Anticipating 8 July, Youssef Rakha discusses revolution Tomorrow is "the second revolution". I am no longer enthusiastic about the term. Not that I have the least ambivalence towards what is happening, what has and has not yet happened: if meaningful change is to occur, if justice is to be done, there is no escaping more and more sustained protest; I shudder to think there is no escaping more violence too, though in the light of Central Security (the Egyptian riot police) striking back, violence seems inevitable. An effective as opposed to puppet interim government and an end to both police and military abuses are the very least starting point for the promised new Egypt; naturally, as it now seems, neither has been forthcoming. Despite the appearance of relative stability, sooner or later something must explode; I say this analytically, not emotionally: whatever the powers that be are thinking, however much the quasi-official media continue to churn out misinformation, the current situation is not tenable. As far as we support the 25 Jan-11 Feb protests, perhaps we should be grateful that stability remains a brittle veneer. In some ways, of course - for 30 years prior to 2011 - stability was a veneer anyway. Yet protests have been repeatedly decried as a threat to stability and as such identified with disturbance of the peace (in much the same way as protesters have been identified with baltagiyya or thugs and subjected to military trials). There is a sense in which the discourse of revolution has been co-opted by some and marginalised by others, in which the uprooting of corrupt dictatorship has reduced to hollow patriotism, "bringing down the regime" to "loving Egypt". In just over four months, dependency on the army has facilitated both a rise in reactionary (as in positively counterrevolutionary) Islamism and (coupled by a string of minimal, essentially cosmetic interventions) business as usual for all the elements constituting the former social-political order, media, security and Muslim Brothers not excluded. My gripe with "revolution" is that, all things considered, it seems to have struck an unprogressive chord with the silent majority; and the Historic Achievement of the Egyptian People - so far little more than a symbolic gesture - has reduced to a term. Even in daily discourse, the events of those 18 days have become synonymous with a period of time, the martyrs to a social group: people say "at the revolution" as if they are saying "last Ramadan" or "during the holiday"; and references to "the families of the martyrs", stripped of any ethical prerogative, are juxtaposed with references to other social strata with a direct interest in the political future. Tomorrow is "the second revolution". One assumes the majority of the intellectual community will, at some point in the day, make their way to Tahrir Square and, with characteristic timidity, join in the chanting of slogans probably created by the "ultras", as the organised, often uniformed football supporters-cum- male cheer leaders who have made up the bulk of Tahrir Square protesters in the last two months are now called. They will dissolve in the multitude, if multitude there is. They will be theorising about developments as developments occur. A very potent question is whether they will be there as protesters or in the presupposed capacity of "the conscience of the nation". In just over four months, it has been fascinating to watch the intellectuals take part and, especially, comment on events while at the same time seeing how they might pragmatically benefit from the incumbent developments - assuming positions in the ministry of culture, for example, or allying themselves with people who have. It is not so much that they are on the wrong side of the moral divide. The important thing is to realise how, in much the same way as the ideological grand narratives, hero worship and tutelage that characterised the emergence of postcolonial national states in the Arab world have come to an impasse, so too have the discourses of an intellectual "margin" which, positing itself as the enlightened, progressive and selfless counterweight to an ineffectual, vacuous and often criminal mainstream, when the time came for it to make sacrifices, to turn itself into a self-respecting page, ended up producing little more than bystanders' remarks. Should revolution pick up where it left off, now, what would be the intellectuals' role in it? And other than prematurely exaggerating the significance of what happened through rhetoric and/or making sagely, often idiotic or patently counterrevolutionary statements about where to go from here, what was the intellectuals' contribution to "the first" revolution? If enough people show up tomorrow, if the situation sufficiently escalates, one assumes there will be, around intellectuals and ultras alike, huge numbers of Central Security armed with freshly imported tear gas and a vengefulness for protesters, plainclothes operatives directing anti-riot operations as well as baltagiyya to aid and justify them, perhaps also snipers stationed on rooftops or elsewhere, perhaps arrests. A small core of committed activists - peaceful to the last - will be calling for an indefinite sit-in and, if the situation develops, eventually