Go Egypt Go!

Egypt has got to be the most fun subject in Middle East war news since ever. From the charge of the Camel Brigade to the military crackdown on their own local Wahhabbis - without the approval of Washington! - Egypt is proving to be the true meth lab of democracy for that whole region.

I went to some DC yuppie party in Feb '11 and they'd hung a big Egyptian flag in the window. For "solidarity" if you can believe it. The limousine liberals were oh so happy Mubarak got ousted and I couldn't stop worrying about my best friend's mom, a rich lady in Sharm and a natural target for revolutionaries. She's fine, in case you're wondering. Point is, those DC yuppies were bananas for the first stage of the ongoing Egyptian Revolution but they'd rather not talk about its current state.

Well I would! I remember this photo from when it started -

"Hey, Hosni! Take this job and shove it!"

See, when the army's against the dictator like that, it means he's going down. And really, is there anything more cheering than seeing the soldiers joining in the protest? That ain't just solidarity, that means the people fighting the system finally have some firepower on their side. Wish that would happen in this country for once, damned gun-phobic liberals...

 And it's really been the army running Egypt since, thank Christ. In all the hand-wringing over Morsi's ouster, Western folks are forgetting what a reactionary dildo he was being. Or maybe they just weren't paying attention since "Yay! Democracy!"

I sure was paying attention. I remember when Egypt's own Jon Stewart got hauled to court for daring to make light of His Holiness Mullah Morsi. Not to mention the ramped up pogroms against Copts that went on while the Muslim Brotherhood ran the show.

And really, I have to ask - didn't you idiots catch on that "Muslim Brotherhood" might not lead to a cozy Jeffersonian Democracy? I know I've said a free election won by theocratic wackjobs is as legitimate as an election won by the urbane Levantine intellectuals those DC yuppies like to pretend exist, but I never argued that made it good.

I'm not really arguing for the good of this either. But I like watching it. And as the rest of the Middle East goes through its own Thirty Years War with the whole Sunni VS Shia blood feud, it's nice to see a militaristic nationalism taking place at the fringe. One that the western powers are right now too impotent to strangle in its crib.

God, imagine if this grew into something like a real modern, secular republic? And then imagine it steamrolling across the rest of that medieval mess, like France did to all of Europe in the 19th century. Those French citizen-soldiers, chanting "Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité! Ou la mort!" did way more to spread democratic thought throughout the continent than all of Jefferson's scribblings.