13 ms·

A brief glimpse at recent events in Egypt

57 points by OmarShehata 3y ago

zen_1 3y ago
This is significant because historically the most common way for men to avoid conscription was to emigrate for school/work and just not come back until they'd acquired dual citizenship (which usually* exempts you from conscription). A nice side effect of this is a pretty significant brain drain, when your people are motivated to leave because they want to avoid 1-3 years of military service for basically no pay (3 if you're selected to serve as an officer, so Doctors, Engineers, and I believe certain other specializations, 1 otherwise). It's funny (and depressing) to think about how were it not for some luck and some hard work, I'd probably be in my first of 3 years of conscription right this second. Instead I'm on HN :) * Subject to the feelings and competence of the bureaucrats processing the paperwork, as well as any presidential decrees which might interfere with this policy.
ungruntled 3y ago
I haven’t had any upper middle class or rich Egyptians ever noting being concerned about the draft. I assume corruption permitted it to be completely avoidable. What value is this new system offering given the existing ‘infrastructure’ to avoid it?
rossdavidh 3y ago
It all sounds rather disorganized and unfair and arbitrary but maybe just barely functional. Which, really, is a lot like government in the USA, not that I'm saying there aren't also differences.
- dash2 3y ago
  I think it really sounds much more disorganized and arbitrary than the US, and it's a salutary reminder: state capacity in most of the world is low, like astonishingly low. Here's the Italian website for their startup visa scheme: https://italiastartupvisa.mise.gov.it https://italiastartupvisa.mise.gov.it Notice how the website looks like something your cousin cooked up? And how you can't even really tell how the scheme works? ... how, to apply, you need to get two paper stamps at the post office (LOL)? And Italy, despite the stereotypes, has a relatively high-capacity state in a global context. The world is really, really different from big developed countries.
  - Shawnj2 3y ago
    OTOH when I went to Sri Lanka they had posters in the airport warning that possession of drugs would be met with the death penalty that looked like they were made in MS paint lol
  - dwaltrip 3y ago
    Everything is a mess, but it’s not fun to think about, so we don’t. And then if we do stop to look closely and think about it, we are surprised to see how messy things are. Still, things are rarely as bad as they seem. We are resilient and adaptable, often far more than we realize, and can get quite far on very little. The unthinkable happens, yet life goes on. Joy is found in the smallest of places. Sometimes what seems like an unsolvable disaster just needs one little variable to change and all of the sudden it isn’t so scary and impossible. Life is full of paradoxes and complex half-truths :)
Eumenes 3y ago
Paying to skip conscription has been going on for hundreds if not thousands of years
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  In the US, the government pays you to conscript yourself.
  - twelve40 3y ago
    in other words, we the taxpayers pay so that someone else can serve (voluntarily for a market salary) instead of everyone getting drafted.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      The taxpayers pay so that someone else can protect them (or invade other countries so some oil corporation gets dibs). Socialized defense, a fair deal. If only the same collective principle could work for healthcare ... shots fired!
    - Eumenes 3y ago
      https://www.militarytimes.com/pay-benefits/mil-money/2021/11/16/rising-costs-for-troops-pay-and-benefits-could-hurt-military-readiness-experts-warn/ https://www.militarytimes.com/pay-benefits/mil-money/2021/11... > The average cost per active duty service member for the department in fiscal 2021 was $136,000 How many service members could command salary/benefits like this in the private sector? Most count beans and clean things. I bet that doesn't factor in pensions and lifetime benefits either. The US military is the country's largest welfare program.
      - devilbunny 3y ago
        > The US military is the country's largest welfare program. If they were all as successful as the military is at inculcating middle-class habits in people raised without them, welfare would be a lot more popular.
mahathu 3y ago
Interesting but can't beleive how author didn't spend more time on how crazy discriminatory this practice is, which is also common in other countries in the middle east. No war but class war.
- klipt 3y ago
  If you're already drafting people based on their genitals (sexism), a little class discrimination on top of that barely moves the needle.
  - bhouston 3y ago
    Biological male draft has always made sense from a population maintenance standpoint. If you did a biological female draft only you'd see an even more massive population drop from any hot war that you see with a male-only draft.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > If you did a female draft only you'd see an even more massive population drop from any hot war that you see with a male-only draft. Not so much a greater immediate drop as a much slower bounce back.
    - klipt 3y ago
