Egypt: Forget Denial, The Totalitarians Won, Get Used to It

Barry Rubin

“Why such inaction in the Senate?
Why do the Senators sit and pass no laws?
“Because the barbarians are to arrive today.
What laws can the Senators pass any more?
When the barbarians come they will make the laws….
Why don't the worthy orators come as always
to make their speeches, to have their say?
"Because the barbarians are to arrive today;
and they get bored with eloquence and orations.” - -Constantine P. Cavafy, "Waiting for the Barbarians." (1904)

Who better to sum up the situation than Cavafy, the great Greek poet of Egypt who wrote of the Christian decline there.

"The Big Pharoah" is one of Egypt’s liberal bloggers, precisely the kind of young hip Facebook kid that the Western reporters love, the kind of person they've been listening to. Like many of his peers, he’s been upbeat since February. First, he said, the Brotherhood wasn’t really a threat; next, he said, it was possible to live with it in power. Now, he jokes that he and his friends will set up a republic of Heliopolis, named after the rich district where he lives, the only area of Cairo that elected a liberal by a landslide. He notes that one of the Salafists elected in Alexandria openly announced that democracy was forbidden. So much for running in elections proving that one favors democracy.

Big Pharoah’s cute idea is that they will shut off Heliopolis from the rest of Egypt and make it a separate country. But that won’t happen. He’s gone from denial to bargaining. The West is still in denial.

The comments on his site accept the joke and laugh about it. Ha, ha, ha.

But the Brotherhood will laugh last.

Meanwhile, the liberals make sick excuses that only Western observers are dumb enough to believe. Here’s one of their main leaders, Ayman Nour:

The generals, he says, “are playing with the Brotherhood and sending the message to the United States that it is us or them. We as liberals pay the price. It is exactly the same strategy that Mubarak pursued.”

It reminds me of the leader of the Turkish opposition who when he lost to the Islamists announced that the reason was that the voters were stupid. The Washington Post tells us that the military is the main threat to democracy. The New York Times implies that the Islamists won because the army made a deal with the Muslim Brotherhood. The election proves, it says, without being aware of the obvious nonsense in the statement, that the election proves the people don’t want a religious dictatorship.

Forget about saying that the real problem is the armed forces. Forget about saying that the real threat are the remnants of the Mubarak regime.

Wake up and accept this simple principle: The masses in the Arabic-speaking world are reactionary. You can respect their choice if you want to but their choice is for an intolerant dictatorship that will do whatever it wants through the mechanisms of democracy. Oh, and it will create huge foreign policy headaches, crises, and possible wars. But who cares? After all, they came to power through elections.