William A. Jacobson
Legal Insurrection
3/7/2011
Christopher Hitchens has really been phenomenal in the past few weeks. In his Vanity Fair April article, he does not disappoint. He mulls over all the revolutions he has seen, and concludes that Egypt is not as poignant as it seems:
Neither in exile nor in the country itself is there anybody who even faintly resembles a genuine opposition leader. With the partial exception of the obsessively cited Muslim Brotherhood, the vestigial political parties are emaciated hulks. The strongest single force in the state and the society—the army—is a bloated institution heavily invested in the status quo. As was once said of Prussia, Egypt is not a country that has an army, but an army that has a country. More depressing still, even if there existed a competent alternative government, it is near impossible to imagine what its program might be. The population of Egypt contains millions of poorly educated graduates who cannot find useful employment, and tens of millions of laborers and peasants whose life is a subsistence one. I shall never forget, on my first visit to Cairo, seeing “the City of the Dead”: that large population of the homeless and indigent which lives among the graves in one of the city’s sprawling cemeteries. For centuries, Egypt’s rulers have been able to depend on the sheer crushing weight of torpor and inertia to maintain “stability.” I am writing this in the first week of February, and I won’t be surprised if the machine—with or without Mubarak—is able to rely again on this dead hand while the exemplary courage and initiative of the citizens of Tahrir Square slowly ebb away.
Bret Stephens made a similar point in his WSJ column last week and I seemed equally pessimistic in the beginning of February. While we may have been onto something, the Hitch is the unparalleled master of evaluating violent political movements. I encourage you to read the piece.