      That only works in a polygamous society. In monogamous societies like the UK the deaths of many men in the world wars led to "marriage gaps" where a roughly equivalent number of women were unable to marry and have children. So X people dead in war led to 2X people not reproducing. If the draft had been 50/50, then X dead would have only led to X not reproducing.
      - brohee 3y ago
        No need to go full polygamy. After WW II (or the Great Patriotic War), USSR didn't exactly became polygamous but put policies to support single motherhood, that works too. Quoting https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dv3u8t/what_was_it_like_to_be_single_in_the_ussr_after/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dv3u8t/what_... "The shortage of men also meant a very important shift, in which the Soviets worked to try and both destigmatize single-motherhood by increasing state benefits they could receive and featuring mothers of ambiguous marital status in propaganda, while also tacitly encourage even married men to sleep around by preventing the single mothers from suing the father for child support, and making it harder for their irate wives to divorce them. The result being that many men would have numerous affairs, and even unmarried men would often bounce from relationship to relationship." The interbellum period in France and Germany also saw an increase in sexual freedom leading to more single mothers, without going to polygamy.
lordnacho 3y ago
How is 5k per head enough? How many conscription age Egyptian males are there abroad?
- bhouston 3y ago
  Average yearly Egyptian salary is only 3.5K USD. The place is really poor.
  - lordnacho 3y ago
    Yes but this is aimed at people who aren't in Egypt. According to the article. How many people are there abroad that they can contribute a meaningful amount of foreign currency?
    - umeshunni 3y ago
      Many people in this age group might be low skilled laborers, students etc. Especially since the majority of Egyptian expats are in gulf countries.
      - alephnerd 3y ago
        Unskilled labor in the Gulf is mostly South Asian in origin (from poorer regions like UP, Bihar, Nepal, Northern Bangladesh, Sindh, Balochistan, Afghanistan). Egyptian nationals in the Gulf in 2023 now tend to work skilled jobs that require Arabic fluency like Medicine, Nursing, Teachers, Civil Service, Administration, Military, etc. It doesn't hurt that Egyptian degrees are relatively respected in Kuwait, Saudi, and a couple other Gulf countries.
  - aquir 3y ago
    This must be a typo! $3.5k per year?
    - Tade0 3y ago
      I'll do you one better: I was making $8k annually as a developer a decade ago in my very much EU member country. I was getting shafted, but I learned that my co-worker lowballed and had $5k - I think this was below minimum wage at the time, but the employer took advantage of a loophole in temporary contracts. Back in 2003 $8k per annum was good money.
sneak 3y ago
I wish we'd stop using euphemisms like "conscription" for the practice of slavery. Slave armies are still slave armies even if it's the government doing the enslaving.
- Muromec 3y ago
  But conscription is neither slavery nor forced labor (like taxes aren't theft), because parties to ECHR agreed to give themselves exemption on that.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    I do think it's slavery too. Especially because as a soldier you have no rights and you have to follow orders barked at you by most likely less intelligent people just because they have a few stripes on their shoulder. We still had conscription in the Netherlands when I was young but luckily I got a medical disqualification.
- MockObject 3y ago
  Think of it as less of a euphemism, and more of a specific type of slavery.
- twelve40 3y ago
  well... it is, but mostly for economic reasons. Contract army is the privilege of the very richest countries, and in most favorable conditions, too. To me, the idea to be obligated to go and die in some random place like Vietnam on the other side of the planet is obscene. But no society seems to escape this to a certain extent. Except... a few ultra-privileged ones, in peaceful times.
- munificent 3y ago
  Equating conscription with slavery conveys strictly less useful information. There are many social constructs that forcibly remove rights from someone while retaining others. The set of rights a conscript loses is radically different from the set of rights a slave loses. As a citizen of the US who is not of cosncription age, am I "slave" because the government has removed my right to own nuclear weapons or kill bald eagles? No, obviously not. While conscripts are forced to do some things, they maintain many rights and are treated as people, not property, under law.
GeekyBear 3y ago
We've seen a similar "buy your way our of military conscription" policy in America's past. > Many healthy men who were eligible to serve in the military during the Civil War never ended up enlisting. The Enrollment Act of 1863 provided that a draftee could pay a “substitute” enrollee the sum of $300 (about $5,000 in today’s terms) in order to enlist in his place. Such famous Americans as Grover Cleveland and John D. Rockefeller took advantage of this provision, in effect buying their way out of service. https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/01/abraham-lincoln-the-president-paid-a-substitute-to-enlist-in-the-union-army.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/01/abraham-lincoln-the...
