“I would not have thought a scenario possible where we welcome military intervention but the Egyptian army is very much part of the fabric of Egyptian society. And in both 1977 and 1985 it refused direct orders to fire on Egyptian demonstrators. An oath taken by every soldier is that he will not shoot Egyptians. So at the moment the army is securing for us this space in our country where we are carrying out our peaceful, democratic, young, inclusive, open-source, grassroots revolution.
From an atmosphere piece by Ahdaf Soueif, female author of the novel The Map of Love.
— This site is archived; see this for more information. —
Comments
An army of Bradley Mannings - wishful thinking or grateful ally?
This resembles recent events in Ecuador when police mutiny against a government determined to cut back on the police state could only be finished that way. The Correa crisis was not just the usual infighting in some random country, but a showcase incident of how national interest can turn against police state interest, although an unfinished one since it has not yet resulted in the systematic forensic analysis of secret police archives like in Guatemala. The Egyptian army will only be successfull if they prevent their police from deleting the records. And that includes all army records as well. It is peculiar for this all-inclusive revolution that it also is inclusive to armies, but once they stray on the wrong side of history they're permanently out. Actually, in some countries this has already happened, and everything people there can do to liberate themselves is try to inspire planetary domino effects.
To prove to all the world that all this works well, now Egyptian police have dropped their uniforms. They'd rather be politically identifiable as a gang of thugs than individually recognisable by soldiers. This is the result of all other forms of oppression against the liberty movement failing to work. They masquerade as a rival protest movement because they can neither intimidate nor infiltrate the real one. Foreign observers need to avoid the temptation of moral equivalence and see the dissolution of the criminal regime into criminal rackets as what it is. There can be no dialogue with oppressors, there only can be abolition.
Guarding the ancient cultural heritage in the museums is one thing, guarding the current memory of an abused society in the secret police archives another. Telling which one is more important for winning the future might be the only impossible one among them.