Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

I wouldn’t use the word ‘mistake’ in the title; as the writer elaborates in the article , it was rather a weakness that stems of the absence of a well-organised revolutionary organisation. In fact, insurrection stopped short of taking the levers of powers. There was not an open general strike to pose the question of power.  “Despite the revolutionaries’ battlefield triumph, little was achieved at the structural level in the centuries-long popular fight against the police state. Unlike what happened with the Stasi in East Germany after the 1989 revolution, Egyptians still know very little about the SSI [the State Security Investigation Service]. The problem for those rebelling against Egypt’s police state was primarily their limited capacity—as well as lack of a strategy and the necessary political imagination. The liberal human rights discourse also reduced the police state to a problem of its repression and illegality, preventing a deeper understanding of its constructive role, its so

Lines of succession

Tahrir revolutionaries famously chanted for “bread, freedom, and social justice.” Ten years on, hopes for freedom and social justice are quite far from most Egyptians’ minds. The vast majority are far too busy chasing after the daily bread that led off that short list of demands, struggling day in and day out to feed themselves and their families, and desperately trying to cling to what’s left of their basic human dignity, before even that is stripped from them. There is no denying that the situation is bleak. But at least for one night, Egyptians were able to celebrate and take pride in their cultural heritage, even as that too becomes little more than another weapon in the hands of the regime. The Military Mobilisation of History