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<h2><font size=3>From</font><font size=2><b>
</b></font><font size=3>Facebook - definitely worth sharing for those who
haven't seen it already!<br><br>
</font><font size=4><b>Letter to the Occupy/Decolonise Movement from
"Comrades from Cairo"</b></font></h2><font size=3>Posted by
<a href="http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=518906462">Mika
Minio-Paluello</a> on Monday, October 24, 2011 at 3:30pm<br><br>
[This is a letter of solidarity from some anonymous awesome Cairo
revolutionaries to the occupying folks in the US - and elsewhere. I
(Mika) didn't write it, but received it as an email.]<br><br>
To all those in the United States currently occupying parks, squares and
other spaces, your comrades in Cairo are watching you in solidarity.
Having received so much advice from you about transitioning to democracy,
we thought it's our turn to pass on some advice.<br><br>
Indeed, we are now in many ways involved in the same struggle. What most
pundits call “The Arab Spring” has its roots in the demonstrations,
riots, strikes and occupations taking place all around the world, its
foundations lie in yearslong struggles by people and popular movements.
The moment that we find ourselves in is nothing new, as we in Egypt and
others have been fighting against systems of repression,
disenfranchisement and the unchecked ravages of global capitalism (yes,
we said it, capitalism): a System that has made a world that is dangerous
and cruel to its inhabitants. As the interests of government increasingly
cater to the interests and comforts of private, transnational capital,
our cities and homes have become progressively more abstract and violent
places, subject to the casual ravages of the next economic development or
urban renewal scheme.<br><br>
An entire generation across the globe has grown up realizing, rationally
and emotionally, that we have no future in the current order of things.
Living under structural adjustment policies and the supposed expertise of
international organizations like the World Bank and IMF, we watched as
our resources, industries and public services were sold off and
dismantled as the “free market” pushed an addiction to foreign goods, to
foreign food even. The profits and benefits of those freed markets went
elsewhere, while Egypt and other countries in the South found their
immiseration reinforced by a massive increase in police repression and
torture.<br><br>
The current crisis in America and Western Europe has begun to bring this
reality home to you as well: that as things stand we will all work
ourselves raw, our backs broken by personal debt and public austerity.
Not content with carving out the remnants of the public sphere and the
welfare state,capitalism and the austeritystate now even attack the
private realm and people's right to decent dwelling as thousands of
foreclosed upon homeowners find themselves both homeless and indebted to
the banks who have forced them onto the streets.<br><br>
So we stand with you not just in your attempts to bring down the old but
to experiment with the new. We are not protesting. Who is there to
protest to? What could we ask them for that they could grant? We are
occupying. We are reclaiming those same spaces of public practice that
have been commodified, privatized and locked into the hands of faceless
bureaucracy , real estate portfolios, and police‘protection’. Hold on to
these spaces, nurture them, and let the boundaries of your occupations
grow. After all, who built these parks, these plazas, these buildings?
Whose labor made them real and livable? Why should it seem so natural
that they should be withheld from us, policed and disciplined? Reclaiming
these spaces and managing them justly and collectively is proof enough of
our legitimacy.<br><br>
In our own occupations of Tahrir, we encountered people entering the
Square every day in tears because it was the first time they had walked
through those streets and spaces without being harassed by police; it is
not just the ideas that are important, these spaces are fundamental to
the possibility of a new world. These are public spaces. Spaces for
gathering, leisure, meeting, and interacting – these spaces should be the
reason we live in cities. Where the state and the interests of owners
have made them inaccessible, exclusive or dangerous, it is up to us to
make sure that they are safe, inclusive and just. We have and must
continue to open them to anyone that wants to build a better world,
particularly for the marginalized, excluded and for those groups who have
suffered the worst.<br><br>
What you do in these spaces is neither as grandiose and abstract nor as
quotidian as “real democracy”; the nascent forms of praxis and social
engagement being made in the occupations avoid the empty ideals and stale
parliamentarianism that the term democracy has come to represent. And so
the occupations must continue, because there is no one left to ask for
reform. They must continue because we are creating what we can no longer
wait for.<br><br>
But the ideologies of property and propriety will manifest themselves
again. Whether through the overt opposition of property owners or
municipalities to your encampments or the more subtle attempts to control
space through traffic regulations, anticamping laws or health and safety
rules. There is a direct conflict between what we seek to make of our
cities and our spaces and what the law and the systems of policing
standing behind it would have us do.<br><br>
We faced such direct and indirect violence , and continue to face it
.Those who said that the Egyptian revolution was peaceful did not see the
horrors that police visited upon us, nor did they see the resistance and
even force that revolutionaries used against the police to defend their
tentative occupations and spaces: by the government's own admission; 99
police stations were put to the torch, thousands of police cars were
destroyed, and all of the ruling party's offices around Egypt were burned
down. Barricades were erected, officers were beaten back and pelted with
rocks even as they fired tear gas and live ammunition on us. But at the
end of the day on the 28thof January they retreated, and we had won our
cities.<br><br>
It is not our desire to participate in violence, but it is even less our
desire to lose. <br><br>
If we do not resist, actively, when they come to take what we have won
back, then we will surely lose. Do not confuse the tactics that we used
when we shouted “peaceful” with fetishizing nonviolence; if the state had
given up immediately we would have been overjoyed,but as they sought to
abuse us, beat us, kill us, we knew that there was no other option than
to fight back. Had we laid down and allowed ourselves to be arrested,
tortured, and martyred to “make a point”, we would be no less bloodied,
beaten and dead. Be prepared to defend these things you have occupied,
that you are building, because, after everything else has been taken from
us, these reclaimed spaces are so very precious.<br><br>
By way of concluding then, our only real advice to you is to
continue,keep going and do not stop. Occupy more, find each other, build
larger and larger networks and keep discovering new ways to experiment
with social life,consensus, and democracy. Discover new ways to use these
spaces, discover new ways to hold on to them and never give them up
again.Resist fiercely when you are under attack, but other wise take
pleasure in what you are doing, let it be easy, fun even. We are all
watching one another now,and from Cairo we want to say that we are in
solidarity with you, and we love you all for what you are doing.<br><br>
Comrades from Cairo. 24thof October, 2011.<br><br>
<br>
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