You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Selected Writings 2011-2021

by Alaa Abd El-Fattah

Workers’ protest for better conditions in Kafr al-Dawwar is brutally repressed, and two of the workers are sentenced to death and executed.

Israel invades Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, under agreement with France and the UK, but international pressure forces their withdrawal. A major political victory for Nasser. Control of the canal is cemented.

War between Israel and Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Israel occupies the Palestinian West Bank, the Gaza strip, the Syrian Golan Heights, and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. A humiliating defeat. A war of attrition begins against Israeli forces now occupying the east bank of the Suez Canal.

September 1984: Workers demonstrate and stage a sit-in at Kafr el-Dawwar Spinning & Weaving Factory (public sector), protesting rising food prices and demanding increased pay. The sit-in is violently broken up by police forces, leaving three workers dead. Several more strikes will follow, protesting rising prices, low pay, corruption, neglect of the public sector and the complicity of the official workers’ unions.

October 2004: Three coordinated bombs are detonated in tourist spots around Taba, South Sinai, killing 38 people.

June 2010: Khaled Said, 28, is dragged from a cybercafé near his home in Alexandria by two plainclothes policemen and beaten to death. The police report claims he suffocated as he tried to swallow a bag of hashish he was caught with, but Said’s family manage to take a photograph of his corpse in the morgue. His face is battered beyond recognition. They release the photograph online, along with a claim that he was killed for having video material implicating policemen in a drug deal. A new Facebook page, ‘We are all Khaled Said’, attracts hundreds of thousands of followers in a few days, becoming Egypt’s largest dissident group online.

Morsi makes a unilateral power grab, declaring his decisions immune from judicial review and precluding the courts from dissolving a new Constituent Panel. Massive protests ensue.

Many of these words were first written with pencil and paper in a cell in Egypt’s notorious Torah Prison, and smuggled out in ways we likely will never understand.

few texts were written in relative freedom, on the eve of repeated imprisonments, or during probationary release, in an isolation cell at a police station where the author was required to spend his nights.

His editors at Mada Masr, where many of Alaa’s writings first appeared, have also faced harassment and detention for their commitment to independent thought in a sea of state propaganda.

This text is also a product of revolutionary effort, of subterfuge

It must be read for the precision of its language, for its bold experimentations with form and style, and for the endlessly original ways its author finds to express

disdain for tyrants, liars and cowards. Most of all, it must be read for what Alaa has to tell us about revolutions – why most fail, what it feels like when they do, and, perhaps, how they might still succeed. It is an analysis rooted as much in a keen understanding of popular culture, digital technology, and collective emotion as it is in experiences confronting tanks and consoling the families of martyrs.

So, for instance, in the handful of months when Alaa was on probationary release from prison in 2019, before his reimprisonment, he shared several reflections on how the outside world had altered during his years of incarceration. When, he wondered, did otherwise serious adults start communicating with one another via emojis and gifs? Why, amidst the constant online chatter, was there so little actual discourse...

In an interview with journalists at Mada Masr, Alaa observed that, ‘Getting out [of jail], I feel like we’ve gone back to the Stone Age. People speak in emojis and sounds – ha ha ho ho – not text. T...

And yet in his own life, he had watched these networked technologies – filled with so much potential for solidarity, increased understanding, and new forms of internationalism – turn into tools of aggressive surveillance and social control, with Big Tech collaborating with repressive regimes, governments using ‘kill switches’ to black out the internet mid-uprising, and bad-faith actors seizing on out-of-context tweets to slander reputations and make activists markedly easier to imprison.

Nor was he under any illusion that Silicon Valley was a partner in his people’s liberation. In one of this book’s most prescient passages, Alaa, writing without Internet access in a prison cell in 2016, predicted the Covid-19 lockdown lifestyle almost to the letter, with its attendant attacks on public education and labour standards. Mimicking the breathless techno-utopian tone, he wrote: Tomorrow will be a happy day, when Uber replaces drivers with self-driving cars, making the trip to university cheaper; and the day after will be even happier when they abolish the university, so you’re spared the trip and can study at Khan Academy from the comfort of your own home. And the day after will be even happier still when they do away with your trip to work and have you doing piecework from home in a flexible, sharing-based labour market, and the day after will be happier and happier when they send you off for early retirement because you’ve been replaced by a robot.

keynote

Now here he was, plunged back into the waters of instant digital gratification and continuous digital input. And he was, quite understandably, appalled. Not just by the replacement of carefully chosen words by crude emoticons, but, one senses, by the dissonance between the enormous stakes of the struggle for liberation against the military regime – fallen comrades, thousands of political prisoners, tortured bodies, death sentences – and the light-hearted, absurdist tone that characterizes how pretty much everything now gets discussed online, in Egypt and beyond.

feel like there has been a regression,’ he said, ‘even in two-way conversation, not just collective – in the ability to deal with complex topics.’

It’s fitting that Alaa would zero in on regression when he was able to re-engage online after what he described as his ‘deep freeze’.

