PoliticsEgypt: Transition: Mubarak disappoints, again; Cairo blogger announces Friday's biggest march ever

Update:  See video of a scholars panel at Hudson Institute USA (feb8,2k11) on C-Span.org.



Cairo blogger Abu A. sends "passionate email" to Huffington Post (Feb11,2k11) with an announcement that today, Friday, will bring the youth revolution's largest march and demonstrations so far: 

 A very URGENT update on the situation in Cairo. We just finished our late night/morning emergency meeting within range of Tahrir Square with representatives from each sector of our trusted civil disobedience organizers. We have decided unanimously to march from Tahrir Square to the Presidential Palace later today on this Friday the 11th of February. The word is spreading rapidly that it shall be the largest peaceful protest witnessed in Cairo thus far. This has just been decided upon after Mubarak's "bait-and-switch" speech that turned the crowd from hopeful to angry earlier. Much fear is in the air, however there is power in numbers. May peace guide our actions as we seek a new dawn in Cairo. 

Earlier, the same Abu A. showed just how naïve to a fawlt, these youthful protesters can be.  He cites the vapid rhetoric we have come to distrust, just as much as we distrust the dictators.  But he makes some 
very hard-reality points as well.  Now Abu A's email text:

 [There] is something we are rallying around and showing others here as the speech we the people of Cairo WANTED Mubarak to give. It is an analogy for our situation in trying to get a true Democracy and no more dictators regardless of name or rank. We do not want any hard-line Caliphate like Iran as that would be worse for human rights than even Mubarak's secret police squads. We want tolerance and an open economy without corruption or crackdowns for a change.

The speech video I refer to is the one given by Charlie Chaplin in his movie The Great Dictator when his character is mistaken as the exact double for the movie's parody of Hitler and him handing over the power to the people.

Just as Mubarak and the rest of the 30 year old dictatorship friends in the current power structure should be doing as well. This is the best analogy for what we want. Please watch and you will see what we are trying to strive for here now. May peace guide our actions as we seek a new dawn in Cairo. 

Yet, as long as the 10% Christian national minority in Egypt is not mentioned -- is erased -- along with other Egyptian minorities and demographics, the "general community" idea proves itself historically to be a screen for the same old totalist and totalitarian propensities borne along by the rhetoric of democratic pieties. Read: democratistic, majoritarianism.  Beware, young revolutionaries!  I know you mean well, and I want to support you in your endeavour for a renewed Egypt where the old and the new can live side by side in good will.





[Check out refWrite's YouTube channel, yUT2ube, for this vid and our entire collection.]


-- comment, plus materials from HuffPo, posted by Politicarp