Revolution for Dummies: Laughing through the Arab Spring

it easier to use religion to mass-control people with shitty lives?

Or maybe it is the very nature of military rule: they hate diversity and they don’t know how to deal with it, so the best thing is to make everyone as homogeneous as the uniforms in their training camps. The

when you bend down once, you stay bent, you never stand tall again.

I am not going to censor myself to comfort your ignorance.

you got Trump as president, so you’re really not in a postion to mock our “democracy” or our “choices

An authoritatrian regime, whether military or religious, doesn't want diversity. Having masses of people who think the same. talk the same, and hate the same is much easier for maintaining control.

The army could not have been happier. The result of the referendum was a repeated slap to the faces of those liberal powers who thought they could change the country. The army never wanted change, not with so many interests, businesses, and powerful people involved. It was a system sixty years in the making. Removing Mubarak didn’t even touch the deep state that he was a disposable face of. The Muslim Brotherhood were never serious about the revolution either. They used it simply to come into power. They had no problem with the old regime as long as they were on top of it. One

Fear has always been their best weapon. Fear of refugees, of people who don’t look like us, fear of “losing our religion and identity,” fear of war, and the destruction that will happen if you don’t blindly follow your dictator, or simply the fear arising from dealing with facts, reality, and science, because truth is not really their friend.

When you laugh, you are not afraid anymore.

in a two-man race the other candidate came in third

Same scare tactics, different days of the week.

Having masses of people who think the same, talk the same, and hate the same is much easier for maintaining control.

Normal people began to see that a beard was not synonymous with honesty. It was simply a patchy place to hide one's lies.

Fact-checking the authorities is looked upon as a form of mutiny against the country or against God. They will always find a way to justify ridiculous claims. If you challenge those claims, you don’t like the country or you are misinformed by “mainstream media,” which is not telling you the “truth.

Human rights” became an infamous phrase. In the state-run media, they accused anyone supporting human rights of using it as an excuse to create chaos to destroy the country from within.

Egypt was living through one tragedy after another. People were killed every day because of something. This became our own Columbine reality on a weekly basis. There was always this challenge of trying to make people laugh amid such terrible circumstances. But what could we do?

The young generation is not taking this bullshit again.

America, I hope you do something about that Trump. Consider this book a warning for what is yet to come.

On Fox News I found an abundance of stupidity and ignorance.

college student was arrested for photoshopping Mickey Mouse ears onto Sissi’s head.

it was in their best interest to prop up imaginary enemies all the time to keep people distracted.

Our segment of the week just wrote itself.

My team had to endure the same agony Jon Stewart’s team had to go through while watching Fox News.

You can’t really respect or fear something you are laughing at.

how desperate I was to get out of the country like my getting pumped about going to Cleveland.

never really liked being a doctor. It was just a great line to open a conversation with a hot chick.

ignorance, xenophobia, racism, and everything that Donald Trump stands for can transcend borders, cultures, and religions.

Those who called themselves liberals proved later that being well dressed, eloquent, and standing up against Islamist fascism doesn’t really mean you are a liberal. On the day of my interrogation the joke was on the Islamists. But a year later the liberals were the new joke that kept on giving.

In the two years since I left Egypt, things haven’t gotten better. Thousands of people have been incarcerated for the most trivial reasons. Hundreds have been tortured on a daily basis in police stations. Others have been killed. You would think that there would be some sort of stability on the surface at least. You know, the kind of fake stability military dictatorships have. But even economically the army was running the country into the ground. They were basically milking the shit out of it, changing laws, basking in the corruption that is protected by their military status. Every day, people woke up to a new business taken by the army.

With Sissi, he was not the elephant in the room, he was the elephant and the room. As