More on the April 6 Fizzle

Okay, I guess the age of Facebook as a fomenter of revolution isn't here yet, after all. The 6 April Movement is going to have trouble explaining the results of the day after all the preliminary hype.

Reading various accounts of today's demonstrations in Egypt, it seems clear that the earlier impression was correct: the 6 April Movement failed to even score major demonstrations, let alone a general strike. A few reports from various places: here, in which the total number arrested throughout Egypt is estimated at only 45, and it is noted that at the demonstration outside the Journalists' syndicate, the State Security Investigations and other police outnumbered the demonstrators; this article entitled "Some University Students Protest as Others Play Ping-Pong," and, given the fact that the organizers urged the demonstrators to wear black as a symbol of their protest, I have to look at this photo and ask, does riot police body armor count?

I'm not making fun of the protestors: there's plenty worth protesting, and they did take risks in organizing their movement, but their ability to rally supporters has proved to be virtually nil. They had a good virtual presence, as I noted in my earlier backgrounder, but 73,000 Facebrook friends using pseudonyms is not quite the same as protestors willing to stand up to the billy-clubs of the security police. The Muslim Brotherhood "supported" the demonstrators but had few people actually on the streets; it may be that this Al-Ahram assessment ("Too Old School to Strike") is on target. Ayman Nour showed up to rally demonstrators at one point and apparently became the center of attention for photographers, but there seem to have been only tiny clumps of people at the main targets of the demonstrations (trade union headquarters, the Journalists' Union, etc.).

UPDATE AND VOCABULARY NOTE: I've been surfing English-language Egyptian blogs, websites etc. tonight, and one word keeps cropping up in a range of blogs from the Trotskyite left through the Nasserists and Islamists and on out to the fairly pro-government folks. The most common word in the frequency cloud, at least in my unscientific opinion, is the one I've seen in almost every posting: pathetic. When left, rightl and center all agree on the same dismissive word, your revolution needs a bit of fine tuning.