Filibuster CartoonsTitle: Internet pets (click to view)
Date: January 30, 2011
For nearly a week now, we've all be watching enthralled as aggressive street protests continue to unfold in Egypt. At issue is the regime of President Hosni Mubarak, the aging dictator who has governed the country unopposed for nearly 30 years, inheriting the job following the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat.
While a far cry away from the murderous psychopathy of a Saddam, or the totalitarian smothering of an Iran or Saudi Arabia, the Mubarak regime is still
extraordinarily rigid in its denial of basic civil rights to the populace. Egyptians cannot vote in free elections, nor can they access radio or television free of government control and censorship. Arbitrary arrests and imprisonments are common, and the right to organize peacefully is heavily suppressed, meaning the protests we've been witnessing across the country are brazen acts of civil disobedience towards a regime that usually demands (and denies) permits for such open displays of dissent.
Depending on a number of variables — not the least of which is the Mubarak government's response — these protests could go either way. Though the broad spectrum of Egyptian opposition groups have become more united and organized in recent years, focusing on a clear set of demands relating to basic civil rights and democratic reforms, much concern continues to be raised over the fact that the country's best organized dissent group of all remains the Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist party with ties to Iran. Couple this with the fact that Egypt remains the only openly pro-Israel government in the Arab world, and the second-biggest recipient of US aid as a result, ans you can see why many western governments have been a little bit wishy-washy on where they stand in response to the recent unrest.
While the fate of the Middle East is certainly interesting, much of the press coverage of the Egyptian protests has focused on the events from an entirely different angle, namely "how important was the Internet in all of this?" As we may recall, a couple of weeks ago, similar street protests forced the dictatorial president of Tunisia from office, in an uprising many wags credited to the ease of public organizing through social media. And no one forgets the so-called Iranian "Twitter Revolt" of '09, the remnants of which linger to this day in the form of many ugly green avatars.
While it's important to avoid playing the "single cause thesis" game, and overplay the significance of online organizing in the Egyptian, or any other popular revolt, it is worth noting that the Egyptian government still found the Internet a threatening enough presence to shut it off completely across the country this week (a power they
apparently hold). More than anything else, the problem with the Internet in third-world dictatorships is that most of these governments are simply too bumbling, backwards, and poor to control the medium effectively. Effectively censoring and blocking websites — to say nothing of emails and social media — requires a degree of technological sophistication and infrastructure few tyrannies possess, turning the net into a bit of a legal no man's land where dissidents can thrive.
The obvious exception to this trend is China, which, thanks to years of collaboration with western tech firms, does in fact possess the technological sophistication and infrastructure to suppress and control the Internet in a way that meets the regime's needs at the expense of public freedom. As I was drawing this cartoon, for example, it was
revealed that China has already begun blocking Internet searches for the word "Egypt."
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