not a bad first day

All in all, not a bad first day of jetlag recovery. Despite sleeping until almost noon, it was a productive and energetic day.

Among other things, I finished revising my March 11 Amsterdam lecture on Meillassoux, and sent it to the people who want to publish it. More details soon.

Tomorrow I plan to finish off the review of that collection of tweets from the Egyptian Revolution, which is a nice, fast read. (It doesn’t take very long to read 206 pages of tweets about a topic you know pretty well.) It’s a useful document; I’d already forgotten a couple of the twists taken during the Revolution.

But one thing that jumped out at me was how every measure taken by the regime backfired in some way:

*shutting down the internet forced everyone onto the streets to get their information, increasing crowd sizes

*pulling the police from the streets in hopes that the public would beg to have the police back as their saviors simply led to the brilliant spontaneous organization of armed neighborhood watch committees– one of the greatest success stories of the Revolution, and perhaps the clearest refutation of the Mubarak/Suleiman “Egyptians aren’t ready for democracy” claim

*the Army was put on the streets in part to enforce the curfew, but the soldiers actually on the street seem to have been largely supportive of the Revolution, and weren’t going to shoot any of their peers for making it home past curfew

*the thug attack was supposed to display an “authentic” pro-Mubarak public, but merely exposed the government as the bribing racketeers they were

*the crackdown on international journalists did the regime more harm than good

*releasing Wael Ghonim from prison was supposed to look like a humanitarian gesture, but his TV appearance restored momentum to the Revolution when it was flagging

*finally, the last-ditch tactic of “let’s send everyone back to work and pretend the protests are irrelevant” during the final week simply brought workers together to organize the final wave of massive strikes

I’m probably even forgetting a few. But I don’t think there’s one card the regime played correctly. Maybe there’s nothing they could have done anyway.

In retrospect, I suppose that January 28 (the first Friday) was the day the regime was doomed. The ability of unarmed protestors to defeat armed security police on the Qasr al-Nil bridge and enter the square was probably the moment when the myth of invincibility was shattered.

It’s still pretty surprising that the protestors could defend such a geographically indefensible space as Tahrir Square, with its ten or so entrances. You could hardly pick a worse spot to try to defend against armed paramilitary units, but they did it.

I suppose the one thing the regime could have tried is an all-out Tinanmenizing of Tahrir. But in the first place, I doubt many of the soldiers would have gone along with that. And in the second place, I don’t think Egypt is well-equipped to operate as the pariah state it would have been in that case. This is not remote Libya. It’s a country that is deeply economically dependent, through tourism and the Suez Canal, on the outside world. If they had Tiananmened the Tahrir protestors, you could kiss Egyptian tourism goodbye for a decade or more.

I tried to mark all the “goose bump” moments of the book, when people said especially moving things. One of those moments was when a Cairo protest veteran gave a shout out to the “bad ass” people of Suez and bragged about how tough the canal towns are. (The Suez protestors faced incredible brutalities, even more than in Cairo). It was a great moment of national pride coming across on Twitter.

The release of both Wael Ghonim and sandmonkey are also nice moments. You see them both tweeting at the beginning of the book, then both disappear at various stages while others worriedly tweet about their disappearance, and then of course both of them reappear later, relatively unharmed.