Good morning John! So, Egypt had a revolution this week and if you're an American like me, you're probably like,
"Didn't they just have a revolution?! Shouldn't they give somebody else a chance?".
Well, if that's how you feel, please allow me to correct your ignorance as I have corrected my own.
As I explain what's going on with Egypt, absolutely as quickly as I can! There are four main groups here, that are holding a lot of power. Let's go one by one.
FIRST: The old regime, which began when Gamel Abdel Nasser overthrew King Farouk who was sort of a puppet king of the British.
SECOND: The Muslim Brotherhood, a political and social and religious institution that advocates that all Arab states should be based on Islamic law.
They also advocate getting there through hard work and politics and not through violence.
THIRD: The Egyptian military, which is SUPER WEIRD.
FOURTH: Young, disenfranchised, largely unemployed activist people who want a revolutionary, liberal Egypt.
Now, I'm not saying that those are the only four factions in Egypt; there's a 10% Christian minority, there is a crazy radical, Islamist side and
there are secularists who are not disenfranchised young people, but those are the four main players in our story.
Now, a little bit more about them. The Muslim Brotherhood actually was banned in Egypt after a rogue member tried to assassinate Nasser in the 50s.
It was forced underground where it thrived extremely effectively. Many members now are wealthy and in the middle class and they were, for a long time, in
government, just as independents.
They hold powerful positions, they fund social programs like schools and orphanages and mosques. So they're kind of rich and powerful,
but at the same time, a lot of people don't understand them, and are kind of afraid of them and the old regime did vilify them a lot.
So lot's of people like them, lots of people don't- it's complicated.
Now as to the military. The armed forces in Egypt are very different than how we imagine armed forces if we live in the Western world. Or, really, if you live anywhere.
The military in Egypt owns a great deal of the land in Egypt, it can sell that land autonomously, like for real estate development or
it can lease it for resource extraction.
They have a bunch of factories; factories that are staffed by conscripts, by people who were drafted into the army and are basically now free labour for the army.
And those factories don't just build military equipment, they build, like, gym equipment and refrigerators and Windex.
They have farms and ranches and they sell the Egyptian people their chickens and their bottled water.
The Egyptian military does not need to make power grabs, because the Egyptian military remains in control of, like, 40% of the Egyptian economy and
they are very powerful.
They also, according to their rhetoric, have a sacred bond between them and the people of Egypt and
they are, in some cases, apparently, outside of what we would call the law. That's gonna be important!
So, by 2010, the current president- now we say president but really, he's a military dictator- is Hosni Mubarak. He is terrible.
He didn't start out terrible but he's terrible now. He's sort of the, just the head of a kleptocracy that extracts resources from a failing economy and
gives it to himself and his cronies.
He's also jailed lots of members of the Muslim Brotherhood, so the Muslim Brotherhood hates him. Meanwhile, his son, educated in Europe, comes back,
with a banking degree and wants to completely overhaul the way the military controls the economy.
So, Mubarak's regime has now pissed off the Muslim Brotherhood, the disenfranchised young people and the military; you can see how this is not going to go well.
Meanwhile, the internet happened and the 30 years of censorship that Mubarak has placed on top of Egypt is coming to an end because he cannot control it.
When the young people of the Arab Spring take to the streets, calling for Mubarak's resignation, the Muslim Brotherhood cautiously follows and when
Mubarak is like "Hey, military! We've got a problem right?", they're like "No...not really..." So Mubarak steps down.
So now we're up to 2011, we had Islamists who wanted elections to take place for a new parliament immediately because they already have an infrastructure for
campaigning with lots of money and lots of power structures.
The more liberal factions who want to first create a constitution before electing parliament so that they can have some time to use the revolutionary, the energy to
create a revolutionary new constitution and you know, build up their campaigning apparatus.
And the military, who just wants stability because they wanna keep selling land to real estate developers and kitchen appliances and stuff.
The military, because they want a new government as soon as possible sides with the Islamists, which is not a normal pairing; that doesn't usually happen in Egypt.
It's important to note that America is also calling for elections as soon as possible because we don't want it to be just sitting there as a military dictatorship with
the military now in control of everything 'cause that's not how we do things; we're Americans.
With support from everyone except for the revolutionaries, the elections go forward and yes,
surprise surprise, the Islamists win a majority of the seats in parliament.
The revolutionaries are feeling betrayed by their military, who's supposed to have a sacred bond with them and by the American government,
who they thought was going to be a great supporter in all of this.
They made that impossible revolution possible and they're not being represented in the new government that is being formed. That's annoying.
Worse than this, crime is way up, the police have kind of been disbanded, the youth on the streets are calling for the election of a new president as soon as possible in
the hopes that they can get somebody in there who actually represents them.
The election happens and it is super annoying because we have two people in first and second, getting 25 and 24% of the vote,
that being the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi and a candidate who basically represents the original regime of Mubarak that we just overthrew!
The rest of the votes, more than 50%, is split between progressive or liberal candidates. And they don't get to be in the runoff election.
So now, we have to pick between the Muslim Brotherhood candidate and the original regime. Fantastic!
Mohamed Morsi wins, barely, weirdly enough, which is okay at first because there is a mandate of revolutionary fervour and Morsi is supposed to take that into account
but then he doesn't. He turns out to be really terrible at his job!
Now, to be fair, this is an extremely difficult job. It is extremely difficult to take into account all of these different factions.
But, he's not even trying. He's extremely divisive.
Lots of intelligent people are telling Morsi to stop being such a tool but he refuses.
He's undermining the biggest opportunity the Muslim Brotherhood has ever had. And to top it off,
last November, he passed a decree basically saying that the constitution didn't apply to things that he said. So great, we've got ourselves another dictator. Fantastic!
So this makes the courts unhappy, it makes the people unhappy, it makes the military unhappy.
But the revolutionary youth of Egypt, they are not having it at all. A small group of young people starts going door to door, asking people to sign a petition,
saying that they will take to the streets on June 30th.
Millions of people sign. In the end, as many as 22 million people. That's more people than voted for him in the first place.
The Egyptian people now are freaking out. They think that this may be how the civil war starts, right? And the military is freaking out too,
because even if it isn't how the civil war starts, 22 million people on the streets is just a logistical nightmare!
So now, everybody is asking Morsi to make some concessions. Instead, he gets on stage and gives probably the worst 3 hour long speech of all time.
It's dismissive, it's divisive, it's defensive, it's drivel. It's other 'd' words too.
So yeah, the protesters say, "To heck with June 30th!" and they just go ahead and take to the streets right after the speech.
Apparently, 10 million people on the streets across Egypt are enough to enact the sacred bond between the Egyptian military and the Egyptian people.
The military goes in and they remove him from office, using force.
This may be the weirdest coup of all time, a coup that should be said, is supported by a lot of people.
The head of Egypt's military does not install himself because as we said previously, he's already got a lot of power. He doesn't need that.
Instead, he installs the head of the constitutional court as the interim president.
Hopefully, the first upon a path that will lead to some stability so that the Egyptian military can keep selling refrigerators and chickens and stuff.
My own bit of analysis here is that revolutions tend to be incremental steps forward for the actual people of a country.
They can be large, ideological steps but change happens slowly.
Cultures have to change subtly because they are composed of so many different people and people cannot all change their minds at the same time.
We can hope though and really, we can only hope that these incremental changes are for the stability of the country and the overall happiness of the people.
And that's something that despite all of the news media's prophetic ramblings, we are never going to know until we know it.
We're just going to have to wait and see. Sabrina, I'll see you on Tuesday.