In Egypt, a Facebook page administrator known only by the handle El Shaheeed, or Martyr, is one of the driving forces behind the historic protests. Mike Giglio tracks down the mysterious figure, who talks about his crucial role in organizing the demonstrations.
Iran’s Green Revolution had a martyr named Neda, a 26-year-old woman gunned down in the streets of Tehran. Tunisia’s was Mohamed Bouazizi, an unemployed university graduate who set himself ablaze outside a government building. Egypt’s is Khaled Said—because someone has been agitating under the dead man’s name.
A scientist at the network security company Arbor Networks has used data from 80 Internet service providers around the world to create an image of the Internet block in Egypt.
The graphic, which was compiled using anonymous traffic engineering statistics, shows traffic to and from Egypt dropping sharply around 5:20 p.m. ET. As of about three hours ago, traffic has not picked back up.
A large and growing body of knowledge exists about how to carry on powerful conversations — methodologies, facilitation know-how, dynamic understandings, and more. This knowledge informs professions ranging from therapy to diplomacy and conflict resolution, from organizational development to creativity and innovation, from community revitalization to activism and deliberative democracy, from family relationships to education and spiritual development.
At the leading edge of the deeper understandings of conversation's power are innovative contributions like Peggy Holman's recent book Engaging Emergence: Turning Upheaval into Opportunity, and her related earlier paper, Engaging Emergence — and the ambitious project to create a “pattern language” for group process now nearing its first stage release by Tree Bressen, Co-Intelligence Institute president John Abbe, and many others (including me).
Stepping back from the leading edge, we find a wealth of incredible knowledge, broadly useful in many aspects of life. Over the last year I've found some excellent resources about this, compilations of pathways into and around the world of powerful conversational practice. You'll find these resources in this email.
Click on Image to Enlarge
One amazing compilation is the “Best-of-the-Best Resources about Dialogue and Deliberation” compiled by Sandy Heierbacher, coordinator of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD). Read over her list below and, if you find something interesting, go to the original URL. There you will find active links to virtually everything on her list.
Building on Sandy's work, I've developed an additional list, given first below: “The Best Online Compilations of Conversational and Participatory Processes”. Together, the sites linked there describe and link you to well over a hundred different processes.
May this information serve you well in your efforts to serve your groups, your community, your organization, your world and the unfolding future we all share.
WASHINGTON (AP) — As with Iran 30 years ago, American leaders again are wrestling with the moral conflict between Washington's demands for democracy among its friends and strategic coziness with dictatorial regimes seen as key to stability in an increasingly complex world, particularly the Middle East.
The turmoil in Egypt — and its potential for grave consequences for U.S. policy throughout the region — was inevitable. The recent WikiLeaks release of U.S. diplomatic reports showed that Washington knew what problems it increasingly faced with the regime of President Hosni Mubarak and his three decades of iron-fisted rule.
Phi Beta Iota: For decades we have been citing Will and Ariel Durant, who state in Lessons of History that morality is a priceless strategic asset. Max Manwaring et al nailed it in The Search for Security, identifying legitimacy as the sole basis for stable effective governance. Ambassador Max Palmer nailed it in Breaking the Real Axis of Evil, addressing the fact that the US Government has consistently chosen to support 42 of 44 dictators over the public interest. To the best of our knowledge this is the only website that has consistently stated that morality, legitimacy, and integrity are the essential foundation for a prosperous world at peace.
1. The US Government has no strategy and no standing. Obama and Clinton are puffery without a clue. What has been done in this region and “in our name” has been a Web of Deceit and a Legacy of Ashes. Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude.
2. Israel has lost all credibility as well as all practical power–Turkey and the publics will do to Israel what Gandhi did to the British. Israeli genocide (and Arab dictator neglect) of the Palestinians will stand as the modern Holocaust.
3. Saudi Arabia, not Jordan, should be the next regime to fall and fall hard. There are 60,000 “royal” perverts and thieves there that need to be exorcised, exiled or executed. Jordan is on the edge of the razor–our Queen Noor's Leap of Faith is central to the possibilities.
This is going to take a quarter century to play out. A fine beginning.
* MQM chief urges youth in Punjab to join hands with his party and asks army, rangers and police to support poor
* Says his party will support creation of more provinces, proposes referendum on it
By Masroor Afzal Pasha
KARACHI: Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) chief Altaf Hussain has said that revolution has become the fate of the country.
In his telephonic address at the MQM’s Qaumi Yakjehti Jalsa (National Unity Meeting) at Jinnah Ground in Azizabad on Sunday, Altaf said, “Whenever I spoke about a revolution, I was criticised and questions were raised about revolution.”
“Revolution is unfolding in Tunis and Egypt which everyone can see. This assembly in which people from all ethnic and cultural entities are participating is a revolution in its own right,” he added.
