There is a true story from the early 20th century that is told by the great writer Ahmed Amin in his excellent book “A Dictionary of Egyptian Customs and Traditions.” A peasant laborer acquired a vast fortune and bought a large boat, called a dahabia. He bought smart and expensive clothes and sat in his dahabia as it glided across the water. The man who owned the land he worked on, an arrogant and cruel-hearted man, saw him and ordered his workers to storm the dahabia and arrest the peasant. The peasant begged for forgiveness, swearing he would never sail the dahabia again if the landowner thought he had done wrong. The landowner accepted his apology, but then gave orders to his servants, who tied the peasant up and dragged him along he ground until his new clothes were covered with mud and ripped to shreds. Then they started to beat him until his knees, his feet, and his back were bleeding.

To my mind, this story reflects a widespread pattern for the relationship between the despot and his victims.

I remember this lesson when I follow what is happening in Egypt. Generations of Egyptians have grown up in the firm belief that submitting to injustice is wise, and that kowtowing to those in power is the best way to protect oneself from harm. Egyptians have long believed that objecting to the authoritarian system is sheer folly and will never change things for the better, and that those who resist injustice will be detained, tortured, and even killed. Egyptians have believed that coexistence with the authoritarian regime will save them from the harm it can inflict, trusting that the vast apparatus of repression which the state possesses only goes into action to crush those who stand in its way.

But now, perhaps for the first time in decades, Egyptians are waking up to the fact that submission, failing to speak out for justice, and being obsequious towards oppressors will not prevent injustice, but often add to it. Khaled Mohamed Said, the young man who was killed in Alexandria last month, was no political activist and did not belong to any movement aimed to change the regime; in fact he may never in his life have taken part in any demonstration. He was a completely peaceful young Egyptian, dreaming like millions of Egyptians of escaping by any possible means from his oppressive homeland. He was waiting to obtain a U.S. passport like his brothers, so that he could leave Egypt forever. On the evening of his death, he went to an Internet cafe to pass the time, again like millions of others. He committed no crime and broke no law, but as soon as he went into the cafe two plainclothes policemen pounced on him and without a word started beating him brutally. They banged his head on the edge of the marble table with all their might, dragged him out of the cafe and took him into a nearby building, where they continued to beat him and banged his head against the iron gate of the building until their purpose was fulfilled. Khaled's skull was smashed and he died in front of them. Regardless of the real reason behind this brutal murder, and regardless also of the successive statements issued by the Ministry of the Interior to justify the crime, all of which have turned out to be untrue, the clear meaning of this murder is that submission is no longer enough to protect Egyptians from repression. Khaled Said was beaten in the same way as young people demonstrating for freedom.

Repression in Egypt no longer distinguishes between demonstrators and ordinary people, sitting in cafes and sleeping at home. The brutal murder of Khaled Said and the fact that the killers have escaped punishment plainly indicate that any police officer or any plainclothes detective can kill whomever he wants, and the apparatus of despotism will step in at once to exonerate the killer. They have ample and effective means to do so, thanks to emergency law and the fact that the judiciary is not independent of the presidency. The millions of Egyptians who wept when they saw the picture of Khaled Said with his skull smashed, his teeth knocked out and his face mangled from the beating were not weeping only out of sympathy for Khaled and his poor mother. They were weeping because they imagined that the faces of their children might tomorrow be in the place of Khaled Said's picture. The picture of Khaled Said's military service certificate, published in the newspapers alongside the picture of his mutilated body, reflects the saddening truth: Egypt is now doing to its own people what Egypt's enemies have not done.

Hundreds of thousands of innocent Egyptians have faced death at the hands of the regime: those who drowned on the ferries, those buried under collapsed buildings because of building licenses obtained corruptly and substandard building materials, those who died of disease because of rotten foodstuffs imported by big merchants, those who have killed themselves in despair at their future, and the university students who have tried to flee the country—to clean toilets in Europe—but have drowned aboard the sinking ships.  All of these were completely peaceful citizens and it never occurred to them to resist despotism. In fact they believed, just like the peasant in the story, that they could obey the regime and set up their own small, safe world for themselves and their children. But what happened to them as a result of submitting was exactly what they feared might happen if they protested and rebelled.

The wave of protests sweeping Egypt now, from one end to the other, is essentially due to the fact that life for millions of poor people, which was already hard, has become impossible. And Egyptians have realized that silence about justice will not protect them from injustice. For thirty years, Egyptians have tried the individual solution. Egyptians used to escape hell at home by going to the Gulf countries, where they often faced another kind of humiliation and subjugation. After a few years they would come back with enough money to live a comfortable life, far from the general context of Egyptian suffering. These individual solutions no longer work and Egyptians are now under siege in their own country. They have finally learned the lesson that the peasant in the story did not understand: that the consequences of courage are never worse than the consequences of   fear, and that the only way to escape an oppressive ruler is to confront him with all our strength.