I keep trying to sit down to write another post about the Egyptian revolution, but things are changing so quickly I can't keep up. I woke up Thursday to reports that Mubarak was expected to step down. Egypt was ecstatic. But he didn't step down and now Egypt is furious. Who knows what today will bring?
One of the defining features of the Egyptian revolution has been its amazing tactical flexibility. Using tactics reminiscent of everything from the French Revolution to the Palestinian intifada, the protesters have consistently outmaneuvered a police state with as much repressive strength as any foreign military occupation. Now a fascinating article in--of all places--the Wall Street Journal gives us an insight into how the protest that started it all was planned. Answer: extremely well.
I'm not going to spend time recapping the article--you should just read it--but it involves a secret meeting point, some low-tech, decidedly non-online organizing, and the desperate hope that if a few hundred people turned up in the street with no cops around, thousands and then millions would follow. And it shows the brains, creativity and sheer nerve of Egypt's new generation of radicals, mostly people my age and younger, who have never known an Egypt without Mubarak.
The mainstream media have repeatedly called this a "leaderless" revolution. Nothing could be farther from the truth. There are dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of leaders. Just because we don't know their names doesn't mean they don't exist. They do exist, they planned this revolution, and they planned it well. For weeks they brainstormed how to get around the central tactical problem of any protest in Egypt: the fact that the police have huge numbers at their command and can physically surround (or "kettle," as the Brits say) any demonstration to keep it from moving. They planned their demonstration like a guerrilla military operation--which, in a certain sense, it was--organizing in cells at times, using disinformation to confuse the cops, and accepting that some of the protests on the 25th could be broken up as long as at least one succeeded in marching.
These activists knew their city, their fellow citizens and their state, and the strengths and weaknesses of each. They knew Cairo's enormous size could be used to their advantage by calling for many separate protests and spreading the riot police thin across the sprawling metropolis. They knew how to avoid arrest and being spied on--frequently switching phones and sleeping locations, trusting certain information to only a few people--because they had been organizing under condition of dictatorship for years, whether in support of the Palestinian intifada, in solidarity with the strike waves that have rocked Egypt regularly for the past several years, or against the brutal police murder of Khaled Said last summer. They knew the poor neighborhood where they planned to march was a place where no one used Facebook or Twitter, so they organized the old-fashioned way, with photocopied leaflets. They had allies in the older generation--like the mother of one of the organizers, a veteran of Egypt's last wave of mass struggle, the 1977 bread riots. And overall, after the success of the Tunisian revolution, they believed the moment was right in Egypt and had the courage to seize it.
In retrospect this plan looks brilliant, because it worked. But it could have collapsed at so many points. The police could have gotten wind of the secret 21st location. The organizers could have been spied on or infiltrated and all arrested before they even got to the meeting point. The mass of people they were counting on to protect them could have failed to materialize, hanging back out of fear instead of surging into the street. If any of these things had happened, the leaders would have been isolated, arrested and tortured like so many before them--like many of them had been in the past, in fact. This could so easily have been a suicide mission. I'm sure at times organizers thought it was. To even attempt such a plan required incredible courage--and the political astuteness to know that the time was ripe for the spark to start a blaze.
The times was ripe, as it turned out, and people have joined the protests in ever-increasing numbers. Although there is no guarantee that the revolutionaries won't make a tactical mistake somewhere down the road, they haven't made one yet. The proof is in the fact that the movement is still going and has gotten stronger. Meanwhile the regime has pulled trick after trick out of its bag to try to crush the protests, with no success. When Mubarak pulled his police off the streets to try to create chaos and looting, neighborhoods organized committees to defend themselves. When he sent thugs into the street to attack the protests, people fought back, barricaded the square and drove the thugs out. In a flash mass protests turned into street battles--highly organized and successful ones--and it is now possible to speak of front lines and positions taken and held around Tahrir Square. When the regime stalled for time with fruitless negotiations (sound familiar?) the protesters used that time to widen and deepen the revolution, expanding the borders of the "liberated zone," organizing street protests that have only gotten larger, and in the last few days, organizing strikes that have the potential to bring the considerable weight of Egypt's working class fully behind the revolution in an organized manner.
In order to win a revolution you need to be simultaneously smart, brave and lucky, because when the stakes are so high one wrong move can kill you. As dawn breaks over Cairo on the 18th day of protests--a Friday, the start of the weekend in Egypt--organizers are calling for a march to the presidential palace. It promises to be massive. At least 10,000 people have also surrounded the state TV building, with, it seems, the goal of taking it over. The role of the army is still an unknown, and is the factor that I'm told many people on the ground are now discussing. Momentum is still on the protesters' side, and at this point I doubt even a total bloodbath would roll it back. No one knows what will happen today, but this revolution may very well be just beginning.
