The
struggle against a state that seeks to deny its people any genuine empowerment
is playing out on the streets of Heliopolis
The vast majority of Egyptians have been told throughout history that they
are little more than interlopers in the closed rooms where decisions over their
lives, community and environment are made; this is a nation where the political
elite has always viewed the wider population as so many static pieces, devoid of
agency and in need of being controlled and pacified through a fluid web of
top-down munificence and brutal repression.
That authoritarian conception of the state remained entrenched regardless of the differing ideologies and motivations of those who ruled, from colonial officials to the post-1952 military dictatorship, from Hosni Mubarak's kleptocrats to the army junta that managed the so-called "transition" to democracy.
And it remains today, under the rule of a Muslim Brotherhood whose critique of Egypt's problems is moral rather than structural, whose vision of power is exclusionary instead of pluralistic......
Many Egyptians would be horrified at such sentiments, but their very presence
on the palace wall indicates why this revolution is not disappearing any time
soon. Times have changed and, both figuratively and literally, the country's
population is at the gates of power. No elite that ignores this fact can expect
to survive for long."
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