Marwan kindly translated comrade Khalid's article from Al-Akhbar yesterday:
"From Dictatorship to Madness
"From Dictatorship to Madness
Khaled Saghiyyah
They tried to turn off the lights, yesterday, in Tahrir Square. Some things ought to be done in the dark. Blood should be spilled, unseen. Silence has to prevail and go unheard.
It’s not the first time that the Egyptian regime feeds on the blood of its people. It’s not the first time where violence is carried out against the Egyptians. The difference is that when the regime becomes naked, its violence becomes naked. Just as we moved from unfair electoral laws to electoral fraud and from economic exploitation to organized looting, we are moving from police uniform to thugs, horses, camels, sticks, knives and Molotov cocktails.
Whenever the President looks at himself in the mirror and finds he is increasingly transformed into a stuffed mummy, he will further resort to violence. The arrows of his violence will not be pointed at the demonstrators only, but also at the Egyptian history as a whole. And repeated attempts to burn and loot the museum attest to this. The president does not bear an existence for Egypt without him; he does not bear a history of Egypt that does not glorify him. That appeared to be Hosni Mubarak’s main obsession, in his speech two nights ago. Perhaps the most dangerous game starts when an individual talks himself into confronting history.
Mubarak moved from a dictatorship era to one of madness. Someone has to stop him, to step forward and implement the Zine El Abidine Ben Ali scenario, for example. To enter the president’s office and tell him: the game is over, this is your ticket to Saudi Arabia.
In the meantime, we can enjoy watching the spokespeople of the U.S. administration sweating profusely whenever they come out to speak to journalists, using all kinds of contradictory and cautious expressions. But the situation turned comical recently. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called to hold those responsible fully accountable for the violence. America's silence might have been more useful.
Tunisian and Egyptian peoples reminded us that democracy is achieved by the uprising of the people. The Egyptian demonstrators know how to stop Mubarak’s madness. After all, they are still holding out in the Tahrir Square and other squares. And their voices began to fill up the Arab world, “from the swamps of the East to a new East”."
