The year 1958 was a crucial one in what the late Malcolm Kerr called "The Arab Cold War," when Nasserism was sparring with more traditional Western-backed regimes, with the broader Cold War rivalry providing the lens for much Western interpretation of what was going on. The overthrow of the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq (and the deaths of the Royal Family), an incipient civil war in Lebanon, threats of a coup in Jordan, and the dispatch of US Marines to Lebanon and British troops to Jordan, all created a sense of explosive crisis which seemed more coordinated to many at the time than the historical evidence necessarily justifies. A few clips for this week's Weekend Historical Videos.
Two newsreels of the overall situation, clearly focused through a Cold War lens:
US Marines in Lebanon;
Video of the Lebanese crisis with only a musical background, but the presence of Pierre Gemayel in many of the clips makes me assume its a Phalangist video:
Have a good weekend.
You have read this article Egypt /
Iraq /
Jordan /
Lebanon /
Nasser /
Weekend Historical Videos
with the title Nasser. You can bookmark this page URL https://ogbcommunity.blogspot.com/2011/01/weekend-historical-videos-1958.html. Thanks!
A blast from the past for Egypt hands. As far as I am aware, every single one of the original Free Officers who overthrew the Egyptian monarchy on July 23, 1952, installing Naguib and then Nasser, has died, since the deaths of Hussein al-Shafi‘i in 2005 and Zakariyya Mohieddin in 2009, save one alone who survives to tell us: Khaled Mohieddin, the "Red Major" to his colleagues because he was to the left of most of them, founder and longtime head of the Tagammu‘ Party (the Progressive Socialist Rally), now retired and 88 years old. (More on his Arabic Wikipedia page for those who can read it.) This video for Al-Masry al-Youm, with subtitles in English, is of a pre-election interview (November 4) with Mohieddin. It may be one of our last looks at the old guard of the Revolution, and at one of them who really wanted a real revolution.
There's nothing revolutionary here in what the old revolutionary has to say (except implied praise of Israel as a democracy), but not long ago I found myself wondering if he was in fact, still alive. When he goes the last of the Free Officers are gone. He stayed in Parliament until 2005, when he was defeated by a Muslim Brother (the symbolism is obvious: old lefty replaced by Islamist, except that after the latest election the Tagammu‘ is the biggest opposition in Parliament). He did not write his memoirs until 1992 (in Arabic; translated 1995 into English but not now listed at AUC Press as far as I can tell). Even then the memoirs basically go through the Revolution and stop. I've seen the Arabic but haven't read it all, and don't have the English version.
Last man standing. A nostalgic way to start the week.
You have read this article Egypt /
Muhammad Naguib /
Nasser /
nostalgia
with the title Nasser. You can bookmark this page URL https://ogbcommunity.blogspot.com/2010/12/and-now-word-from-last-of-free-officers.html. Thanks!
This week's "Weekend Historical Video" — again poaching from the wealth of YouTube so I can enjoy the weekend — is a BBC documentary on the 1956 Suez War. It doesn't carry a date but must be in the last few years since it includes much information that was only declassified after 40 years or more. [UPDATE: Looks like 2003.] But its strength is it contains, in addition to the inevitable talking heads, a lot of contemporary newsreel clips of Nasser, Eden, etc.
Now that 1956 is more than half a century in the past, the Suez War does not seem to occupy a very prominent place in most Westerners' collective memory; most aren't old enough to remember it. When it comes to Arab-Israeli wars, 1948 is enshrined in Israeli memory as the war of independence, and 1967 and 1973 are much studied as the formative matrices of the modern Middle East. Israel was a bit player in 1956, its invasion of Sinai a pretext (planned in advance) for the Anglo-French intervention. And in Britain and France, it's an incident best forgotten, the last death rattle of empire, when the once dominant powers were brought low by their erstwhile American ally, which turned out in those days to actually mean its anti-colonial rhetoric.
But Suez' memory is still alive in Egypt, for this was Nasser's finest hour, the defiant victory over the former colonial masters, his apotheosis as an Arab symbol, never completely erased even by the disaster of 1967. The victory over the "Tripartite aggression" is still a staple of school history in Egypt.
[In the documentary I do have one historical nit to pick. When discussing Nikita Khrushchev's nuclear threats against London and Paris, the documentary cuts to clips of a silo-launched missile and to another missile which is in fact an SA-2 surface-to-air missile. Neither of these was in service in 1956. The first Soviet ICBM, the R-7, was tested in 1957 (and launched Sputnik later that year) and none were silo-launched in the early days. The SA-2, which is an anti-aircraft defense, was also first introduced in 1957 and most famously demonstrated against Francis Gary Powers' U-2 in 1960. So those clips are anachronisms; though Khrushchev talked a lot about missiles, in those pre-Sputnik days most Westerners interpreted any nuclear threat as involving bombers.][End of Nitpick.]
The BBC documentary is in three parts, totaling about half an hour, below. Have a nice weekend.
You have read this article 1956 Suez War /
Egypt /
France /
Israel /
Nasser /
The UK /
Weekend Historical Videos
with the title Nasser. You can bookmark this page URL https://ogbcommunity.blogspot.com/2010/11/weekend-historical-video-1956-suez-war.html. Thanks!
