CULTURAL IMPERIALISM AND THE EGYPTIAN REVOLUTION

There was a very revealing insight into an aspect of the leftist liberal zeitgeist recently in the Guardian:-www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/dec/31/human-rights-imperialism-james-hoge. In which a certain Mr Kinzer argues that a fetish of human rights that concentrates on such civil liberties as free speech, freedom of assembly and habeas corpus, holding these to be universal, represent a form of ‘cultural imperialism!’ This argument is not new and is often used as an apologia for authoritarian regimes that, after all, ‘make the trains run on time. ’ It is an argument not shared by those currently turning out in immense numbers onto the streets in Egypt, who seem strangely attracted to such ‘western’ notions as a free press and democracy. Or could it be that a hunger for such rights is indeed universal?


The events in Egypt have also provided a much needed riposte to the Islamacists, since the demand of the demonstrators, on the streets of Cairo, Alexandria and other Egyptian cities, both Muslim and Christian, is for a secular democracy.The prize that this offers the whole Arab world as an alternative model to the destructive and insular vision of the Islamacists cannot be overstated. All that currently stands in its way is the greedy narcissism of an 82 year old man.

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