yesterday, like today

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

George Orwell, 1984.

We must smother the internal and external enemies of the Republic or perish with it; now in this situation, the first maxim of your policy ought to be to lead the people by reason and the people's enemies by terror.

Maximilien Robespierre, Speech to the National Convention, February 5, 1794.

The country’s newly appointed prime minister, Kamal al Ganzouri, addressed the nation for the first time on Monday, calling the recent events an “attack on the revolution,” and denying that the military shot anyone. He asserted that the people gathered in Cairo’s iconic Tahrir Square, the center of Egypt’s winter uprising, were not “pure” revolutionaries.

“We have never used anything that could be labeled as violence,” he said.

"Egypt clashes continue for second day; 8 killed, 300 wounded," Washington Post, December 17, 2011.

The title of this post is the title of a book written by Charlie Weber who died while in the custody of the Stasi, the East German secret police. The German title is Gestern Wie Heute, and the book, according to his wife, Miriam, is "about the way that one dictatorship here is the same as another." (Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, p. 34.)