One can read thousands of words about Egypt and have less sense of the culture of the military coup than one gleans through this video. It’s quite a piece of work, isn’t it? But what does it say? One take is that Egypt is going through something like the experience of Italian fascism of the 20’s and 30’s; there seems to me a kind of similarity in the cultural style—the sensuality, the military worship tropes (for an army that has never had much actual success in the field). The combination of the two—sex and the allure of men with shiny boots. But of course other interpretations are possible.

My old prof Robert Paxton once said that fascism was essentially hard measures taken by a frightened middle class. The fear back then, in Italy, Spain, and also in France and Germany, was of communism. Here the secular middle class fears the Muslim brothers, and sharia plays the role of the Soviet future as aspiration for some and terror for others. I can’t say for certain where my own sentiments would be faced with that dreadful choice. Where are most of Egypt’s secular, Western oriented, “liberals?” Right now, backing the coup. Is their fear of Morsi and Egypt’s Islamic population justified or overwrought?

In any case, I submit this clip as an apt representation of how Egypt’s secular liberals are rallying to their man on horseback.