Events in Egypt have
clearly not gone to plan and it now looks to be a serious mess. This
provides further evidence that democracy is not the pinnacle of organisation
that it is sometimes held up to be.
Hopefully the social networking revolution will provide us with better
alternatives in the not too distant future.
Perhaps part of what
went wrong here is that the people and the church really didn't understand
their roles in the play. The standard western script requires that the
church is subservient to the state and the role of the sheeple in a democracy
is to return the elite to power. In general the government should be
left to run the state. The church is
there to help in times of crisis and operate as a sheepledog to round up and
restore order when there are too many straying and wandering from the path of obedience
to the elite.
In the case of Egypt the
government elite boils down to the military as they control the extremely
generous slush fund provided by the US.. For some reason nobody
explicitly explained this arrangement to the Egyption people and so it seems
the military decided to abort the play half-way through the first act. It
appears the Muslim Brotherhood was favouring its own supporters. Hardly a
suprising turn of events in any democracy but clearly not acceptable to he
military.
It seems
they considered it was outrageous of the Egyptian people to not
recognise that the military's candidates were supposed to be elected and
that democracy was to be conditional on electing the right winner?
So democracy ended, at least for now, with the coup that wasn't a coup coup.
It clearly further
exacerbates the pain when your economy is based largely on
tourism and understandably this tends to underperform when violence and
insecurity is rife. It is hard to be optimistic for the immediate
future. The greatest civilization of the past may be one of the least
civilized places to be at present and an uncivil war seems a real
possibility.
However all things are
relative and for Egypt at present perhaps the only crumb of comfort can be that
they are not Syria and are at least being left to sort out their own problems
without the rest of the world queuing up to getting involved.
