reactions to the northern end of Tahrir

I’ve remarked several times that I found the February 2 thug invasion of Tahrir especially disgusting. It only led to 5 deaths, I believe, plus however many were killed by sniper fire during the ensuing night.

Nonetheless, it was a profoundly evil act, with a peaceful gathering of unarmed protestors attacked by armed thugs from what David Rylance aptly described to me in an email as “an ersatz counter-public.” Nice description: they were paid thugs, plus the worst of the police posing as outraged pro-government citizens. Several people I know saw them, with their own eyes, being organized by regime officials.

The thugs came in from the northern end of the square, at first sowing enough panic that the protestors retreated fairly deep into the center of the area, before launching a counter-attack that within a day or so had pushed the clash into the thugs’ own staging ground, beyond the square.

Today I made sure to exit Tahrir through that area, because I wanted to see how it made me feel.

There are two extremes of historical sites. One is represented by legitimate battlefields, which can cause sadness, but tend to inspire reverence. After all, they are sites of a fair fight where people stood up and died for whatever cause they represented. U.S. Civil War battlefields feel like that, as do Omaha Beach, El Alamein, and pretty much anywhere a bona fide historical battle occurred.

Then there are sites that feel anywhere from dirty to evil, depending on how horrible the incident there was. Auschwitz is probably the extreme of those I’ve visited, but Hiroshima & Nagasaki have that feeling as well, as does central Sarajevo, and presumably lower Manhattan (I haven’t been down there post-9/11). You don’t feel a sense of heroic sacrifice in such places even if there was some. You just feel a sense of sickness and disgust.

The point being… northern Tahrir Square made me feel that way today, even though it was packed with flag-waving families, and even though it’s such a non-descriptly ugly part of the square that I couldn’t imagine ever feeling any emotion about it other than a sort of vague, traffic-related stress. But even though less than half a dozen people were killed there on that day in particular, it had a feeling of conspiratorial evil about it. I can imagine that I will try to avoid it in the future as much as possible.