Anonymous letter from Cairo

[Anonymous letter from a comrade in Cairo.  Crucial.  Please share and spread widely.]

Dear friends,

I am since 4 days in the middle of shooting and nerve gas, here in Bab El Louq square, 5 minutes behind Tahrir square, close to the Ministry of Interior. Right out of my window, I can see the fire of the guns and the gas cartouches and the motor cycles that take the injured out of the battle bringing them to the field hospitals, one after the other... hour by hour, day and night...There is shooting and this strange nerve gas all the time and at around 10:30 p.m. yesterday night the shebab were attacked for one hour by 30 unknown uniformed special forces in black with different live ammunition and gas, no street lightning at all, the scene only lit up by the fire of the guns, the dim light of the moon and some strange phosphoric light at the end of the street leading to the Ministry of Interior. After an hour, they reconquered Bab El Louq square where I am living with nothing than stones and unbreakable determination and solidarity. Into the face of the shooting and the attacks onto their bare bodies, the shebab were shouting into the night "hurriya" (freedom) and "madaniya" (civil state)... not "ilsamiya" (islamic)... In parallel, Tahrir square full with a millioniya (a million-man demonstration) was attacked at least twice during the night with a nerve gas which you cannot see or smell. I saw with my own eyes how people collapsed suddenly around me. As far as I understand, it's not clear yet from where the gas was coming - from an airplane, the metro air condition below the square or thrown from above the roofs of the surrounding buildings. It's war against the population, it's incredible, it's a crime. Me myself am full of gas and mentally and motorically slightly but continuously disoriented, respiration tract burning. I am deeply shocked. Whoever needs to understand: the Egyptian shebab will never give up, none of us will give up any more. This is about holding on to your remaining or may be first becoming a human being again.

Below a video of the Egyptian campaign "Occupy", a call to all Egyptians and everyone who understands that this is not about Egypt alone, that this is about the fight of all of us for freedom and for a future for everyone in this world to substitute the logic of accumulation and theft and the oppression needed to enforce it, a call to join the open-ended demonstration and sit-in in front of the Egyptian embassies all over the world starting at 3 p.m. next Friday in your countries. The video is in Arabic and English, the middle part is English.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZb6pJrZWR4&feature=player_embedded

Try to follow the news on the non-mainstream media (facebook and blogs) and the news on Al Jazeera, for those who speak Arabic preferably the Arabic version.

Also for those who speak Arabic below the link to one of the most important TV programs in Egypt after the revolution, the sequal that was broadcasted before yesterday. In it, the hosting journalist Youssri Foda gives space to three of our injured comrades to speak as well as to the well known journalist Bilal Fadl. The dentist Ahmed Harara, the blogger and activist Malek Mustapha and the photographer Ahmed Abdel Fattah of the Egyptian daily al-masry al-youm all lost their eyes due to deliberate shooting from close distances with what we call khartouche ammunition, a projectile with between 13 and 16 small bullets of different sizes, made of either hardened plastic or metal. Fired at close distances it can be lethal and if targeted at eyes, the eyes are destroyed. Ahmed Harara is a close friend of mine. He lost his right eye during the first revolution on 28 January 2011 and 4 days ago he lost his left eye. He will be forever blind but he went back into Tahrir square, right after his operation in the hospital. In the TV program you will see the young officer who fired the bullet and you will hear the voice of a shooting officer proudly reporting to his superior that he managed to get another eye...it was a premeditated campaign... targeting the eyes of the activists. But their response is to go back to Tahrir square, the square of liberation, because a shot eye is better than a broken eye as Ahmed Harara says in the program. They are not blind and they put everyone in front of the necessity to take position, no more lies, no more evasion. This is expressed very bluntly by the journalist Bilal Fadl in the program. The program also gives a good concise context of the events during the past month leading up to this second Egyptian revolution

part I with Ahmed Harrara and Bilal Fadl

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fbp_KEnVwqQ&noredirect=1

Part II with Malek Mustapha and Ahmed Abdel Fattah

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0HNsO84asU

Warm greetings to all of you,
Anon

Urgent From Tahrir

[this is from two days ago.  It is still extremely relevant.  Further news emerges about use of nerve gas and live ammunition.  From here]

We are in the midst of a decisive battle in the face of a potentially terminal crackdown. Over the past 72 hours the army has launched a ceaseless assault on revolutionaries in Tahrir Square and squares across Egypt. Over 2000 of us have been injured. More than 30 of us have been murdered. Just in Cairo alone. In the last 48 hours.

