Vision: The World Is Inspired as We Watch Millions Defy Mubarak's System of Intimidation and Violence

Egypt presents in full the unfathomed and perhaps unfathomable mystery of revolution. For decades, the structure of an oppressive state rises above society, murderous, imperturbable, implacable. The torture chambers are operating twenty-four hours a day. The nation’s wealth flows to secret accounts abroad. The rich and privileged sit contented in their gated communities. “And the hapless Soldier's sigh/ Runs in blood down Palace walls” (Blake). Often the sovereign bows to a foreign paymaster. A fog of propaganda fills the air like poison gas. The Leader’s portrait covers office buildings. Unaccountable bureaucracy tangles up the country in a thousand absurd regulations. Leonid Brezhnev snores in the Kremlin, his “dead hand” hovering over the nuclear button. Imelda Marcos communes with her three thousand pairs of shoes in her colossal shoe closet. Ben Ali sips cocktails in his resort in Hammamet. Nothing, it seems, will ever change, can ever change. In the words of Nadezhda Mandelstam regarding Stalin’s rule, “There was a special form of the sickness—lethargy, plague, hypnotic trance or whatever one calls it, that affected all those who committed terrible deeds. All the murderers, provocateurs and informers had one feature in common: it never occurred to them that their victims might one day rise up again and speak.” Only a few “dissident” voices break the calm, and most of them are in jail or in exile.

But then suddenly a tremor runs through the whole edifice. A few thousand people come out in the street, then tens of thousands, then, appearing as if by magic, hundreds of thousands all around the country. And somehow this rebellion—breaking out in only a few days—can be enough. Its spirit touches a nerve in something like the whole nation, which awakes, and with amazing ease sheds the long-hated yet tolerated regime. (In nearby Tunisia, the fuse that set off the Egyptian bomb, it took only twenty-three days from the beginning of the uprising for Ben Ali to get on his plane to Saudi Arabia.) Suddenly, all the rules change, all the old relationships of command and subservience are reversed, and the structures of power begin to dissolve. Later, scholars will ferret out signs of what was to come and even find “causes” of the event, but the fact is that revolutions are the least anticipated of all events, taking the world again and again by surprise.