Notes from Tahrir Square

摘要

Ⅰ Standing next to me on Tahrir Square, someone said that on 28 January the Hosni Mubarak regime had shut down the Internet and cut off mobile-phone service, throwing Egypt into the nineteenth century. Yet I had already witnessed the twelfth-century spectacle of Mubarak supporters riding on camelback, lashing demonstrators with whips and slashing their faces with swords. Another 30-year-old demonstrator told me: 'I have no point of comparison. Since I was born the only ruler I've known has been Mubarak.' Egyptians raised funny signs, like the one carried by an obviously tired kid in his up-raised hand reading 'Mubarak please go, my arms hurt'. The young men and women in Tahrir Square, and with them the rest of Egypt, wanted their country to be part of the twenty-first century, the world they knew through Facebook and the Internet. They wanted to be part of the modern world.