The Square

The bottom line is that after two years of turmoil beginning in the winter of 2011 Mohammed Morsi remains under what the Times describes as "indefinite detention," Hosni Mubarak has moved from jail to house arrest “Mubarak to Be Transferred to House Arrest,” NYT, 8/21/13) and the military is still in power. These are the events that are narrated in Jehane Noujaim’s documentary, The Square, currently playing at Film Forum. Of course, the title referring to Cairo’s Tahir Square, the epicenter of unrest during the initial rebellion against the Mubarak dictatorship, also conjures up the memory of Tiananmen Square, where the Chinese movement was crushed in l989. Politically, both Arab Spring, of which the Egyptian uprising was a part, and the early rebellion in China both emanated from the same impulse--the struggle for human rights. The Square is a jeremiad since it betokens the tragic fate of many freedom movements in which resistance to authoritarianism becomes so ideologized that it spawns its own forms of repression. That’s what’s happening in Syria where Al-Qaeda and other fundamentalist factions have co-opted the opposition. Who knows if parliamentary democracy would have been the product of a successful people’s revolution against the party elite in China? The narrative of The Square is told in microcosm through the eyes of Ahmed, a streetwise agitator, Khalid an actor (who has starred in films like The Kite Runner) and Magdy, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the most torn of all the characters, precisely due to a political agenda—which increasingly puts him at odds with his confreres. The Square recapitulates the sickening history of freedom movements from the Russian Revolution on, with the early millenarian fervor attendant upon shocking degrees of naivete. While one has to admire the courage of the protestors, one wants to give them a history lesson—or two. Have they never heard of an Italian sociologist named Vilfredo Pareto and his concept of  “the circulation of the elites?” Have they never heard the expression that that power is conservative and self-perpetuating, no matter how lofty the ideals it seeks to uphold? The film is rather straightforward and earnest, but there’s one exception and that’s the intermittent cross cuts to a mural that’s constantly being painted by an unidentified hand. This brilliant little touch links the film to the works of painters as varied as Goya, Orozco and Picasso and their narratives of human suffering.

Apres moi le deluge

Louis XV by Hyacinthe Rigaud

The sentiment of "Apres moi le deluge" could easily be applied to the Middle East. Gaddafi, Hussein have fallen, along with Mubarak in Egypt and his successor Mohammed Morsi (whose Muslim Brotherhood was crushed by the Egyptian military) For a while it looked like Assad was on the way out, but now the glimmerings of a possible deluge have actually been responsible for perpetuating his rule. One of them communicated recently in a front page Times photograph (“Brutality of Syrian Rebels Posing Dilemma in West,” NYT, 9/5/13) showing opposition soldiers standing over half naked Syrian army regulars who were about to be cold-bloodedly murdered. Liberation from oppression has been galvanized by social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Yet the opposition parties are already so immersed in a metaphoric game of capture the flag that there is no flag to raise in a putative Iwo Jima. The victories are Pyrrhic at best with former dictators smiling from their graves or in the case of Mubarak on the verge of being rehabilitated (“Mubarak Is Moved From Prison to House Arrest, Stoking Anger of Islamists," NYT, 8/22/13). Obviously one of the most destructive elements in all the uprisings is the extent to which they have been exploited by external movements for their own purposes. Terrorists battle each other for hegemony fueled with arms and money from other tyrants of which they are clients. Neutrality and a non-partisan humanistic stance have become dubious luxuries that few civilians can readily afford. It’s not naturally selective to be an innocent bystander in the civil wars that are the rubble left by Arab Spring where violence has become the only means of survival.