Not Really A Coup

The Egyptian military decided to end the first act of the play in their little democracy theater. People appear to think this is a coup, but this military has been in power the whole time. A coup would require someone else to take power from them. This is a natural misunderstanding, no doubt growing out of the misunderstanding that the Egyptian 'revolution' was a revolution in the first place. The Egyptian military is a revolutionary body. They are socialist. If you are against them, you are counter-revolutionary, whether you think you are or not. If you are really upset because you don't have a future, there isn't decent job, or any stability in your life- well, guess where the capital needed for your stable society was spent? It was all spent on the revolution.

You don't end a revolution by starting another. You have to just put it down. That doesn't necessarily mean violence- what it means is that you don't fight for possession of the tools of control- you fight for an end to the tools of control. There are more ways than one to do that- if you know a lot of people are going to fight to be king of the hill, maybe you install a king to distract people until you can manage to flatten the hill. The logic of revolution though, almost always requires some body of people in charge of some form of redistribution, so there is always a place for some bureaucratic hack who will seize control under some premise or other, and he won't even feel hypocritical- for to him, he is the revolution.

It is with similar impunity that democrats define democracy via themselves and their own aims rather than with regard to what the people actually want.