Twittotalitarian

At about five am this morning (2 May),I woke up to news of people being murdered in and around the site of the Abbassiya (Ministry of Defence) sit-in (#MOF on Twitter, ongoing since late Friday, 27 April)

I began following the news online, relying on tweeps who were either already in Abbassiya or on their way there. For the first time since the start of the sit-in, I also paid attention to what the star activists (Alaa Abdel Fattah and Nawara Negm, in this case) had to say about developments—in the vague hope of finding out why, beyond their continued and, to my mind, increasingly irresponsible enthusiasm for "peaceful protests" regardless of the purpose or tenability of the event in question, such cyber-driven "revolutionaries" had sided with the fanatical Salafi supporters of former presidential candidate Hazem Salah Abu Ismail.
Following a prolonged sit-in in Tahrir to protest Abu Ismail being disqualified from entering the race for the presidency because his late mother held a US passport, supporters of the lawyer-cum-TV proselytiser, demanding the dissolution of the Higher Committee for Presidential Elections and the instant handover of power to civilians by SCAF, had decided to escalate by moving the sit-in to the ministry headquarters in Abbassiya. (Remarkably, Abu Ismail himself at no point either called on his supporters to stop protesting on his behalf or bothered to join them in person; the Sheikh, as many of them called him in fervent tones, complained of a sprained ankle that kept preventing him from being among his warriors of Islam. Only after people started dying at the hands of thugs widely thought to be deployed by SCAF did Abu Ismail declare that he had nothing to do with the protest in the first place.) Since Friday, however, Salafis had been joined by all manner of protesters including politicised football Ultras rallying around the slogan "Down with military rule".
The sit in had been subject to periodic attacks by thugs aiming to disband it, but nothing as systematic or as garish as what had been unfolding when I started looking at my Twitter timeline this morning; whether due to a decision by those commanding the thugs to end the sit-in once and for all or because the protesters had managed to irk the local residents sufficiently for the latter to join in the fight against them, the conflict was reaching new and disturbing heights; Negm said she could smell blood everywhere around her on reaching Abbassiya around eight am.
With the majority of tweets discussing an earlier (probably true) report by Abdel Fattah that protesters chasing thugs through the backstreets of a residential area far removed from the sit-in itself had fired live ammunition of their own—it was later reported that, by accidentally killing an unaffiliated young man, either protesters or thugs posing as protesters had incited the whole neighbourhood to declare war on the sit-in—there was not much scope for working out what the self-declared leaders of Egypt's popular revolution were thinking. Here, translated from Arabic as literally as possible, is the tweet that threw me into a silent rage, however (it was by Abdel Fattah's sister Mona Seif, addressing fellow Twitter-activists): "Whoever truly wants to help will either join the march that's gathering in half an hour at Al-Fath Mosque or go to Demerdash [Hospital] and donate blood to the injured. Otherwise no one has the time for you, seriously."
***
To explain my rage—first to myself—and to try and answer my initial questions about why the "Sons of Abu Ismail" protest was perceived as an episode of "the ongoing revolution" and how the star activists can fail to see that what "the immediate handover of power to civilians" means at the present moment is the immediate transformation of Egypt into an Islamist dictatorship not likely to be any less murderous to dissidents than SCAF (and let me state, again, in no uncertain terms, that I do not condone SCAF remaining in power any more than I ever condoned SCAF taking control of the country in the first place), I want to say a few things about that tweet.
The first thing I want to say is purely factual. Neither did the 9.30 am march to which the tweet referred make it to the sit-in—thugs and/or military forces blocked the way—nor were there any injured protesters at Demerdash Hospital at that time (the latter was soon confirmed by Negm from there). It was subsequent, purely "peaceful" marches—for which read "mired in the crimes of actual and potential wielders of political power, and ones that included deep-in-the-political-process players like the Islamist presidential candidate Abdel Moneim Abul Fetouh—that prompted executive power on the ground to take control, eventually, patchily cutting short the fighting. (Abbassiya has since turned into a hub of purely Islamist "peaceful" demonstrations.) Such, of course, are the pitfalls not only of hearsay but also of Twitter-based (and apparently also politically suicidal) revolutionary command strategy. Following Seif's instructions could not actually have resulted in anyone "helping" anyone or anything at all, whether truly or in any other way. Perhaps her tone actively discouraged a good few people from WANTING to help.
I am also forced to ask—a little more philosophically, if I may in these "revolutionary" (for which read chaotically populist) times—what it is precisely that activists thought they were doing when they headed over to the sit-in last night or this morning, launching their usual bombardments of haphazard, confusing instructions and cryptically brief comments in the usual arrogant and peremptory tone. In what capacity? For nearly 18 months it has been demonstrated time and again that, helpless against thugs, local residents and/or organised security forces both visible and in plain clothes, unarmed protesters end up being killed for nothing even when demonstrations have a clear-cut purpose or cause (the Port Said massacre prompting Ultras and other protesters to rise up against the Ministry of Interior, for example). I am forced to ask whether this self-righteous zeal for protests is actually as moral as it seems considering that it results in innocent people dying. Who do the activists actually represent apart from themselves and their fans? Morally speaking—and there is nothing but a supposedly idealistic moral stance that justifies their attitude—aren't the activists to blame for the deaths incurred in this endless travesty of regime change?
The third thing I want to say is that, as it seems to me as much from Twitter as from first-hand experience and basic understanding of such mental conditions as temporary collective psychosis and obsessive compulsive disorder, for these people "activism"—which as often as not reduces to calling for and/or attending ultimately murderously suppressed protests—is more of a way of life than a political statement. The constant sense of urgency eliminating any rational questions about what's going on and how we might best relate to it combines with celebrity status and the often downright stupidity of a black-and-white perspective on events to maintain this lifestyle and generate a "revolutionary" reality not only different from—indeed opposed to—the reality of the people but different even from the substance of the revolution itself. I seem to recall Negm tweeting something to the effect of, "Let's make sure the Muslims Brotherhood takes the reigns of power as soon as possible so we can protest against them while we're ready"! Does one ask oneself, when one tweets something like that, about what will happen when it is the Muslim Brotherhood who are responsible for the loss of life and there is still no efficient alternative to the Muslim Brotherhood? Does it occur to one that maybe one is simply ENJOYING protests and the rhetoric that goes with them—the bloodier, the more epic—more than making any statement about or contribution to history?