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.
The regime was telling us that no matter what happens, we are still better than Syria and Iraq. They were the new boogeymen now.
But we were actually turning into Syria or Iraq, without any outside military interference or an inside civil war. The military supporters still lack any thoughts resembling logic. They are part of the same echo chamber you’d find yourself in if you attended a Trump rally: “Everyone is conspiring against us. They are out to get us, they hate us for our freedoms.” Even when Sissi visited Germany and the media there grilled him for all the human rights violations, Egyptian media accused the German media of being funded by Islamists!
Fascism was coveted and promoted like never before. In the same way that white supremacy and racism and bullying were normalized for Trump supporters. Many media figures accompanied the president to China. They came back marveling at how strong China is. “China was doing just fine with no democracy,” they said. “They even shut down social media and Facebook and YouTube. They don’t need it there. We should do the same.”
In Egypt, North Korea was not a joke; it was an example to follow. In one incident an Egyptian judge sentenced more than five hundred people to death in less than twenty minutes. They were all accused of killing one police officer. One!
Young people were taken from their houses in the middle of the night and disappeared for months. They then appeared in a propaganda video produced by the military, in which they “confessed” to taking part in terrorist plots, and pictures were taken of them with a variety of weapons, as though they were being photographed for a spread in a monthly publication of “Terrorism Today.” They were later filmed “confessing” to their evil deeds. Many of their families came out and said that those confessions were tortured out of them.
You didn’t even have to participate in a political activity to be taken into custody. A twenty-two-year-old college student was arrested for photoshopping Mickey Mouse ears onto Sissi’s head. They looked really good on him. Still, that kid was sentenced to three years in jail.
Army generals appeared on television to claim there is a “Supreme Council of the World” that controls everything, that decides which country they want to bring down.
Sissi warned Egyptians that we are facing a “Fourth Generation war”—whatever the hell that means—and hinted that those who opposed his rule were spies or were affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.
The media were creating a new breed of citizens. We were now a nation of informants.
Border control officers in the Cairo airport bragged about their “catch of the day” on the pages of newspapers. That “catch” could be little remote-control helicopters and drone toys, you know, those toys being sold at Brookstone? The photos appeared under a headline saying BORDER CONTROL EXPOSES A DEVIOUS PLOT TO SMUGGLE SPY DRONES INTO THE COUNTRY.
The paranoia spread like wildfire among regular Egyptians. All they heard on television was that there was a global conspiracy against Egypt, so it is only natural that they would go out into the streets seeking to save their country.
English once again became a dangerous language to speak in public. A British couple was captured and delivered to the police by “concerned citizens” in the subway who’d overheard the two talking in their own language, you know, English.
You see, America, you are not the only country to throw people off planes for speaking another language.
I still had a share of accusations directed at me too. Although I was thousands of miles away from Egypt, the media hit men were all over my case. They would refer to me as the “American poster child.” One TV host said, “America always takes care of its men in Egypt, and Bassem Youssef is living proof of that.”
Madness is now everywhere. It is the kind that makes people believe anything out of fear and hysteria. Like that time the army told the Egyptian people that they had defeated the American Sixth Fleet . . .
That’s right. We defeated your troops in a war you never knew anything about. One of the famous pro-military TV hosts appeared on his show holding a copy of Hillary Clinton’s memoir Hard Choices. He announced that according to this book America tried to send the Sixth Fleet to invade Egypt and reinstate Morsi. However, the Egyptian army under Sissi prevented this invasion and even managed to capture the commander of the Sixth Fleet through a special operation. We threatened that we would expose America’s defeat to the world if they didn’t retreat, which they did. And that would have been so, so, so cool. If only it had happened.
The TV anchor actually had an easy time getting away with this by citing Clinton’s book, because not a single person has read that book. Have you read that book? I haven’t. Literally, no one.
Everyone was living in a parallel reality. But something had to give. Everything in the country was falling apart. The economy was going down the drain; prices were rising by the minute. Many were starting to see this regime for what it really is, a failure. But the military wouldn’t accept that. In their book and the book of their staunch supporters the country was fine.
When they ran out of tricks and people started to really feel the hardship with the worsening economy, the police announced they had arrested twelve people who they accused of plotting to spread a “pessimistic mood” in the country. According to the government there were no shortages of goods, no devaluation of currency, and no collapse in services and infrastructure; it was all an illusion propagated by twelve traitors. As usual they had people on camera confessing (probably out of fear of torture) that they had plotted to spread rumors daily to destroy the “morale of the public.”
You might ask yourself, how come the supporters of such a regime don’t see all of this? Well, the military always had an explanation for everything, even for the most absurd things. They would believe the military no matter what happened. Even if the military’s lies were exposed. I will give you an example.
In the fall of 2015 the military proudly announced that they had a successful airstrike, killing a terrorist cell in the Egyptian Western Desert. This was a common occurrence. Some people would be killed somewhere and the military or the police would simply say they were terrorists. There was no other source than the military, and no one dared to question that. After all, the people killed in these raids or attacks are Egyptians who are worth nothing to the regime. Everything was justified by “national security.” But this time, those who were killed in the airstrike turned out to be Mexican tourists who were on an off-road trip. Since there was a foreign government involved they couldn’t say that those people were just some terrorists.
The Mexican foreign minister flew to Egypt to deliver a very harsh message to Sissi for this fuckup. What happened then was absolutely ridiculous. As Sissi was photographed with the Mexican minister, with his face showing that he was shitting in his pants, the Egyptian media pushed the narrative that Mexicans are known to be drug dealers and those who were killed must have been there illegally. Even after the military’s initial lie about the victims being terrorists was exposed, the military supporters just believed the new narrative that we killed a bunch of drug dealers. Hmm, Mexicans being drug lords? Supporters who would believe anything? Why is this so familiar?
Oh yes . . . The Trump wagon!
When I came to America, I witnessed all of Trump’s scandals, including the famous tape in which he was bragging about grabbing women by the pussy. I saw a Trump supporter listening to the tape and saying that she still supported Trump. He had been chosen by Jesus to save America. No matter what Trump (or Sissi) does, their supporters will never change their positon.
Stupidity is not exclusive to the Middle East.
I was watching all of this and thanking God I didn’t have my show. I would have had endless material, but every joke I would’ve had to make would’ve brought me closer to jail.
And yet, they asked me to come back. The intelligence service contacted me this go-round. What a shocker.