- cafard 3y ago
  You could argue that colleges served the same purpose in the 1960s.
- baybal2 3y ago
  [dead]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jfoutz 3y ago
  not quite the same, but the police used to work the same way. https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Policing.jsp#constablestext https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Policing.jsp#constabl... Traditionally, householders served in the office of constable by appointment or rotation. During their year of office they performed their duties part-time alongside their normal employment. Similarly, householders were expected to serve by rotation on the nightly watch. From the late seventeenth century, however, many householders avoided these obligations by hiring deputies to serve in their place. Essentially being a police man was sort of like jury duty.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    We would probably benefit from going back to that model.
JoeAltmaier 3y ago
From a Utilitarian approach, it makes sense to leave the economy's more critical members in their roles (rich people, kind of) and put the fungible folks out in the field. Not moral; not gonna say it's right. But societies that did this, won more wars. So they're the ones we have around today. Cultural natural selection of a sort. Like it or not.
- ostbender 3y ago
  Which societies did this? Up until ~100 years ago, it was common and expected for the elites to lead the people in times of war, from the frontlines!
  - JoeAltmaier 3y ago
    Like, 2 or three rich men I guess.
- LordShredda 3y ago
  You tell me what a billionaire is doing for society
  - JoeAltmaier 3y ago
    They were never going to be drafted. We're talking about business owners, professionals. Folks who can easily afford that fee.
gumby 3y ago
This same system applied in the US through the civil war at least ($300 would exempt you from the union draft -- about $11K in today's dollars). Also, up to WW1, in the US and UK at least you became a commissioned officer by purchasing your rank. Of course during the war there were field promotions on merit.
- kragen 3y ago
  i don't think the 19th-century usa would prosecute natural-born us citizens who had committed the 'crime' of living abroad during the years when they were eligible for the draft egypt is doing this
  - gumby 3y ago
    I was talking about buying your way out of a draft. Passports are a (supposedly temporary) invention of the 20th century. They aren’t prosecuting, just keeping you from leaving before you fulfill your legal obligation. Egypt is hardly alone in this regard (e.g. Turkey, and before they abolished compulsory military service, France and Germany). Compulsory military service is not a good idea but that is orthogonal to the issue being discussed.
    - kragen 3y ago
      the article explains that they do in fact prosecute tho otherwise i agree
      - gumby 3y ago
        Are we reading the same blog post? The words "prosecute" and "punish" are not in the article. Maybe the confusion is that it is illegal to not do your service (I mean, that's what "obligatory" means) but that's unrelated to where you live, and again, a common rule in most countries with obligatory service that I know of. I don't know how serious a crime that is, except as the blogger points out you can't renew your passport.
LargeTomato 3y ago
I just got back from a family reunion a week ago. Half of the people flew out from Egypt to attend. I learned a lot about their opinions on Egyptian domestic politics. A disclaimer, they are all educated Muslims (only 1 Copt). They also strongly prefer democracy but are realists about it. They all drink, don't wear hijabs, and are very moderate. They do not agree with the revolution. They believe the revolution was fueled by fake news. They liked Mubarak, as far as military dictators go. They strongly disliked the Muslim Brotherhood and many fled to America when it became clear the MB was going to take power. Mubarak did not flee. He was arrested, tried, and found not guilty on all accounts. Morsi (MB) was arrested soon after taking power. He was tried, convicted, and jailed. Morsi sold national security information to Qatar and the UAE. They respect Mubarak as truly caring for Egypt but losing control of the elites in his old age. The new guy, Sisi, is still very new and they are waiting to see how he does. Mubarak sold government contracts to his posse of businessmen. Sisi sells contracts to the military. They dislike this because it stifles domestic companies and a strong military can get out of control quickly. They're waiting to see if Sisi's infrastructure plans actually kickstart more domestic economic growth. I don't know what to think. I do remember Anderson Cooper getting in front of the American people and cheering for the MB. Calling Mubarak a dictator. Mubarak was a dictator but the MB was a fundamentalist, crazy organization. My Egyptian family in the US lost their shit when American media supported the MB. Mubarak never mowed down protestors in Cairo. He didn't flee the country. Whatever your opinion, whatever the truth may be, the situation is complicated.
- selimthegrim 3y ago
  Didn’t Sisi basically threaten to nationalize or nationalize one of Egypt’s largest dairy companies?

