Egypt Today

Are people still refusing to call the coup against Egypt’s first democratically elected president a coup? In case there’s any doubt as to whether it’s a coup or not, please read the news today. It’s been very disheartening to read from my friends on facebook about how the coup against Morsi was a revolution. This couldn’t be any farther from the truth. The point being, I feel obligated to assert, is not that Morsi was good or bad, but that however dumb and inept he may have been, he enjoyed a democratic mandate and should have been voted out of office when his first term was up – if that was to be his fate. This all shows that Mubarak was not the only problem before the January 2011 uprising. He presided over an entire apparatus that was entrenched. Changing the figurehead was a start but the apparatus that entailed the military elite, the financial elite, and the Mubarak era judicial elite, all enduring and ousted Egypt’s first democratically elected president. If 2011 was to be a total revolution, all the Mubarak era centers of power should have been swept away. In 1979 Iran, the revolution, with all its faults and shortcomings, was at least total in the sense that the billionaires that sought to preserve the Shah’s status quo, his military, legal, and media apparatus were all put to flight, or worse. The question begs, how did Morsi intend to further the 2011 revolution when all the Mubarak era centers of power, the so-called “deep state,” remained largely untouched?