On the contrary, that’s exactly what they were. They replaced a single guillotine in Paris with twenty one guillotines, going six days a week. How are we going to judge them? By what they did, or by some after the fact white-washing?

In some ways, the french Revolution has perverted all continental European thinking. It has been declared a “good thing” and now it can be used to justify any kind of state terrorism as long as it can be portrayed as fighting the “counter-revolution”.

The leaders of the French Revolution “weren’t butchers”; they merely killed a half million people. Lenin “made mistakes”; among them restoring the death penalty the liberal democrats had abolished.

“Do you seen what you did here, Vladimir? You have restored the death penalty.” “Oops, my bad.”

What on Earth is it with Europeans? Morsi just granted himself pretty much absolute power, and they try to spin it with babble about the Press “not being kind”.

Pardon me, but is it the job of the Press to be kind? Is the UK Press kind to Cameron? Would you find a way to defend Cameron if he granted himself absolute power by decree?

It is very easy for a liberal revolutionary to become an authoritarian dictator if he can’t part with power/control or if the country is seen as not soon matching the leader’s ideals. The first case can be seen as tyrannical while the second could be considered benign, but both are ineffective in the long run because instead of building culture and institutions they become cults of the individual.

The problem for the left is that their members are mostly of the freedom type, which means they will mobilize at intervals, but will want to get back to their own lives soon. The right has the advantage that their members want to control other people’s lives, so they can in a sense be permanently mobilized.

Morsi´s actions will not be opposed by the West, because in a way they resemble what the West has also been forced to go through in its own transitions. The West has also seen how democracy/liberalism in Turkey in the end brought Islamists to power no matter what obstacles were put on the way.

It is up to the Egyptians to decide if they want a liberal democratic republic based on constitutionalism or if they want to be another “Islamic” republic based on populist elections, murky rule of law and major limitations of freedom of conscience and expression.

Constitutions in the end matter less than what is taught in schools and what is seen on television. The free flow of information and the ability to retake protests is what really matters.