sealing off the square. If all this happens, if there are enough people to make it happen, "the revolution" will have happened again; in rhetorical tones, the intellectuals will express joy and concern, they will espouse ideological grand narratives and tutelage, but it is clear by now that they will not have answers to the only relevant, nearly intractable question of how to actually implement the demands of the revolution. Tomorrow is "the second revolution". The demands of the first revolution, which were more or less willingly left for the army to respond to and have therefore not been met, will be made more forcefully, once again. It is as if the revolutionaries are suddenly discovering that the army had been part of the regime all along, and shared more or less the same interests. The stepping down of Mubarak is, as if for the first time since 11 Feb , seen for what it actually was: a significant enough concession to the social-political transformation posited by some eight million taking to the streets to remonstrate with the political status quo, more than 800 of whom were killed and nearly 2,700 seriously injured, but one that could not in itself lead to democracy. In the absence of guiding principles, planning or leadership, there remains one very significant question about an essentially liberal and middle-class revolution that started out as a protest against police abuses and ended up bringing down the president: for what, precisely, would such a revolution have an army that was technically under the authority of said president try him and the pillars of his regime? Crimes that would seem to be side-effects rather than substantial ailments of Mubarak's dictatorship - financial corruption, lack of respect for the right to live, let alone the right to true and free political representation - continue to conceal the much greater crime of a once purposefully ideological political order rooted in the coup d'etat of July 1952 but now with absolutely no moral substance to it. I am not arguing with the culpability of Mubarak and his many cronies, a number of whom, including the former minister of information Anas El-Fiqi, were acquitted of some charges on Tuesday, generating greater outrage in the buildup to 8 July. I am personally against capital punishment, but I am not arguing with the right of the martyrs' families to see the killers of their loved ones from Mubarak down receiving the harshest possible punishment. What I am arguing against is the idea that the extent and/or nature of the crimes committed by the Mubarak regime could be legally demarcated at all. Too many people were (are?) directly or indirectly involved with the former order, too much legal evidence has been destroyed since Feb, too many private interests would be done too many disservices should justice truly prevail. If 25 Jan is to remain both a white and a decentralised, non-ideological revolution, how can we expect adequate retribution? Perhaps the only true slogan of the revolution is Down with July, but neither intellectuals nor ultras nor even allegedly politicised Islamists have had the vision or the courage to chant it. Down with July, anyway. Tomorrow is "the second revolution": another step on the way to "the second independence", which it has been persuasively argued is what the Arab Spring - an anti-police state, anti- theocratic and by extension anti-military dictatorship movement, if nothing else - is truly all about. But independence implies economic and military self-dependence, which thanks to the trajectory of July is far more than Egypt can say for itself. To have a revolution in any meaningful sense is to admit that this is where six decades of military dictatorship has brought us, all things considered: mobs burning up police stations while the government or agents of the government briskly go about the business of killing the people, and notwithstanding more or less retarded versions of Islamic theocracy, not the faintest horizon of an alternative way forward. To have a revolution is to say that, rather than a Zionist conspiracy or an extension of imperialism per se, what we have had for six decades is shades of rhetoric, and that insofar as we survive at all, we survive thanks to a global order that subsidises our existence in return for some human, mostly natural resources including our geographic location. Without aid, without tourism, indeed without peace with Israel - considering our standards of education and our performance in fields like agriculture, technology or trade - were on earth would we be now? It is not clear to what extent the first revolution has been successful in revealing just what a horrendous mess the military-led nationalist state founded by Nasser has ended up becoming. Perhaps the second revolution will bring home the even more significant and naturally more devastating fact that it was not Mubarak's policy of conciliation with an unjust unipolar global order that was wrong with Mubarak, it was not Mubarak's failure to "support the cause", whatever that might me, that brought Mubarak down. It was Mubarak's incompetence. And there is absolutely no hope in any revolution contributing to any better future until we are prepared to admit exactly how much we share that.