57 points by OmarShehata 3y ago

This is significant because historically the most common way for men to avoid conscription was to emigrate for school/work and just not come back until they'd acquired dual citizenship (which usually* exempts you from conscription). A nice side effect of this is a pretty significant brain drain, when your people are motivated to leave because they want to avoid 1-3 years of military service for basically no pay (3 if you're selected to serve as an officer, so Doctors, Engineers, and I believe certain other specializations, 1 otherwise). It's funny (and depressing) to think about how were it not for some luck and some hard work, I'd probably be in my first of 3 years of conscription right this second. Instead I'm on HN :) * Subject to the feelings and competence of the bureaucrats processing the paperwork, as well as any presidential decrees which might interfere with this policy.

ungruntled 3y ago

I haven’t had any upper middle class or rich Egyptians ever noting being concerned about the draft. I assume corruption permitted it to be completely avoidable. What value is this new system offering given the existing ‘infrastructure’ to avoid it?

rossdavidh 3y ago

It all sounds rather disorganized and unfair and arbitrary but maybe just barely functional. Which, really, is a lot like government in the USA, not that I'm saying there aren't also differences.

dash2 3y ago
I think it really sounds much more disorganized and arbitrary than the US, and it's a salutary reminder: state capacity in most of the world is low, like astonishingly low. Here's the Italian website for their startup visa scheme: https://italiastartupvisa.mise.gov.it https://italiastartupvisa.mise.gov.it Notice how the website looks like something your cousin cooked up? And how you can't even really tell how the scheme works? ... how, to apply, you need to get two paper stamps at the post office (LOL)? And Italy, despite the stereotypes, has a relatively high-capacity state in a global context. The world is really, really different from big developed countries.
- Shawnj2 3y ago
  OTOH when I went to Sri Lanka they had posters in the airport warning that possession of drugs would be met with the death penalty that looked like they were made in MS paint lol
- dwaltrip 3y ago
  Everything is a mess, but it’s not fun to think about, so we don’t. And then if we do stop to look closely and think about it, we are surprised to see how messy things are. Still, things are rarely as bad as they seem. We are resilient and adaptable, often far more than we realize, and can get quite far on very little. The unthinkable happens, yet life goes on. Joy is found in the smallest of places. Sometimes what seems like an unsolvable disaster just needs one little variable to change and all of the sudden it isn’t so scary and impossible. Life is full of paradoxes and complex half-truths :)

Eumenes 3y ago

Paying to skip conscription has been going on for hundreds if not thousands of years

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
In the US, the government pays you to conscript yourself.
- twelve40 3y ago
  in other words, we the taxpayers pay so that someone else can serve (voluntarily for a market salary) instead of everyone getting drafted.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    The taxpayers pay so that someone else can protect them (or invade other countries so some oil corporation gets dibs). Socialized defense, a fair deal. If only the same collective principle could work for healthcare ... shots fired!
  - Eumenes 3y ago
    https://www.militarytimes.com/pay-benefits/mil-money/2021/11/16/rising-costs-for-troops-pay-and-benefits-could-hurt-military-readiness-experts-warn/ https://www.militarytimes.com/pay-benefits/mil-money/2021/11... > The average cost per active duty service member for the department in fiscal 2021 was $136,000 How many service members could command salary/benefits like this in the private sector? Most count beans and clean things. I bet that doesn't factor in pensions and lifetime benefits either. The US military is the country's largest welfare program.
    - devilbunny 3y ago
      > The US military is the country's largest welfare program. If they were all as successful as the military is at inculcating middle-class habits in people raised without them, welfare would be a lot more popular.

mahathu 3y ago

Interesting but can't beleive how author didn't spend more time on how crazy discriminatory this practice is, which is also common in other countries in the middle east. No war but class war.

