EGYPT…GOING THROUGH BIRTH PANGS FOR DEMOCRACY
(…or heading into a violent miscarriage of it instead?)

Egypt appears to be falling apart, much like many other countries who heralded the so-called –Arab Spring -.and, instead, is moving in retrograde towards a renewed authoritarian rule.

The euphoria of a couple of years before which followed the relatively peaceful transition from the former authoritarian Mubarak regime into a new “democratic” one…is gone. It is gone because the Egyptian people have discovered the hard way that “democracy” is not just about open and free elections, but about a concept which allows all parts of a society to be included in the process. Without that concept of …inclusiveness…or plurality… democracy cannot exist.

Unfortunately, Egypt’s first attempt to apply that concept…misfired. It did so because, despite its best efforts to include the long suppressed and marginalized Moslem Brotherhood, that did not produce the results everyone had hoped for. That is, having been brought back into the political fold, and allowed to participate in the process it was thought the Brotherhood would modify its intransigent absolutist postures. It did not do so.

Once elected to power, and given the opportunity to properly govern, it overplayed its hand by reverting to its non-inclusive and absolutist perspectives, trying to impose its agendas for that on everyone else, that is, upon the majority of the Egyptian people, who wanted no part of it. All of which brought out into the open the classic conflict between sectarian absolutism versus secularism, each vying to become the guiding matrix for its society. What’s happening in Egypt now is the expression of that conflict which, rather than going through birth pangs for democracy, seems to be heading it into a violent miscarriage of it instead.

The sad irony of all this, of course, is that neither element is about to give in or compromise, especially since blood has been spilled. For all practical purposes the majority has opted to return to a military rule…carefully concealed behind a “civilian” façade. As for the Brotherhood, it is now being driven back out in the cold, and, if its repression continues the way it has so far, that will simply make it revert to its underground, terrorist ways and means as it did before. How it will all end it’s hard to say, but if that’s the way events are moving, then Egypt’s future does not look very bright.

CENTURION