Egyptian Scribbles: security forces

Friday, 9 November 2007

Storefront IV: Guns and Black-Clad Security Forces

This was definitely my favourite shop for today! As I was walking in the downtown area, I passed this gun shop. My heart was warmed at the thought of guns being handed out over the counter -- I felt like I was back in the US! Particularly reassuring was the fact that I turned the corner and saw three black Egyptian security-force trucks parked on the street.

The photographs are a little dark, but I hope you can just make out the faces of the security forces staring out through the small barred truck windows. Big police and security force trucks just like this seem to be parked everywhere and, if you look up at them, you see dozens of pairs of eyes staring down at you from behind barred windows.

One little aside on the black-clad security forces (compared with the white-clad police). The men who serve in the security-forces are conscripted from the poorest sections of Egypt (where people live on less than $1 a day). They have to leave their families and come to live in Cairo for three years. They live in camps on the outskirts of the city where conditions are reported to be terrible. Whenever there are demonstrations or civil discontent, it is usually these security forces who are ordered to come in and beat up the citizens - they get all the government's dirty work...

Quotations from Books/ Legal Cases/ Articles I"m Reading

From Richard Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality":
"If one follows Baier's advice one will not see it as the moral educator's task to answer the rational egotist's question "Why should I be moral?" but rather to answer the much more frequently posed question "Why should I care about a stranger, a person who is no kin to me, a person whose habits I find disgusting?". The traditional answer to the latter question is "Because kinship and custom are morally irrelevant, irrelevant to the obligations imposed by the recognition of membership in the same species". This has never been very convincing, since it begs the question at issue: whether mere species membership is, in fact, a sufficient surrogate for closer kinship. Furthermore, that answer leaves one wide open to Nietzsche's discomfiting rejoinder: That universalistic notion, Nietzsche will sneer, would only have crossed the mind of a slave – or, perhaps, the mind of an intellectual, a priest whose self-esteem and livelihood both depend on getting the rest of us to accept a sacred, unarguable, unchallengeable paradox.
A better sort of answer is the sort of long, sad, sentimental story which begins "Because this is what it is like to be in her situation – to be far from home, among strangers", or "Because she might become your daughter-in-law", or "Because her mother would grieve for her". Such stories, repeated and varied over the centuries, have induced us, the rich, safe, powerful, people, to tolerate, and even to cherish, powerless people – people whose appearance or habits or beliefs at first seemed an insult to our own moral identity, our sense of the limits of permissible human variation."