Mourning Egypt's Aborted Revolution

Activist Omar Robert Hamilton ponders what has happened in Egypt:

I sit, for the 12th hour now, alone and struggling for what to do. For the first time since I got on a plane for Egypt on Jan. 29, 2011, I am at a loss. Worse days than today lie ahead of us. We thought we could change the world. We know now that that feeling was not unique to us, that every revolutionary moment courses with the pulse of a manifest destiny. How different things feel today. I will not bury our convictions, but that feeling—youthful optimism? naiveté? idealism? foolishness?—is now truly and irrevocably dead. I mourn the dead and I despise those killing them. I mourn the dead and I despise those sending them to their deaths. I mourn the dead and I despise those who excuse their murder. How did it come to this? How did we get here? What is this place? . . .

In November 2011 and in January 2012, the streets echoed with chants demanding the end of military rule. But now it had become the self-appointed role of the politicians to translate street action into political gain. Now, the Army had people to talk to. Had all the forces that were supposedly against the military—the revolutionaries, the liberals, the Brotherhood, and the Salafis—ever truly united, where might we be today? Dead, possibly. But maybe not. Maybe somewhere closer to a civilian state.

A real, ideological alliance was never possible. But a tactical, practical one just might have worked. But rather than work together, each party repeatedly met with and made deals with the Army, consistently placing the generals in the strongest tactical position. Everyone was to blame. . . .

The main enemy of the people has always been the security state—the police and the military. We will never get anywhere until they are dismantled entirely. There was a moment when that could have been achieved, when a civilian state could have been built. But Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood would have had to choose the challenge of working with the disparate and bickering forces of the left and the liberals over dealing with the organized certainty of the military.

Omar Hamilton's mistake was a common one, thinking that people with no experience of democracy could easily work things out once they got the big bad generals out of the way. But democracy is hard, and authoritarianism does not appear for no reason. When they achieved power, after decades of oppression, the fundamentalists provoked a crisis rather than compromise with their ideological enemies. When the crisis came, the liberals preferred dealing with the military to leaving the fundamentalists in charge. Neither the liberals nor the fundamentalists really care that much about democracy. Both want to impose their own vision of the good society: free and prosperous on the one hand, godly on the other. Thus the military is left in charge for the foreseeable future.

I have a bad feeling that this guy is right:

The revolution is over; the terrorism is starting.