klipt 3y ago
If you're already drafting people based on their genitals (sexism), a little class discrimination on top of that barely moves the needle.
- bhouston 3y ago
  Biological male draft has always made sense from a population maintenance standpoint. If you did a biological female draft only you'd see an even more massive population drop from any hot war that you see with a male-only draft.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > If you did a female draft only you'd see an even more massive population drop from any hot war that you see with a male-only draft. Not so much a greater immediate drop as a much slower bounce back.
  - klipt 3y ago
    That only works in a polygamous society. In monogamous societies like the UK the deaths of many men in the world wars led to "marriage gaps" where a roughly equivalent number of women were unable to marry and have children. So X people dead in war led to 2X people not reproducing. If the draft had been 50/50, then X dead would have only led to X not reproducing.
    - brohee 3y ago
      No need to go full polygamy. After WW II (or the Great Patriotic War), USSR didn't exactly became polygamous but put policies to support single motherhood, that works too. Quoting https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dv3u8t/what_was_it_like_to_be_single_in_the_ussr_after/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dv3u8t/what_... "The shortage of men also meant a very important shift, in which the Soviets worked to try and both destigmatize single-motherhood by increasing state benefits they could receive and featuring mothers of ambiguous marital status in propaganda, while also tacitly encourage even married men to sleep around by preventing the single mothers from suing the father for child support, and making it harder for their irate wives to divorce them. The result being that many men would have numerous affairs, and even unmarried men would often bounce from relationship to relationship." The interbellum period in France and Germany also saw an increase in sexual freedom leading to more single mothers, without going to polygamy.

lordnacho 3y ago

How is 5k per head enough? How many conscription age Egyptian males are there abroad?

bhouston 3y ago
Average yearly Egyptian salary is only 3.5K USD. The place is really poor.
- lordnacho 3y ago
  Yes but this is aimed at people who aren't in Egypt. According to the article. How many people are there abroad that they can contribute a meaningful amount of foreign currency?
  - umeshunni 3y ago
    Many people in this age group might be low skilled laborers, students etc. Especially since the majority of Egyptian expats are in gulf countries.
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      Unskilled labor in the Gulf is mostly South Asian in origin (from poorer regions like UP, Bihar, Nepal, Northern Bangladesh, Sindh, Balochistan, Afghanistan). Egyptian nationals in the Gulf in 2023 now tend to work skilled jobs that require Arabic fluency like Medicine, Nursing, Teachers, Civil Service, Administration, Military, etc. It doesn't hurt that Egyptian degrees are relatively respected in Kuwait, Saudi, and a couple other Gulf countries.
- aquir 3y ago
  This must be a typo! $3.5k per year?
  - Tade0 3y ago
    I'll do you one better: I was making $8k annually as a developer a decade ago in my very much EU member country. I was getting shafted, but I learned that my co-worker lowballed and had $5k - I think this was below minimum wage at the time, but the employer took advantage of a loophole in temporary contracts. Back in 2003 $8k per annum was good money.

sneak 3y ago

I wish we'd stop using euphemisms like "conscription" for the practice of slavery. Slave armies are still slave armies even if it's the government doing the enslaving.

Muromec 3y ago
But conscription is neither slavery nor forced labor (like taxes aren't theft), because parties to ECHR agreed to give themselves exemption on that.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  I do think it's slavery too. Especially because as a soldier you have no rights and you have to follow orders barked at you by most likely less intelligent people just because they have a few stripes on their shoulder. We still had conscription in the Netherlands when I was young but luckily I got a medical disqualification.
MockObject 3y ago
Think of it as less of a euphemism, and more of a specific type of slavery.
twelve40 3y ago
well... it is, but mostly for economic reasons. Contract army is the privilege of the very richest countries, and in most favorable conditions, too. To me, the idea to be obligated to go and die in some random place like Vietnam on the other side of the planet is obscene. But no society seems to escape this to a certain extent. Except... a few ultra-privileged ones, in peaceful times.
munificent 3y ago
Equating conscription with slavery conveys strictly less useful information. There are many social constructs that forcibly remove rights from someone while retaining others. The set of rights a conscript loses is radically different from the set of rights a slave loses. As a citizen of the US who is not of cosncription age, am I "slave" because the government has removed my right to own nuclear weapons or kill bald eagles? No, obviously not. While conscripts are forced to do some things, they maintain many rights and are treated as people, not property, under law.

