“These days it feels hopeless, even pathetic, to go on looking back at the Arab Spring. Yet a minority of Egyptians remain committed to its memory and ideals. [….] Human rights groups estimate that since the coup the Sisi regime has detained 60,000 political prisoners—so many that it has had to build a network of secret prisons, where torture is endemic. One of the few organizations that has monitored the number of detainees and prisons in Egypt, the Arab Network for Human Rights Information, announced on January 11 that it was closing because of unsustainable levels of harassment from the state. Most political prisoners are accused by the authorities of being members of the Muslim Brotherhood. But all of Egypt’s most prominent secular and liberal activists have faced prosecution, imprisonment, abuse, surveillance, or exile. [….] In January the US government withheld from Egypt $130 million in aid because of its dismal human rights record, while simultaneously authorizing more than $2 billion in arms sales.” Please see Ursula Lindsey’s review essay in the NYRB, “Refusing Silence in Egypt” (April 21, 2022 issue).
Having been among those who at the time was moved and inspired by the “Arab Spring,” it is painful to read and recall the subsequent history in Egypt and most of the other countries that basked in the light of these protests and uprisings; that found their citizens moved to struggle courageously on behalf of democratic revolutionary hopes and dreams. One thing we cannot do is let the powerful and ruthless dictators and autocrats, the anti-democratic thugs who’ve since come to power, to erase the truth and reality of those times. Of course there are many other things we should do to oppose authoritarian suppression, coercion and violence, to combat the systematic violation of basic human rights, be they civil and political or economic, social and cultural. But we live in a time when too many people lack any consistent or coherent sense of fundamental values and purposes, when too many people feel, or at least act as if, they are overwhelmed by the myriad events, be they political or “natural,” that define this apocalyptic-like period of human history, when many if not most of us are in denial, well-versed in the art of self-deception, and dispositionally prone to indulging in the crudest of ideologies, the vilest of myths, the darkest phantasies. Yes, there are exceptions to these generalizations, but one suspects they will suffer the fate of Pascal’s red balloon. The question is whether or not the next chapter, or the end of our story, will by anything even remotely resembling the end of Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 French film, Le ballon rouge.
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