as fact or morally judged right or wrong, regardless of where the personal political preferences of supposedly professional analysts lie. And these, if they exist must be explicitly acknowledged. A lone protester stands in front of members of the military during clashes in Cairo, December 2011. Demotix/Jeffrey Bright . All rights reserved. Some - for example the Revolutionary Socialists , see SCAF, (alongside the Muslim Brothers and many other formally organised political parties), as huge obstacles to achieving the main objective of the revolution at this stage, which is to make it permanent until the consciousness of each Egyptian is transformed forever away from acquiescence to any form of exploitative authoritarianism. This is a view with which as an Egyptian I personally sympathise, but which I would not strive to promote surreptitiously as an analyst. For others, SCAF is nothing but the continuation of the same corrupt regime that they wish to see destroyed, and it is actively working behind the scenes to protect Mubarak, his family and other former regime members from having to pay for the crimes they committed against the Egyptian people. More abstractly, many of the young people who flocked to Tahrir and who have now joined the ranks of revolutionaries, see SCAF, and its head, Hussein Tantawy, together with Mubarak, as representatives of that same cruel, self-contradictory father figure depicted so masterfully in Naguib Mahfouz's novels, and against which they have finally mastered the courage to revolt. All this, as true as it might be,