One of the defining features of the Egyptian revolution has been its amazing tactical flexibility. Using tactics reminiscent of everything from the French Revolution to the Palestinian intifada, the protesters have consistently outmaneuvered a police state with as much repressive strength as any foreign military occupation. Now a fascinating article in--of all places--the Wall Street Journal gives us an insight into how the protest that started it all was planned. Answer: extremely well.
I'm not going to spend time recapping the article--you should just read it--but it involves a secret meeting point, some low-tech, decidedly non-online organizing, and the desperate hope that if a few hundred people turned up in the street with no cops around, thousands and then millions would follow. And it shows the brains, creativity and sheer nerve of Egypt's new generation of radicals, mostly people my age and younger, who have never known an Egypt without Mubarak.
The mainstream media have repeatedly called this a "leaderless" revolution. Nothing could be farther from the truth. There are dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of leaders. Just because we don't know their names doesn't mean they don't exist. They do exist, they planned this revolution, and they planned it well. For weeks they brainstormed how to get around the central tactical problem of any protest in Egypt: the fact that the police have huge numbers at their command and can physically surround (or "kettle," as the Brits say) any demonstration to keep it from moving. They planned their demonstration like a guerrilla military operation--which, in a certain sense, it was--organizing in cells at times, using disinformation to confuse the cops, and accepting that some of the protests on the 25th could be broken up as long as at least one succeeded in marching.
These activists knew their city, their fellow citizens and their state, and the strengths and weaknesses of each. They knew Cairo's enormous size could be used to their advantage by calling for many separate protests and spreading the riot police thin across the sprawling metropolis. They knew how to avoid arrest and being spied on--frequently switching phones and sleeping locations, trusting certain information to only a few people--because they had been organizing under condition of dictatorship for years, whether in support of the Palestinian intifada, in solidarity with the strike waves that have rocked Egypt regularly for the past several years, or against the brutal police murder of Khaled Said last summer. They knew the poor neighborhood where they planned to march was a place where no one used Facebook or Twitter, so they organized the old-fashioned way, with photocopied leaflets. They had allies in the older generation--like the mother of one of the organizers, a veteran of Egypt's last wave of mass struggle, the 1977 bread riots. And overall, after the success of the Tunisian revolution, they believed the moment was right in Egypt and had the courage to seize it.
In retrospect this plan looks brilliant, because it worked. But it could have collapsed at so many points. The police could have gotten wind of the secret 21st location. The organizers could have been spied on or infiltrated and all arrested before they even got to the meeting point. The mass of people they were counting on to protect them could have failed to materialize, hanging back out of fear instead of surging into the street. If any of these things had happened, the leaders would have been isolated, arrested and tortured like so many before them--like many of them had been in the past, in fact. This could so easily have been a suicide mission. I'm sure at times organizers thought it was. To even attempt such a plan required incredible courage--and the political astuteness to know that the time was ripe for the spark to start a blaze.
The times was ripe, as it turned out, and people have joined the protests in ever-increasing numbers. Although there is no guarantee that the revolutionaries won't make a tactical mistake somewhere down the road, they haven't made one yet. The proof is in the fact that the movement is still going and has gotten stronger. Meanwhile the regime has pulled trick after trick out of its bag to try to crush the protests, with no success. When Mubarak pulled his police off the streets to try to create chaos and looting, neighborhoods organized committees to defend themselves. When he sent thugs into the street to attack the protests, people fought back, barricaded the square and drove the thugs out. In a flash mass protests turned into street battles--highly organized and successful ones--and it is now possible to speak of front lines and positions taken and held around Tahrir Square. When the regime stalled for time with fruitless negotiations (sound familiar?) the protesters used that time to widen and deepen the revolution, expanding the borders of the "liberated zone," organizing street protests that have only gotten larger, and in the last few days, organizing strikes that have the potential to bring the considerable weight of Egypt's working class fully behind the revolution in an organized manner.
In order to win a revolution you need to be simultaneously smart, brave and lucky, because when the stakes are so high one wrong move can kill you. As dawn breaks over Cairo on the 18th day of protests--a Friday, the start of the weekend in Egypt--organizers are calling for a march to the presidential palace. It promises to be massive. At least 10,000 people have also surrounded the state TV building, with, it seems, the goal of taking it over. The role of the army is still an unknown, and is the factor that I'm told many people on the ground are now discussing. Momentum is still on the protesters' side, and at this point I doubt even a total bloodbath would roll it back. No one knows what will happen today, but this revolution may very well be just beginning.
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