Egypt - A society with no healthy old ideas and no new ideas is doomed to reenact the same drama on new stages.

Five Lessons from Egypt and the Arab Spring

By Daniel Greenfield

The Arab Spring pretended that introducing new processes into societies that lack new ideas would fill the cultural gaps and humanize them. That plan failed. Reforms don’t begin with processes. They begin with moral and intellectual struggles. Only once a consensus has formed, can the process be introduced to implement that consensus

1. Don’t Believe Anything You Hear

Egyptian liberals allied with the Muslim Brotherhood to overthrow Mubarak and challenge the military. In those heady Tahrir Square days, they ridiculed the idea that Mubarak’s overthrow would benefit the Muslim Brotherhood.

Now those same liberals have teamed up with the military to take down a Muslim Brotherhood government that they told us would never come to power. But don’t be surprised if a year from now, after the military develops too crushing a grip on power, they don’t run back to the Muslim Brotherhood and Tahrir Square repeats itself a third time with the banners and fireworks and chants about the will of the people.

And when it does happen, neither the liberals nor the Muslim Brotherhood will ever remember the time when they were deadly enemies. Instead they will pretend it never happened, the way that Egyptian liberals once pretended that the Muslim Brotherhood wasn’t part of the protests.

Middle Eastern politics is reality-selective. It’s conspiratorial and it’s based around shaky alliances between mortal enemies to achieve short term victories. That’s why the Muslim Brotherhood has done so well; it’s one of the few factions to practice long-term thinking.

Everyone else just thinks as far as winning the next battle, getting to power and then letting the unambiguous genius of their vision and the adoration of the people carry them to their destiny.

And then it all falls apart. Again.


2. It’s Not Democracy, It’s Permanent Chaos .......
3. Everyone Will Always Hate America .....
4. Fanatics and Democracy Don’t Mix ......
5. The Muslim World Has No New Ideas .....
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