The fall of Mubarak; this unarmed, pacific crowd, risking death to bring down a deadly regime; this demonstration of power by men and women proving, once again, that there is only one superpower in this world, that of the people gathered together; the grandeur of these people finding the source of unimaginable energy in "fusion" (Sartre) and, in "hope" (the other John Paul, Wojtyla), the invitation to "fear" no longer. The apparition, out of nowhere or, more precisely, out of a space believed to be merely virtual, that of the social networks of the web, of this new agora that was, for 18 days, Tahrir Square in Cairo; these responsible, republican demands, moderate and on a human scale; this absence of lyrical illusions; this astonishing political maturity that also seems to have sprung from nowhere--except, again, from the web; even more striking, this discretion of Islamic agitators who initially remained silent, then reluctantly rallied to the movement, only to try, at the last moment, hand in hand with Suleiman, to plaster over a regime in the process of disintegration; the fact, again, that all this occurred, for the first time in modern Arab history, without a single anti-American or anti-Western slogan, without the burning of an Israeli flag, without dragging out the worn out slogans about the "Zionist" origins of all the plagues of Egypt; the incredible spectacle, then, of these demonstrators who, once having gotten rid of the tyrant, had the civic, citizen's, city dweller's reflex to clean up the place where they had besieged him, telling the world, in effect, that 'clearing away the old order is not an abstract slogan, the clearing away starts here, now, in the lives and in the minds of each of us'--all this constitutes one of the most moving political sequences I have ever lived through. Whatever happens, there is a stock of indelible images that call to mind those of the revolutions of the year of grace 1989; it is the mark of this marvel the French Christian philosopher Maurice Clavel called an Event and that no fear, no reservations, no sombre foreboding should, for the moment, dissuade one from applauding.
That said, it is one thing to salute, to celebrate, to embrace the summer dawn of this Egyptian spring in winter, to say and repeat, as I have for weeks, that a page of the History of the region, hence of the world, is being turned, and that one should rejoice without misgivings. But it is quite another to do one's job by trying to be not, as the media put it, "partners" of the event, but its demanding witnesses, asking the same questions that, at the moment I write, the wisest and most lucid Egyptian democrats are posing.
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