Generations: A Scoop of Gen. Y’s Ideology
By Mohamed Karrem
How was it possible for an Egyptian president to rule two generations in a row and didn’t get assassinated? That was the secret of Husni Mubarak’s regime, which is about to be revealed. I will explain what has been kept for more than 30 years, and showing how much it contributed to shaping most of Millennials’ and Gen Z’s mentalities nowadays.
Consider him as your father
It might seem hard to ask you for putting yourself in Mubaraks’ shoes, but give it a try and imagine that you are about to be declared as the president of Egypt, and your most recent memory is the body of Sadat with a bullet in the heart beside you. The impact of this scene couldn’t be more noticeable in Mubaraks’ visions and decisions made, which led him to depend on the political tranquility strategies and transform Egypt into his own freezer, claiming that political stability will ensure a safe country with no place for terrorism, which let the door open to the emergency law rule.
Millennial’s ice age
So, you can tell that the latest Gen Xers and the earliest Millennials are coming from the Ice Age with no sense of concerning about the others, and they are living just to live, but we can’t blame them for how they were raised and how it wove in their personalities. Expectedly, that Mubarak had no project of his own, lacking any kind of national project, and politics became increasingly irrelevant under his reign. At the same time, he tried to contain the disaffections that had surfaced in the last year of Sadat’s era, he announced at the end of the reign of the privileged minority, that had dominated the invigorated private sector during the Sadat years. He also released Sadat’s political prisoners, while prosecuting vigorously the Islamic militants who had plotted the late president’s assassination.
The ideology establishments
Living in a fake society with a regime trying to mask the reality and freeze the response had established a distrust connection among the different generations, which pushed millennials to gain a sense of entitlement and narcissism. It was a little bit funny under Mubarak’s time that a president didn’t select a VP because of his trust issues, was ruling the generations who had the same issue with the regime itself, but both the president and the public couldn’t care less about what was going on at that time.
Muslim Brotherhood again
I hope you didn’t forget about one of the country’s pillars, which used to cooperate with the regime at the beginning, and ended up in prison, as it was one of the Muslim Brotherhood’s favorite habit. Doubtlessly, Mubarak was so lucky with the militant groups at the beginning, he opened the gates and facilitated the procedures for those who wanted to go for jihad in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the rest of them were part of the controlled opposition in the political movement at this time. It’s undeniable that Mubarak was doing good with the balance of power until the 1992 Cairo earthquake occurred and caused the first cracks in Mubarak’s freezer. Gifting Millennials with their second chance to defrost their mentalities.
What goes around comes around
The period from 1992 to 1997 Gama’a al-Islamiyya Islamic Group began a five-year campaign of attacks on the government and targeted tourists, culminating in the killing of 62 people at the Luxor historic site in 1997. The Pakistan war intensified the militant groups and organized their strategies and methodologies, therefore they couldn’t help feeling a sense of gratitude towards Mubarak’s regime, and decided to thank him by operating Luxor’s terrorist attack.
Similar to Gen Xers, Millennials shared the same quarrel of the Muslim Brotherhood even after all these attacks, and you are going to figure out how that happened in the next articles.
