Similar situation in Cairo. Moving the government to a far off, easily protected location means mass protests are dramatically less effective.
Sisi wants to make sure that there's no second Arab Spring some day.
It's so weird that media does not pick up on how this is a repressive move and nothing else. Eg when Kazachstan moved their capital to the frozen, desolate, middle-of-nowhere northeast, there were lots of giggly BBC articles about how that weird President over there moved his capital because a dream had told him to, haha! But few media wrote about how all that was cheap smoke and mirrors for making sure that everybody who lived near the capital was a civil servant, ie dependent, with their livelihoods, on a stable government.
EDIT: I changed my mind, I jumped to conclusions. This capital is only ~30km away, a suburb of Cairo really, which means that likely civil servants will be able to live in Cairo and commute to work (and vice versa some day). I bet protests will still be harder to organize than on the Tahrir square, but not impossibly so (unlike eg Kazachstan, Equatorial Guinea, Myanmar, Brazil etc)
In fact I wonder why they didn't build it 500km further down the Nile (but I'm glad they didn't), that's exactly what I'd expect of an authoritarian government like Sisi's.
Brazil's capital was moved from Rio de Janeiro to Brasília to try to solve the perceived problem that the Brazilian federal government was focused on the needs of the coastal area around Rio, and moving it to a more central location would make it more responsive to the needs of the country as a whole. I don't think avoiding protests was a major part of the decision. It was planned for decades – article 3 of the 1891 constitution [0] said the capital should be moved to central Brazil, but the move wasn't actually implemented until 1960.
Australia is another country with a planned capital – Canberra. In Australia's case, both Sydney and Melbourne wanted to be the capital. The compromise [1] was that the capital would be located in a federal territory to be carved out of New South Wales, more than 100 miles from Sydney, and Melbourne would serve as the temporary capital until then.
[0] https://pt.wikisource.org/wiki/Constitui%C3%A7%C3%A3o_de_189...
[1] https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Senate/Powers_practi...
I really should stop assuming.
There is nothing substantial to support that theory, capitals are moved because of unfixable infrastructure, reducing overcrowded capital, historic realigning to actual cultural centres or public spending for economical reasons or to have it in a region ethnically aligned with the politically dominant group
Revolutions happen when a lot of people are demanding change not when people are rioting in the capital
Pic I took from the bus, assuming it's the right thing https://imgur.com/bb5KE9Y
It looks surrounded by open ground and looks made with security in mind.
They won't let you on the mainland, even with a valid visa. They don't want you to see what the global oil companies have done (and are doing) to the environment.
I tried to go.
Yo wont get the "stroppy bastards" who actually hold the executives toes to the fire.
Yes. You can get rid of elected representatives.
There are a lot of things with HoL but being unelected is not one of them.
I'm a brit and had to google. Apparently they may move temporarily while refurbing the usual location.
The 2004 Equatorial Guinea coup d'état attempt, also known as the Wonga Coup, failed to replace President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo with exiled opposition politician Severo Moto. Mercenaries organised by mainly British financiers were arrested in Zimbabwe on 7 March 2004 before they could carry out the plot. Prosecutors alleged that Moto was to be installed as the new president in return for preferential oil rights to corporations affiliated to those involved with the coup. The incident received international media attention after the reported involvement of Sir Mark Thatcher in funding the coup, for which he was convicted and fined in South Africa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Equatorial_Guinea_coup_d%...
Versailles. Versailles was a safe residence for the French king, far from the crowds in Paris.
During the revolution, they actually mandated that he move back to Paris.
The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Mutiny_of_1783 is specifically what convinced Congress that the capitol building needed to be moved to an isolated area not in an existing city.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_the_Parliament_Buil...
Most innovative communities aren't some bleeding-heart melting pot but actually look like cults weary of outsiders.
The other examples strike as somewhat peculiar, and probably not anybody’s idea of the Ideal, innovative city.
Counter-culture later merged together with business into what was called the 'Californian ideology' in the 90s, and while it has this sort of melting pot burning man aesthetic going for it, intellectually it is incredibly homogeneous, extremely distinct from the rest of the US, and politically streamlined.
Counter-cultures almost always are paradoxically 'melting-pots' of insanely like-minded people, the stubbornness is what makes them so effective. Once counter-culture starts to bleed into the mainstream (the actually diverse population) it dissipates.
China is also not segregated by cities' expertise but by provincial policy. For example, some cities, like Hangzhou had a very preferential treatment towards tech, by virtue of the provincial investment fund being invested in tech companies compared to the usual state-owned steel mill crap.
Cairo is very congested and dirty city. Protests are last problem in there.
Also, most of Kazakhstan's political elite continued to reside in Almaty and just flew back and forth from the new capital for business, so Astana wasn't even an example of a capital built to secure the rulers from the population.
The revolutionaries were quick to behead Lavoisier, who was a member of the establishment and tax collector for the king. He did his best work under the monarchy.
Not sure you can give revolutionary France credit for that field.
* 200,000 farmers in the Vendee
* tens of thousands of priests and nuns
* ordinary people, children, and eventually themselves.