Fitting because inducing a regressed state in the incarcerated person is t...

one that swallowed him up, as it had his father before him. Isolation, humiliation, continuous changing of the rules, severed connections with the outside world – all of it is designed to achieve a numbed and nullified state of submission. Which makes it all the more remarkable that prison did not succeed in inducing ...

Indeed we leftists have been known to spend years staggering around like golems inside the husks of our movements, unaware that we have been drained of our animating life force.

And yet, he acknowledges, Egypt’s revolution failed in its most minimal common goals: to secure a government that rotates based on democratic elections and a legal system that protects the integrity of the body from arbitrary detention, military trials, torture, rape, and state massacres.

It also failed, at the peak of its popular power, ‘to articulate a common dream of what we wanted in Egypt. It’s fine to be defeated,’ Alaa writes, ‘but at least have a story – what we want to achieve together.’ Reading his earlier, more programmatic essays, it’s clear that this was not for lack of ideas.

And yet, if we check the ledger, it is also true that we have failed to stop the steamroller of hyper-polluting and exploiting trade. We have failed to keep global emissions from steadily rising. We failed to stop the invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan or the war in Yemen. Our resistances, however heroic, however effervescent, have not brought justice to Palestine, or protected the most minimal democracy in Hong Kong. I could go on, but will spare

That serious stakes demand intellectual seriousness. Resist the algorithmic pull of the trivial, absurdist and mocking, as well as the delusion that they constitute meaningful resistance.

Yet he insists that, in the ‘post-truth’ age, an information ecology in which truth and meaning are valued and defended is a threat to power, which is why elites actively encourage our sense of the absurd.

That movements must be avowedly internationalist and feminist, which means rejecting the temptations to deploy easy nationalism and the ‘trap of masculinity’

It is this kind of softness that makes Alaa an evolved movement leader: his refusal to romanticize or glorify imprisonment or suffering in any way, his insistence on his own fragility, his right to sadness. And yet, no matter the physical and psychic mutilations, his belief that healing and regeneration remain possible.

Our social media selections are an attempt instead to show how he uses the internet: as a medium not only for transmission outwards, but of collecting information, combining and disseminating, as a space for debate, a personal diary, a public diary, a podium and a comedy stage.

In August 2012 Mohamed Morsi had appointed General Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi as the new Minister of Defence, replacing the aged and unpopular Field Marshall Hussein Tantawi. Tantawi

but the president had sealed his own downfall by elevating the ambitious and ruthless Sisi to the position from which he would soon overthrow him.

‘Vengeance

The openness and commitment to truth that made him into a revolutionary leader is searching for expression in a new world, sharing himself and his attempts to reconstitute himself with a vanquished public also unable to meaningfully reconstruct itself under the Sisi regime.

Around this time some small street protests erupt, triggered by a building contractor revealing details about government corruption – details shocking even to a populace that expects a high level of corruption. Seeing these small protests as a security failure, Sisi re-organizes the divisions of power and responsibility between the state apparatuses.

A massive sweep of activists begins, Alaa is one of dozens of targeted ar...

people arrested randomly from the street) and is taken from inside the police station where he was already detained every night. Everyone arrested is charged with ‘belonging to a terrorist organization’ and ‘spreading false news’, and none are sent to trial but are kept instead in a state of ‘preventive detention pending trial’, that can be renewed without trial. Legally, this is subject to a two-year limit. We will cross that threshold as this book goes to print, though we expect that, a...

On one reading, the progression of pieces in the book mirrors the overall flow of history since 2011: optimism, ideas and public engagement are besieged by the unrelenting military state until its prisons have swollen to consume all existence and intellect.

It’s been four months since the revolution toppled Hosni Mubarak, President of Egypt for the previous thirty years, and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces assumed official control of the country as a transitional body to oversee a democratic transfer of power.

The charter was adopted and became the Constitution of the South African liberation movement.

There will be work and security and the doors of culture and learning will be opened. There will be housing, security and comfort, peace and friendship. These freedoms we will fight for, side by side, throughout our lives, until we have won our liberty.

The volunteers collected responses and sent them to elected committees in each local area who then compiled them into lists of demands, which were then sent to elected committees representing each district, which collated and summarized them before forwarding them to the committee drafting the Freedom Charter.

The idea was born when the African National Congress (ANC – Nelson Mandela’s party) found itself at an impasse.

apartheid

the Congress settled the debate within the ANC between an Afrocentric vision that saw the liberation of black South Africans as part of the larger fight against colonialism on the continent, and a belief that the solution was a common struggle for equality among everyone who lived in the nation regardless of ethnicity, including white South Africans.

After having been divided by apartheid and by colonialism into separate ethnicities and tribes, the people were reborn as a unified entity with a single goal and vision that was passed down through generations – generations that were willing to pay the price in torture and imprisonment and martyrdom.

The people protected the legitimacy of the charter until the apartheid regime fell and the people remained.

Naturally, the elites think it’s their destiny and their right to be elected, and sometimes confuse being an elected representative with being a guardian of the people. Honestly, there’s no difference here between the Constitution First camp and the Parliament First camp and I worry that they’ve already agreed that the people’s role ends at the ballot box.