GeekyBear 3y ago

We've seen a similar "buy your way our of military conscription" policy in America's past. > Many healthy men who were eligible to serve in the military during the Civil War never ended up enlisting. The Enrollment Act of 1863 provided that a draftee could pay a “substitute” enrollee the sum of $300 (about $5,000 in today’s terms) in order to enlist in his place. Such famous Americans as Grover Cleveland and John D. Rockefeller took advantage of this provision, in effect buying their way out of service. https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/01/abraham-lincoln-the-president-paid-a-substitute-to-enlist-in-the-union-army.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/01/abraham-lincoln-the...

cafard 3y ago
You could argue that colleges served the same purpose in the 1960s.
baybal2 3y ago
[dead]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jfoutz 3y ago
not quite the same, but the police used to work the same way. https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Policing.jsp#constablestext https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Policing.jsp#constabl... Traditionally, householders served in the office of constable by appointment or rotation. During their year of office they performed their duties part-time alongside their normal employment. Similarly, householders were expected to serve by rotation on the nightly watch. From the late seventeenth century, however, many householders avoided these obligations by hiring deputies to serve in their place. Essentially being a police man was sort of like jury duty.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  We would probably benefit from going back to that model.

JoeAltmaier 3y ago

From a Utilitarian approach, it makes sense to leave the economy's more critical members in their roles (rich people, kind of) and put the fungible folks out in the field. Not moral; not gonna say it's right. But societies that did this, won more wars. So they're the ones we have around today. Cultural natural selection of a sort. Like it or not.

ostbender 3y ago
Which societies did this? Up until ~100 years ago, it was common and expected for the elites to lead the people in times of war, from the frontlines!
- JoeAltmaier 3y ago
  Like, 2 or three rich men I guess.
LordShredda 3y ago
You tell me what a billionaire is doing for society
- JoeAltmaier 3y ago
  They were never going to be drafted. We're talking about business owners, professionals. Folks who can easily afford that fee.

gumby 3y ago

This same system applied in the US through the civil war at least ($300 would exempt you from the union draft -- about $11K in today's dollars). Also, up to WW1, in the US and UK at least you became a commissioned officer by purchasing your rank. Of course during the war there were field promotions on merit.

kragen 3y ago
i don't think the 19th-century usa would prosecute natural-born us citizens who had committed the 'crime' of living abroad during the years when they were eligible for the draft egypt is doing this
- gumby 3y ago
  I was talking about buying your way out of a draft. Passports are a (supposedly temporary) invention of the 20th century. They aren’t prosecuting, just keeping you from leaving before you fulfill your legal obligation. Egypt is hardly alone in this regard (e.g. Turkey, and before they abolished compulsory military service, France and Germany). Compulsory military service is not a good idea but that is orthogonal to the issue being discussed.
  - kragen 3y ago
    the article explains that they do in fact prosecute tho otherwise i agree
    - gumby 3y ago
      Are we reading the same blog post? The words "prosecute" and "punish" are not in the article. Maybe the confusion is that it is illegal to not do your service (I mean, that's what "obligatory" means) but that's unrelated to where you live, and again, a common rule in most countries with obligatory service that I know of. I don't know how serious a crime that is, except as the blogger points out you can't renew your passport.

LargeTomato 3y ago

I just got back from a family reunion a week ago. Half of the people flew out from Egypt to attend. I learned a lot about their opinions on Egyptian domestic politics. A disclaimer, they are all educated Muslims (only 1 Copt). They also strongly prefer democracy but are realists about it. They all drink, don't wear hijabs, and are very moderate. They do not agree with the revolution. They believe the revolution was fueled by fake news. They liked Mubarak, as far as military dictators go. They strongly disliked the Muslim Brotherhood and many fled to America when it became clear the MB was going to take power. Mubarak did not flee. He was arrested, tried, and found not guilty on all accounts. Morsi (MB) was arrested soon after taking power. He was tried, convicted, and jailed. Morsi sold national security information to Qatar and the UAE. They respect Mubarak as truly caring for Egypt but losing control of the elites in his old age. The new guy, Sisi, is still very new and they are waiting to see how he does. Mubarak sold government contracts to his posse of businessmen. Sisi sells contracts to the military. They dislike this because it stifles domestic companies and a strong military can get out of control quickly. They're waiting to see if Sisi's infrastructure plans actually kickstart more domestic economic growth. I don't know what to think. I do remember Anderson Cooper getting in front of the American people and cheering for the MB. Calling Mubarak a dictator. Mubarak was a dictator but the MB was a fundamentalist, crazy organization. My Egyptian family in the US lost their shit when American media supported the MB. Mubarak never mowed down protestors in Cairo. He didn't flee the country. Whatever your opinion, whatever the truth may be, the situation is complicated.

selimthegrim 3y ago
Didn’t Sisi basically threaten to nationalize or nationalize one of Egypt’s largest dairy companies?