The stench of the bodies was so great they moved the guillotines outside the city. One day after beheading a convent of nuns that refused to stop praying, next up was a young boy caught stealing. As he was led up to the guillotine, a shout could be heard from the crowd "Please, no more children!"
But hey, at least they replaced their King with an Emperor.
Seriously though, I find the entire period fascinating (mostly via the Revolutions postcast, and reading Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety). The French Revolution is such a pivotal point in Western history that I believe that precision is important.
I mean, all I know is some proto-marxists overthrew the king, murdered everybody who looked at them funny for 5 years straight, went crazy, got overtaken by Napoleon who was basically the next king again.
That's a few years as a republic, and an extremely bloody and dysfunctional one at that, how was that pivotal? Was it "just" because it was the situation let Napoleon take power? I'll definitely agree that Napoleon was pivotal :-)
But I'm very shallow wrt this topic, I'd love to learn how (besides the bloodshed), the revolution changed matters.
Countries were transformed from feudal holdings under a monarch into nation states.
I sincerely urge you to learn more. It's much more complex than a few fanatics overthrowing a king and then falling apart. Specifically, it's about how the full military power of France was unleashed upon Europe, and crucially, this was a power driven by ideology - people should govern themselves, not be beholden an ancient royalty and church.
Napoleon could probably never had risen as far as he did under the monarchy. And crucially, he took power in part because he was so successful in waging the Republic's wars.
I never understood the revolution as causing the Napoleonic wars, and I had always gotten the idea that Napolean waged his wars for the much more mundane reason of an Emperor wanting to expand his borders, because ego. I never understood that so much of the revolution's ideas persisted into Napoleon's rule and conquest.
Also I've always had a bit of a beef with people celebrating the French Revolution as some glorious victory of "the people" over their evil oppressors, without mentioning the Terror that followed. Maybe that's made me a bit blind to how much of the good parts persisted :-)
I'll dig deeper, thanks!
Parisian urban revolts were a regular occurrence[0]; it was an explicit goal to make them more difficult.
The following quote is from the SlateStarCodex review[1] of Seeing Like a State.
"This was a particular problem in Paris, which was famous for a series of urban insurrections in the 19th century (think Les Miserables, but about once every ten years or so). Although these generally failed, they were hard to suppress because locals knew the “terrain” and the streets were narrow enough to barricade. Slums full of poor people gathered together formed tight communities where revolutionary ideas could easily spread. The late 19th-century redesign of Paris had the explicit design of destroying these areas and splitting up poor people somewhere far away from the city center where they couldn’t do any harm."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-lik...
it sure worked really well in 1871, considering the dommage which were done during the Commune
Consider how a number of nascent democracies in Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries are now widely regarded as having had a democratic deficit because of their treatment of Jews or of other ethnic minorities, in spite of the governments being elected by a majority of voters.
And in this case, the percentage that the Copts make up of the Egyptian population (which is infamously disputed, so giving a figure like you did is risky) is completely irrelevant, because any modern democratic state is obliged to respect various freedoms regardless of the amount of the population keen on them.
Actually that's precisely what it means: "demos" = mob + "kratos" = rule; hence "demokratia" = the rule of the mob.
Funny, huh?
The people become "ochlos" crowd when in sub-groups, or perhaps when they start causing irritation "ochlesis". Before that, the demos is just a bunch of people.
Originally demos refers just the people of a particular land, from Homeric "demos" = land, and expanded over time to include particular bunches of people (e.g., of a village or town, or a band of people).
The political sense of the people as free and sovereign citizens (the body politic; Latin "plebs") is a later meaning. Before that, demos used to refer to the mass of subjects contrasted to the "basileus" king.
Of course, both demos and ochlos can refer to a crowd (as can "plethos"). One could say that demos has a common attribute (e.g. place of origin) giving it stronger cohesion, while an ochlos may be ad hoc.
Still, ochlos is mass/multitude of people, with the ability to exercise influence in a democratic assembly. It is that characteristic of democracy as mob rule - alright, occasionally, that generated early critique (but also gave rise to rhetoric and dialogue as more benign means of persuasion).
(Source: LSJ and a bit of Lampe)
From your name I gather you are from, or interested in the study of, the Mediterranean?
Morsi was certainly there long enough to pass judgment. I'm not old enough to remember the Muslim Brotherhood, but older family members are and they were fairly concerned about their rapid political rise. I didn't share that concern at the beginning, but quickly realized the dangers of it with the theocratic bend of the newly-formed government.
I have been saying this for a while, the globalist ruling class all around the world is essentially trying to separate themselves from the rabble … or is it cattle? … around them.
Why was it the provisional capital? Well, the major cities (Istanbul, Izmir) were occupied. Ankara was * Controlled by Ataturk's government * Centrally Located * Decently Large (i.e. not a village)
Indeed, primarily by distancing the rulers from people poor enough to not to have anything to loose.
How much big of a part of Cairo is a gigantic slum? Cairo is not a small city, 20 million at least in the conurbation.
On other hand, having a standing out compact garrison city in the desert will make bombing Sisi out of existence much easier.