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In that time, so much has happened to the country and its people. Egypt had its brief moment of democracy, which was . And, as if to consign that period firmly to the past, both Egypt's first democratically elected president  and the tyrant he replaced are now dead.

The reality is, that Egypt finds itself locked into endless tyranny - the same tyranny that Mubarak represented, yet under Sisi the methods and scope are different.

What was once brutal authoritarianism under Mubarak has been transformed into even more brutal  under Sisi. Never in modern Egyptian history has a regime done more to control the public and private life of citizens, with every sphere - cultural, political and civil - being ruthlessly policed and reshaped towards complete subservience to the state. 

It's difficult to write a commemoration of January 25 in the face of an Egypt where  have been and are being murdered, tortured, imprisoned, disappeared, exiled and executed. What it really deserves, is a lamentation.

If the mass and constant repression of dissent is the cruel terroristic methodology of Sisi's counterrevolution, it's in  like Egypt's "new capital city" that you find the rotten fruits of such brutal labour. 

Amid  ravaged by Covid-19, the  of Egypt's inability to mitigate the effects of Ethiopia's Grand Renaissance Dam,  and the , a cityscape designed for and by the super-rich minority is what Sisi offers up as the future. 

Never in modern Egyptian history has a regime done more to control the public and private life of citizens

What better description than "pharaonic" could be attributed to the opulent grandiosity of this endeavour?

The capital city project is the antithesis of the spirit of January 25, which was, at its very heart, a demand for basic egalitarianism. A demand for the breaking up of Egypt's tyrannical kleptocracy, with power, wealth and opportunity being taken back by Egyptians.

This project is a monument to the bloodstained triumph of the tyrannical kleptocracy. It's the ultimate reward to Egypt's ruling classes for withstanding the tidal wave of January 25 which briefly . 

While the children of Egypt's poor are forced into , the children of the rich are being rewarded with a  four times the size of Disneyland. 

In the doomed megalopolis of Cairo, poor people have had their "temporary homes" , making thousands homeless and adding to the existing  official and unofficial "homeless" population. Meanwhile, the regime  in Egypt's "new capital" for its ultra-rich devotees.

It will be a massive enclave foreign to most Egyptians - a world of shopping malls, multiplexes, swimming pools and five star hotels. This is the contribution to civilisation the Sisi regime will leave behind - monuments of extreme injustice, stripped of dynastic romanticism and infused with the most crude materialism.

Cairo will be all but abandoned, with its sprawling population providing cheap labour for the new city, while its already depleted water supply will be siphoned off. 

This is the ultimate triumph of the parasites over their host. 

It would be easy to make predictions about an inevitable backlash to all this, but the totalitarian fortress that Sisi has built isolates different struggles and consigns dissenters to terrifying fates. 

Instead, the opportunity for change might lie in sources external to Egypt. 

Though it doesn't seem that long ago that Egyptians, and many around the world were looking at the defiant gathered masses in Tahrir as a beacon of hope in a world weighed down by endless war and economic depression, in political terms it has been like a lifetime. 

Though Barack Obama was  or in , Donald Trump didn't even know or care they existed. Under Trump's rule, Sisi, his "", could expect not even the lip service Obama paid to his human rights abuses. Europe, which managed avoid the righteous scrutiny Trump faced, exploited Trump's pro-Sisi effervescence and literally made a killing by  to the dictator, as well as  with him.

The world, for the most part, couldn't wait to forget January 25, and either helped or turned a blind eye to the Sisi regime as it drowned the revolution in a sea of blood.  Trump was simply the American archetype of this global spirit of counterrevolution. 

A cityscape designed for and by the super-rich minority is what Sisi offers up as the future

But even Trump has fallen. The administration of Joe Biden and vice president Kamala Harris are allegedly putting democracy  of their foreign policy. 

With  and his brutal exploits, and with an in the Democratic Party of the need to hold Sisi to account as a recipient of billions of dollars of US aid, Sisi might find himself navigating diplomatically rocky terrain. 

On the contrary, it could push Sisi deeper into the scope of his more  Russia, or China which has invested in the new capital city. 

But it seems unlikely that either Beijing or Moscow could offer Egypt the same as what the US gives them, while Sisi's counterrevolutionary overindulgences have left the country geopolitically weak.

If the US begins to hold Sisi to account, Europe might be forced to follow to suit and Sisi's solid body of allies could suddenly crumble. The tyrant might be forced into reforms he doesn't want to make, and Egypt's bruised and beaten dissenters could find themselves newly galvanised. 

This, for now, remains conjecture. Counterrevolution always contains the death of hope, and history shows us that it is extremely difficult to resurrect such hope. Sisi has, like never before, made basic survival the main aim of Egyptians - January 25 is a distant memory within a daily reality of the most brutal struggles.

Sam Hamad is a writer and History Phd student at the University of Glasgow focusing on totalitarian ideologies.

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