Free Once Upon a Revolution by Thanassis Cambanis

comments, tweets, and blog posts. Tunisians had risen up in December 2010 and within weeks had driven their dictator, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, out of the country. If eleven million Tunisians could depose a regime, couldn’t ninety million Egyptians do the same?
    In what turned out to be its final days, Egypt’s regime was smug and confident. Mubarak’s state had grown so remote, so casually violent, that its mechanisms of perception no longer functioned. Anger was swelling, but the regime didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. It had no plans to punish the policemen who killed Khaled Said. It had no intention of placating the population with some token gesture simply because Arabs in a nearby country had overthrown their leader. Instead, it went on with the same tricks, dispatching dollar-a-day goons to beat demonstrators. On New Year’s Day a bomb ripped through a church in Alexandria, killing twenty-three. The government had failed once again to protect a vulnerable minority. Young activists from all backgrounds took to the streets in solidarity with the Christians. Several protest leaders were arrested. The police blamed a Salafi named Sayed Bilal and tortured him to death. He turned out to have no connection to the bombing. Little demonstrations flared up around the country. The Journalists Syndicate had a tall building downtown used as a meeting space and conference hall; the syndicate’s leadership allowed anti-regime protests on the front steps. Moaz was among a small group attacked by police there. When he returned home, his mother said nothing, but his father fumed. “This is not a smart investment,” he told his son. “This is no way to lead a good life.”
    â€œIf we can’t change our life in 2011, then I will emigrate to Canada or find a new country,” Moaz said. “If I don’t speak against this regime, one day they will kill me, and nobody left will speak out.”
    Alexandria had now contributed a trinity of martyrs: first Khaled Said, the secular Muslim everyman; and then the Christians, for years thevictims of state-sanctioned sectarian discrimination, blown up in their church; and finally Sayed Bilal, the pious Salafi, innocent of any offense but in thrall to a rigid and suspect faith. The state had targeted almost every kind of Egyptian. Now, in response to those crimes, a current of anger had united Egyptians across their many dividing lines in January 2011, after a decade or more of orchestrated cruelty.
    Obtusely, the government elevated Police Day, scheduled for January 25, into an official national holiday. This was Mubarak’s last insult. No institution was more universally detested in Egypt than the police. At a moment when the president needed to placate his enraged populace, he inflamed them. Youth of all backgrounds collaborated in the call for a national “Day of Rage,” scheduled to coincide with the ludicrous new holiday: Muslim Brothers, Salafists, labor activists from the April 6 Movement, canvassers for ElBaradei, and the administrators of the Khaled Said Facebook page, which by now had 365,000 members.
    It was during this final surge of planning that Moaz and Basem met, like so many other activists who until then had been agitating in lonesome obscurity. An underground cell convened at an apartment on the west bank of the Nile. It belonged to a middle-aged communist who had taken part in the Bread Riots of 1977, when angry Egyptians demonstrated against a government move to eliminate wheat subsidies. It was perhaps the last time before 2011 that a popular outcry had managed to unnerve the regime. Her son was a thirty-year-old secular lawyer named Zyad el-Elaimy, a bear of a man who had relished fighting the police since his days at university. Zyad had maintained close friendships with the Muslim Brotherhood leaders from his student union days, and he had become a top aide to ElBaradei. Now, using methods