionist state of Israel and a lifeline for the Palestinians.
Likewise, a revolutionary Egypt means the end of the Kings and Emirs of the Arab world and will lay the basis of a socialist Middle East.
Workers in the west must give this revolution their full support and demand there be ‘no intervention’ and that the masses of Egypt must be allowed to decide who will rule and who will not, and that all of the peoples of the Middle East have that right.