He said, “I ask the journalists and intellectuals from Punjab, Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Kashmir and other parts of the country that have come here to witness this public meeting to see for themselves if the people present here were brought out through force or at gunpoint.”
“MQM does not have guns that kill, but it has the guns and rockets of love, peace and brotherhood,” he added.
Only a revolution would usher in an era in which those looting the country and orchestrating kidnappings-for-ransom should be publicly hanged, he said, adding, “The properties of landlords and feudals will not be destroyed rather educational institutions and hospitals will be established on them.”
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Sunday called for an orderly transition in the US to a government that reflects the aspirations of the American people. The president spoke by telephone with world and Western Hemisphere leaders about the situation in the US.
Mr. Chavez received “multiple updates” throughout the day from his staff.
Demonstrators outside the US Embassy in Caracas were sympathetic to the American people.
“American people are looking for freedom. We don't look for any crazy extremists to run the country,” said Fulano.
“All we need from Wall Street is just to stop supporting corrupt governments. That's all. We don't need anything else. Just stop supporting corrupt governments,” said Abdul.
In a related statement, German Chancellor Angela Merkel called for a peaceful transition to democracy in the US. Speaking live on CNN,Merkel said the “complex, very difficult” situation in the US requires careful progress toward a peaceful transition to democracy, rather than any sudden or violent change that could undermine the aspirations of the American people.
“We want to see this peaceful uprising on the part of the American people to demand their rights to be responded to in a very clear, unambiguous way by the government, and then a process of national dialogue that will lead to the changes that the American people seek and that they deserve,” she said.
“Electoral Reform is a good place to start,” she concluded. According to senior staff, the European Union is preparing for the possibility that the transition government in the US will seek assistance in implementing Electoral Reform, and in monitoring the legitimacy of any subsequent elections.
Although snuffing out dissent and cutting citizens off from the world aren't actions generally associated with the American ideal, two U.S. companies are helping the Egyptian government do just that as populist protests continue shaking the African nation.
The tear gas and smoke grenade manufacturer Combined Systems, Inc. is based out of Jamestown, Pennsylvania. But its wares have been showing up all over the Middle East as of late. On January 20, a photographer with the Eurpean PressPhoto agency was killed when a CSI tear gas canister struck him in the head at a protest in Tunisia. And throughout yesterday and today, CSI smoke bombs and tear gas have clogged the air and lungs in Cairo.
A less visible but possibly more important American-Egyptian partnership is that between the tech company Narus and the Mubarak autocracy. A subsidiary of Boeing, Narus sells hyper-complex, slightly creepy mass surveillance equipment. Its most famous creation is Narus Insight, “a supercomputer system which is allegedly used by the National Security Agency and other entities to perform mass surveillance and monitoring of public and corporate Internet communications in real time.”
My good friend Jim Fallows, national correspondent for the The Atlantic, asked me to be part of a team to publish guest blogs while he is using the ‘down time' to finish a book. I am assigned, with three other people, for this week. Attached is my first entry, which I am also distributing as a blaster.
During his brilliantly run campaign of 2008, Barack Obama electrified the world with vague promises of change in foreign policy as well as domestic policy. (My take on his campaign strategy can be found here.) Two and a half years later, those promises are ashes. Nowhere is that clearer in foreign policy than in the Arab world.
In contrast to the euphoria surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Arab Revolt of 2011 leaves one with a disquieting sense that we may be standing on the wrong side of history. People power and the promise of democracy worked spectacularly well for the United States when the tyrants in Eastern Europe collapsed twenty years ago, but I think it may be working against us in the Arab world of 2011.
Phi Beta Iota: Brother Chuck is at least half right. The Davies J-Curve shows how people revolt not when they are oppressed, but when they have enjoyed or tangibly seen within reach the state of non-oppression. What we have here is a convergence. Yes, the US is on the wrong side of history–it gave up its strategic integrity immediately after WWII when it joined the UK in reneging on all promises to the Arabs and then supporting a series of brutal dictators. Yes, Obama's broken promises had an effect, but not the effect Brother Chuck suggests: instead of raising hopes, Obama's promises, quickly broken, sidelined the US. It took the US off the table. All that was left was the example of the former Soviet Union states, what Vaclav Havel calls “the power of the powerless.” That memory lay dormant while the Internet and cellular telephones and social networks (including especially Facebook) created a new sense of social power independent of the state. The PRECIPITANT for Egypt was the fall of the despotic Tunisian government in less than a week IN COMBINATION WITH the visible collapse of the US and global economies and the food scarcities visible across the region. Paradigms of failure have been with us for some time, but the word ENOUGH!, first articulated in Egypt, will now be heard–and acted upon–around the world. Saudi Arabia is ripe. That's a good thing.
