Mark My Words II

Just a quick thought. If there turns out to be a massacre in Egypt, the fall-out will be similar to that which followed the Tiananmen Square massacre in the PRC:

"Human Rights enhancement" marches on in parallel. In Part I, I reviewed Clinton's steps to evade congressional efforts to impose human rights conditions on military aid and trade privileges for Indonesia and China, and the concept of "human rights" itself, crafted to evade atrocities that contribute to profit. In the weeks since, the China story took its predictable course. "President Clinton's decision to renew China's trade benefits was the culmination of a titanic clash between America's global economic interests and its self-image as the world's leading advocate of human rights," Thomas Friedman's lead article opened in the New York Times, reporting the surprising outcome. Clinton did not merely endorse the Bush Administration policies that he had caustically denounced during the presidential campaign, but went well beyond them, deciding "to delink human rights" completely from trade privileges.²

^{Egypt is nowhere near the level of economic importance as China is. But it is a bulwark for the USA's maintenance of corruption and brutality in the region. If the people's uprising in Egypt is destroyed, expect the loathsome public relations creature Obama to mouth some stupid platitudes about the need to "engage" with the Egyptian dictatorship, to correct the abuses that produced the "chaos" and to maybe ensure that some bullshit "democratization" charade follows a "sensible," "reasonable" course. (Which is to say that nothing of substance will happen.)}