But the revolutionaries keep coming. Hundreds of thousands are in Tahrir and in other squares across the country. We are facing  down their gas, cudgels, shotguns and machine-gun fire. The army and police attack again and again, but we are holding the lines, holding them back. The dead and wounded are carried away on foot or motorbikes and others take their place.

The violence will escalate – for WE WILL NOT MOVE. The junta does not want to give up its power. We want the junta gone.

The future of the revolution hangs in the balance; those of us in the square are ready to die for freedom and social justice. The butchers attacking us are willing to kill us to stay in control.
This is not about elections or a constitution, neither of which will change the authoritarianism and violence coming down around us. Neither is this is about a so-called “transition” to democracy that has seen the consolidation of a military junta and the betrayal of the revolution by political forces. This is about a revolution, a complete revolution. The people demand the fall of the regime, and will stop at nothing short of that to achieve their freedom.

Foreign governments are paying lip-service to ‘human rights’ while they deal with the junta, shaking hands and legitimizing them with empty rhetoric. The US is still sending $1.2 billion in military aid to the Egyptian military. The army and police rely on tear gas, bullets and weapons from abroad. No doubt their stock has been replenished by US and other governments over the last nine months. Stock will run low again.

We ask you to take action:

• Occupy / shut-down Egyptian embassies worldwide. Now they represent the junta ; reclaim them for the Egyptian people.
• Shut down the arms dealers. Do not let them make it, ship it.
• Shut down the part of your government dealing with the Egyptian junta.

The revolution continues, because we have no other choice.

From Tahrir Square / 22 November / 14:00

Mosireen, Comrades from Cairo, Defend the Revolution

Hearts and arms

The fundamentally reductive structure of the news means that all will be reduced to a series of verbs, nouns, adverbs, and occasional adjectives, with static frames to hang a stone in the air. 

The fundamental structure of social upheaval is not linguistic, and it is not iconic.  It is bodily, in all that entails: how we run, how we get turned around, how we stumble, how we sweat, how we leak.  It is indexed, not to programs but to these things called us.  It is as messy and incoherent as these fleshy days of ours always are.  It just brings that to the fore.  That is its tremendous specificity.

We believe that these are specific days.

Hey Google et al,

if you want to make yourself useful, immediately develop a plug-in for internet news sources that will automatically replace the words "pro-Mubarak protester/demonstrator" with the words "state-paid thugs regarding whom the West lacks the courage to call it like it is in the hopes that the uprising will be undermined in such a way that the oil-nervous West could claim it was just 'a democratic expression of the conflicted will of the people' rather than the deliberate murder of those who have the kind of guts we'll never have".  A bit clunky, sure, but at least it isn't a straight-forward lie.  For shorthand, we can just call them either "Baltagayyah" or "murdering goons".

The people want the regime to fall.

(From a new blog of a friend of a friend, with reports from the Egyptian uprising.  Keep an eye on it.)

Double vision

Two cameras, a few hundred meters apart, recording footage at the same moment.  The left, Al Jazeera shows a police van that had been dragged from an alley, torn apart, wracked, smashed, and burned.  The air is thick with smoke and when the camera zoomed out, people were running.  The right, state tv declares that the curfew has been successfully declared, the day is done, and the city is a tranquil set of lights made from electricity and filaments, rather than gasoline.

Now the military has moved in to Cairo to enforce the curfew, with outcome unknown.  A state is, first, the unshaken declaration that the image on the right is the right one, despite the existence of an infinite set of other cameras fixed on the wreckage, and second, it is the savage labor of closing between the distance between the two images, until it can admit and even trumpet those other images in order to say, yes, there may be fire, but it no longer means anything more than the sputtering index of what has been crushed.

Hope from here that all in Egypt make that thin white line splitting the screen into left and right break down into a pointless, spent, porous thing.

"And if Egypt goes, the entire region goes..."

-

 

This is an ocean of dimpled ice

These are rocks that do not sink

They come back to our hands

To come back to your heads

There are more of those rocks 

Where we stand

We are trying to correct this imbalance

That is a fire between us

Which is a small fire

But this time it is not 

Consuming one of us

Who chose to go up

As bundles of leaves and bones

You black things with sticks 

Will be spilled out

Onto this wet

That is a mirror for the wet sky

That is not a map