I came across this Flickr set, which has some interesting photos of the 1950s Egyptian resistance against the British occupation.
Tag: memory of the class
From repression to revolution: Egypt’s Tax Collectors
The pic below is taken by archeologist Nora Shalaby, in Sakkara’s Tomb of Mereruka. The latter was the Prime Minister and the son-in-law of Pharaoh Teti, from the 6th Dynasty. The full mural shows Egyptian tax collectors torturing tax evaders, dragging the village elders to give evidence on their faulty tax returns, to be paid in produce. One man has been stripped, and his arms and feet are bound round a post where he is being beaten
This was 5,000 years ago. Today, under King Mubarak I, the Egyptian property tax collectors are the ones leading the fight against the state.
‘The road to Paris and London lies via the towns of Afghanistan, the Punjab and Bengal’
Esme Choonara, A Rebel’s Guide to Trotsky, London: Bookmarks, 2007, Page 30:
Trotsky and Lenin believed that revolution in the West – in one of the key centers of capitalism – was necessary to secure the future of the international revolution. But they both also understood the importance of the revolts by those oppressed by colonialism and imperialism.
As Trotsky put it in 1919, while on the frontline with the Red Army, “The road to Paris and London lies via the towns of Afghanistan, the Punjab and Bengal”
… and Cairo, Gaza, Beirut and Baghdad.
