The Public Interest

Let’s start with this picture, taken by this person, which has been bouncing around the internet since it was taken this week. What you see are Coptic Christians in Egypt joining hands to protect Muslims while they pray:

“We came here to show that every Egyptian should be here and wants to be here. There is no difference between Christians and Muslims,” said Mina Shehata, a Christian from Nagaa Hamady, the site of a drive-by shooting that killed six Copts in early 2010.

Images of mingling crosses and crescents which appeared after the Alexandria bombing that killed 23 people have been common sights in Tahrir Square through the protests.

“We do not want Mubarak. The people here do not want him. Muslims and Christians do not want him,” said Mariam Eissa Nasif, 25, a silver cross dangling around her neck.”

It certainly sends a powerful message. And it makes me wonder: would this play out the same way in the USA? I would like to think so, and there has been evidence of inter-religious harmony. But at the same time I believe there is a sizable number of people in this country who would do no such thing. Again, this is just my impression, and I want to hear what you have to say on the topic.

“Coptic” Christianity is perhaps the least known sect of Christianity, even though it is as ancient as the Orthodox and Catholic faiths. Read more about Coptic Christianity, and how it differs from other Christian faiths, here.

Back to what’s happening in Egypt. George Packer provides a sharp analysis of how this uprising compares to others in recent history – specifically the question of what helps a popular uprising succeed:

“Egypt’s revolution has a number of counts against it, the main one being the hollow core where Egyptian civil society ought to be—the absence of institutions, groups, and leaders that could shape this massive expression of popular will into an organized counterforce to the regime’s violence, with the means to reach deep into the military hierarchy and a strategy for victory. Instead, Mubarak systematically closed off that space, so that he could say to the world: me or the Islamists, choose. In Burma in 2007, there was a similar void of opposition leadership, other than the moral power of the monks. Young Burmese later told me that they considered their headless revolution more flexible and durable than the older kind—one student called it “post-modern”—but the regime crushed it without much trouble, and hundreds of young Burmese are now rotting away in far-flung prisons.

Iran, on the other hand, had the key elements for popular success in 2009: a broad and alienated middle class, organized groups of civil society, professional journalists, a sophisticated political opposition. If you ignored the regime for a moment, Iran would have seemed a likelier candidate for a victorious velvet revolution than, say, East Germany in 1989, whose opposition consisted of a few pacifist churches and scattered writers and artists. But the regime made all the difference. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Basij paramilitaries remained loyal and were ready, even eager, to inflict limitless violence. Ill-informed observers have shed a lot of ink explaining that certain authoritarian regimes stay in power because of the country’s religion, its culture, its people’s passivity or respect for authority or love of pleasure. In fact, the reason is much simpler. The difference between success and failure, between the Philippines and Burma, the Soviet Union and China, Poland and Iran, comes down to the willingness of security forces to fire their weapons into unarmed crowds. Very few people will stay in the main square once it’s certain they’ll be mowed down.”

Meanwhile, Christopher Hitchens writes a good piece on the seemingly perpetual stupidity of the world’s dictators, who never seem to learn:

“How gratifying it is that all such regimes go on making the same obvious mistakes. None of them ever seems to master a few simple survival techniques: Don’t let the supreme leader’s extended family go on shopping sprees; don’t publicly spoil some firstborn as if the people can’t wait for him, too, to be proclaimed from the balcony; don’t display your personal photograph all over the landscape; don’t claim more than, say, 75% of the vote in any “election” you put on. And don’t try to shut down social media: It will instantly alert even the most somnolent citizen to the fact that you are losing, or have lost, your grip.

People do not like to be treated like fools, or backward infants, or extras in some parade. There is a natural and inborn resistance to such tutelage, for the simple-enough reasons that young people want to be regarded as adults, and parents can’t bear to be humiliated in front of their children. One of Francis Fukuyama’s better observations, drawing on his study of Hegel and Nietzsche, was that history shows people just as prepared to fight for honour and recognition as they are for less abstract concepts like food or territory.

Sooner or later, the line gets crossed and people can take no more.”