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This love of disinfection must make Cairo unbearable for people like El-Hawary, who yearn for a more sanitised universe. The revolution left jackets on the backs of chairs and then threw chairs through the windows. But this is their moment now, El-Hawary’s and his ilk, and maybe that is why they are building a new capital out in the eastern desert, plunging billions into wide, tidy boulevards and neatly segregated business zones while bread riots play out in the old cities left behind. I’ve been to the construction site, a sprawling area just south of Madinat Badr, and paced across the helipads and the hotel complexes and the ceremonial mound from which Sisi will one day inaugurate the future Cairo, which is bleak and sandy and wrapped in a frayed tarpaulin. The regime believes in a binary choice, between total chaos and total control, and if current Cairo was the former then this new capital will be the anti-Cairo: purged of its itinerant shrimp sellers and its outdoor mattress stitchers and its pairs of lovers holding clandestine hands while crouched in the scummy, piss-stained underbelly of the 15 May Bridge. There will be no place in the new capital for white bed sheets strung up between lamp posts by rebellious teenagers and pressed into use as makeshift cinema screens, projectors powered by hacked electricity boxes to broadcast illicit footage of army atrocities to the streets. There will be no audience for the bed sheets, because the new capital will be the antithesis of density and anyway the lamp posts will be too far apart. I spoke to an engineer out there who told me that the state’s synthetic new home will boast the second biggest dancing fountain in the world, and I didn’t know what to say. Afterwards, I met a group of dust-streaked labourers who were helping to build a wall which will eventually encircle the whole city, insulating it and its inhabitants – the first of whom will be Egypt’s government ministries – from all those jackets on chairs and spilt coffee grounds; from the smoking and the beards and the rest of recent history’s unpalatable debris. An urban planning expert described the new capital to me as a bad version of The Truman Show, but up close it looked more confused and menacing than that, more like an attempt to draw a line under an unfinished story, but one that just falls short. The section of the wall that the labourers were working on reminded me of a medieval fortress, massive and unyielding. One of them unzipped his trousers and urinated on it. ‘This town is for the happy people, the ones who fly above us,’ he said.
[...] The next day I flew out of Egypt, just after sundown. It’s the most beautiful time to rise into the air because the sky is dimmed but you can still make out the city’s sparks and hollows, its many bumps and breaks. There are always kids on balconies shining lasers towards the planes as they take off from the runway, and alongside the white high beams and the orange street bulbs and the strips of green neon draped down the sides of minarets they make the earth seem restless and electric and alive. As we climbed towards the delta, I stared out of the window. Cairo looked like shattered glass, light coursing through the cracks.
he braided hair so elaborately that in high school she started charging for it. She ate frozen waffles out of the freezer, claiming they tasted better that way. She would dive off any rock, cliff or board without hesitation. When she shaved off her long hair, when she went swimming in the icy Atlantic in December on a dare, when she stood up to a teacher who accused her of cheating, we thought she was brave, and she was brave, no question. Our daughter was brave. Even after she became addicted to heroin. Maybe especially then. The things she did. The places she went. When I said this at Family Day during one of the many excruciating Family Days we went to – Massachusetts, Florida, Arizona – people acted like I was Susan Sontag saying the men who flew into the World Trade Center weren’t cowards.
Among the prizes at stake in the endless war of politics is history itself. The battle for power is always a battle to determine who gets remembered, how they will be recalled, where and in what forms their memories will be preserved. In this battle, there is no room for neutral parties: every history and counter-history must fight and scrap and claw and spread and lodge itself in the world, lest it be forgotten or forcibly erased. All history, in this sense, is the history of empire—a bid for control of that greatest expanse of territory, the past.
such a good opening para
One could argue that the greatest support for Fukuyama’s argument is the fact that, even if the globalized marriage of market capitalism and liberal democracy does not constitute an ideal social order in regard to humanity’s collective fulfillment, prosperity, peace, or happiness, it still seems to mark the decisive end to our development by way of outright domination. This is the subtext to the innocuous-sounding, jargony point that the particular “state of consciousness that permits the growth of liberalism seems to stabilize in the way one would expect at the end of history.” Translation: the neoliberal order will “stabilize” its own dominance by continually incentivizing, rewarding, and securing the dominance of those who believe that it truly is the culmination of human development. Their faith in the “end of history” is validated by the enduring fact of neoliberalism—the world itself stands as a monument to their historical vision.
And yet, every day, all around us, the very meaning of history is eroding and dissipating. On the barren shores at the end of history, even the victors wander like historical amnesiacs. From within the worldwide windowless enclosure of the neoliberal order, the circuits of historical memory are frying, history itself has begun to break apart, and the end of the end may be in sight.
pretty
Henry Wallace, the secretary of commerce and former vice president, agreed with Stimson, as did Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson (though he later changed his position), but Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal laid down the definitive opposition. “The Russians, like the Japanese,” he argued, “are essentially Oriental in their thinking, and until we have a longer record of experience with them . . . it seems doubtful that we should endeavor to buy their understanding and sympathy. We tried that once with Hitler. There are no returns on appeasement.” Forrestal, a skilled bureaucratic infighter, had made his fortune on Wall Street and frequently framed his arguments in economic terms. The bomb and the knowledge that produced it, Forrestal argued, was “the property of the American people”—control over it, like the U.S. seizure of Japan’s former Pacific Island bases, needed to be governed by the concept of “sole Trusteeship.”
"the property of the American people" bruh that's fucked up
The following year, for example, George Kennan, author of the “containment” doctrine, a protégé of Forrestal, and the single most influential strategic foreign policy thinker of the moment, offered a strikingly candid version of the task at hand, in a classified memo that consciously punctured the universalist ambit of the Truman Doctrine:
We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction. (emphasis added)
damn, saying the quiet part loud
[...] the possibility of potential alignments between decolonizing nations and Soviet power was far less concrete and worrisome to the United States than the more definite and delineated material losses faced by the United States and the colonial powers with which it had aligned itself—namely, being deprived access to formerly “assured sources of raw materials, markets and military bases.” In other words, the challenge of the future, as Kennan had underlined, was to devise “formulae” to buttress the forms of political authority that sustained economic inequality (at a world scale) in the face of inevitable revolt and revolution against such authority and the social conditions it supported.
Over the next quarter century, fewer than 400 individuals operated the national security bureaucracy, with some individuals enjoying decades of influence. That the top tier was dominated by white men who were Ivy League–educated lawyers, bankers, and corporate executives (often with ties to armament-related industries) lends irony to official fearmongering about armed conspiracies mounted by small groups, let alone the idea that the role of the United States was to defend free choice against coercion imposed by nonrepresentative minorities. This fact, perhaps more than any other, suggests that, as much as the Cold War represented a competition between incompatible, if by no means coeval or equally powerful systems of rule (i.e., communist and capitalist), it was marked by convergences too. The Soviet “empire of justice” and the U.S. “empire of liberty” engaged in mimetic, cross-national interventions, clandestine, counter-subversive maneuvers, and forms of clientelism that were all dictated by elite, ideologically cohesive national security bureaucracies immune from popular scrutiny and democratic oversight.