In Egypt, the Arab Spring Yields to a Season of Violent Storms

Back when protests for democracy first swept the Middle East, a cynical friend of mine scoffed at the idea of Arab democracy. "There are only two forces that count in the Arab world," he said, "the existing corrupt elite and the fundamentalists."

In Egypt this week the army has done its best to prove him right, unleashing a violent assault against camps of mostly peaceful demonstrators protesting the ousting of ex-president Mohammed Morsi. The furor of this attack appalls me. I understood why so many liberals inside and outside Egypt supported the army's removal of Morsi, who was proving to be an incompetent reactionary. But this slaughter shows why it was still a mistake.

There is always a profound cost to politics by gunfire. The French Revolution began its descent into tyranny when the liberals supported the intervention of the Parisian mob -- the mob may have been in the right, and powerful reactionary elements really were conspiring to undo the democratic changes under way. But when violence was allowed to serve as the highest court of appeal, the stage for Napoleon was set.

In Egypt, when the army swept Morsi out of office and into prison, the stage was set for yesterday's massacre. And what now? Will this explosion of mindless fury usher in peaceful reconciliation? Or will it lead instead to more violence and then yet more violence, as Egyptian fundamentalists respond in kind to the army's outrages? Will Egypt go the way of Syria, with an escalating Civil War that rages on and on partly because everyone is afraid to stop? Hannah Arendt:

The danger of the practice of violence, even if it moves consciously within a non-extremist framework of short-term goals, will always be that the means overwhelm the end. If goals are not achieved rapidly, the result will not merely be defeat but the introduction of the practice of violence into the whole body politic. Action is irreversible, and a return to the status quo in case of defeat is always unlikely. The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.

Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.