Egyptian blogger Big Pharaoh hits the target and psychoanalyzes the cartoon rioters with his latest entry. Go read the whole thing. Here is a piece of it:
There is a kind of euphoria spirit going on here. A spirit of victory which is something rare in this nation and this region. The victory is not over some disease we managed to cure or an economic indicator we managed to increase, the victory is over a small Scandinavian European country that makes butter and toys. The victory is over a western country that in our minds represents the entire west. In other words, the victory many of us are feeling today is over the west as a whole.
From my conversations with my friends and the articles I read in our papers, I felt that there is a sense of victory after the apology of both the Danish government and J-Posten (neither apologized for publishing the cartoons however). A feeling that we finally managed to defeat Lurpak and Legos after we dreadfully failed to defeat Boeing and Coca Cola. As someone who longs for my region to experience a triumph after another, I cannot partake in this illusionary “victory” because, just like many of what we consider as victories, it is fake and has done more negatives than positives.
We are a defeated nation. Defeated in almost all areas of life. This is the reason why we search, in fact we sniff, for any victory, no matter how fake it turns out to be. Our inability to achieve real and beneficial triumphs forces us to accept illusionary victories that we accept without any rational thinking. In addition, we have the horrible habit of blaming others for our defeats, and since these days we look at everything through the prism of religion, we direct our blame at the Western world.
We are the complete opposite of the Japanese who lost their empire yet made a U-turn and became a world economic superpower once again. They made their U-turn by asking themselves the crucial questions of “what went wrong?” and “how can we fix it?”. They didn’t blame the west but rather copied the west and excelled over it in many areas. The Germans have done the same thing. They have looked in the mirror and accepted defeat and worked on finding a solution out of it. Our problem is that we don’t have a mirror to look at. We think we, such poor wretched souls, are being attacked from all directions and the whole world wants to suck our oil and terminate our religion. We are consumed by these thoughts, we definitely have no time to look at the mirror.
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Tough, clear-eyed talk from someone who's reporting "from the ground."
Weirdly enough, the talk about the rational, self-critical "look in the mirror" idea of analyzing defeat was on my mind just this morning. I was talking to a fellow history buff about differing reactions to defeat. The reaction to defeat is often much more telling than reactions to victory.
Oh, by the way, while we are talking about Egyptian bloggers, Big Pharaoh's fellow Egyptian Sandmonkey is on fire once more.
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