What would Marx say about Cairo?
It’s been hard for a historian to watch recent events in Egypt without a sense of déjà vu. Haven’t we seen eruptions in streets and squares like this somewhere before, whether in Tunisia last month, in Iran 30 years ago, or in France more than two centuries past? Is Hosni Mubarak going to be next ...
It's been hard for a historian to watch recent events in Egypt without a sense of déjà vu. Haven't we seen eruptions in streets and squares like this somewhere before, whether in Tunisia last month, in Iran 30 years ago, or in France more than two centuries past? Is Hosni Mubarak going to be next week's Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, or Louis XVI?
It’s been hard for a historian to watch recent events in Egypt without a sense of déjà vu. Haven’t we seen eruptions in streets and squares like this somewhere before, whether in Tunisia last month, in Iran 30 years ago, or in France more than two centuries past? Is Hosni Mubarak going to be next week’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, or Louis XVI?
Matching past and present like this is more than just a parlor game. Revolutionaries, more than most political activists, tend to consciously imitate their predecessors. In this sense, the most transformative political events are often paradoxically the most traditional, as actors take their cues from dramas staged at other times in other places and often follow scripts originally written for quite different theaters.
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