The secular left in Egypt protested but failed to organize. This is the result.
by David Atkins
Many on the left and the right applauded the people-powered military coup in Egypt against Morsi and his crew of theocrats. Since then, pro-Morsi protesters have leveraged their own people power and taken to the streets in protest. And now they've been massacred:
Heavy bursts of automatic gunfire were ringing through the streets of eastern Cairo this morning as the Egyptian authorities went to war with Islamists cowering amid the tents and alleyways of their huge protest camp in Nasr City, a suburb of the capital.
Amid escalating violence, Sky News have reported that one of their cameraman, Mick Deane, has been killed in Egypt this morning.
Security figures have announced they have arrested senior Muslim Brotherhood Politician El-Beltagi.
A number of leaders from the Brotherhood have also been arrested, an official announced during a broadcast.
"We have arrested a number of Brotherhood leaders but it's too early to announce their names," General Abdel Fattah Othman, a senior official in the Interior Ministry, told the privately-owned CBC TV channel.Latest estimates from the Muslim Brotherhood put the number of dead well into the hundreds.
As police helicopters hovered overhead and huge plumes of black smoke billowed into the morning sky, security forces armed with semi-automatic rifles and tear gas laid siege to the sit-in from roads surrounding the camp on several sides.
A nurse at a Cairo hospital has counted 60 bodies, and said she expects the death toll to rise.
I have noted before and will note again: only two entities are well enough organized in Egypt to hold power: the military and the theocrats. Egyptian secular liberals were good at marching in Tahrir Square, but not remotely as good at getting themselves elected or holding power.
The result was the ouster of the dictator, followed by the easy election of Morsi by an organized base of theocrats who had mobilized and planned for decades, followed in turn by another popular uprising against the theocrats which was utterly ineffectual until the military decided it had cover to remove the legitimately elected theocrat by coup.
Now that the theocrats have mobilized people power for their own ends, the military is killing them in the streets.
Where are the secular liberals in all this? It's not as if secular liberals in Egypt don't have the population in Egypt to win elections. It's not that they don't have the capacity to organize. They just didn't organize.
And this is the result of that failure.
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