Adam Shatz in the LRB:
So this is how it ends: with the army killing more than 600 protesters, and injuring thousands of others, in the name of restoring order and defeating ‘terrorism’. The victims are Muslim Brothers and other supporters of the deposed president Mohammed Morsi, but the ultimate target of the massacres of 14 August is civilian rule. Cairo, the capital of revolutionary hope two years ago, is now its burial ground.
Particularly harsh words for the revolutionary camp:
The triumph of the counter-revolution has been obvious for a while, but most of Egypt’s revolutionaries preferred to deny it, and some actively colluded in the process, telling themselves that they were allying themselves with the army only in order to defend the revolution. Al-Sisi was only too happy to flatter them in this self-perception, as he prepared to make his move. He, too, styles himself a defender of the revolution
might one ask if the revolutionaries had been forced to make that choice,
choosing between Islamist rule, which never looked or sounded inclusive and went about dismantling state institutions rather than reform them.
How many people here could name Egypt’s foreign minister(s) over the last year, a sidelined figure, bringing the Hadad’s to the fore to run Egypt’s foreign policy, which was a disaster.
The revolutionaries have been dismal, so have the MB, and if we had been a bit more honest with ourselves this wasn’t a revolution, if it was then those who fought for it should have been in power.
With all due respect to Adam, Egypt was never ‘the capital of revolutionary hope’ , not really, that was only what people wanted or perhaps needed to see in it – so it cannot be its’ burial ground’ either. As the Sufis say: he who praises then blames lies twice. These sweeping assessments or rather labeling of situations as if they had neat boundaries and outcomes are unhelpful when addressing ongoing processes that will no doubt outlast us all and most everything that was said or written about them.