What started as an act of solidarity with their protesting neighbors in Tunisia has now morphed into an all-out revolt against the government in Egypt.

The historic events began on Jan. 25 when across Egypt a “Day of Anger” was planned to coincide with National Police Day. A national holiday mandated in 2009, it has roots in the Egyptian fight against colonialism when local police officers refused British Army demands to disarm. The ensuing stand-off left 50 police officers dead and was a widely documented event in the fight for independence from de facto British rule.

Fast forward to the present where President Hosni Mubarak has turned the revolutionary day into a forced day of honor to the guardians of his police state. In power since the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981, Mubarak has ruthlessly terrified the Egyptian populace into compliance for three decades.

Seen as a symbol of stability in the West, Mubarak has built his one-party state on a foundation of fear (against the ever exaggerated threats from Islamist political group, the Muslim Brotherhood) and boatloads of cash from the American government.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, the U.S. government has given the Egyptian state $1.3 billion in military aid every year since 1979. Including smaller amounts towards “economic assistance,” which inevitably ends up going to Mubarak-loyal companies, Egypt has been on the total receiving end of more than $50 billion from American taxpayers.

While Egypt has been home to protests against the government before, none have been this large and pervasive across all walks of life: From the 40 percent of Egypt’s population of 80 million that subsist on $2 a day, to the foreign-educated middle class. Even the religious divide between Christians (which make up 10 percent of the population) and Muslims has apparently been bridged with chants of “Muslameen Mesiheen Kolina Masreen” which means “Muslims Christians We Are All Egyptians,” routinely rising up from the protest crowds.

And despite the reasons for protesting varying from high food prices and unemployment to political corruption and a lack of civil liberties, all protestors agree on one thing: President Hosni Mubarak must go.

With tens of thousands of protestors turning into hundreds of thousands across the country, the government shut down all conventional Internet service providers and blocked cell phone signals on Jan. 28.

While many foreign observers have been more than eager to attribute some, if not all, of the protest’s strength to Facebook and Twitter, most of the protest planning has been spontaneous and by word of mouth.

Facebook and Twitter have been utilized by some tech-savvy youth, but mostly as a means of getting information out of the country and not as an organizational tool within.

President Mubarak, in a display of isolation from his own people, has refused to step down from power and continues to unleash a variety of carrot and stick methods to get the protestors to go home.

First, it was Mubarak’s usual method of sending out the police to bash in some heads.

This time, however, the protests are so large and the issues are so grave, the protestors have been able to withstand police attacks.

Al Jazeera has even noted several policemen taking off their uniforms and crossing over to join the protestors.

Mubarak then called in the army, but reminiscent of scenes from the fall of the Soviet Union, the protestors happily greeted the soldiers who were all too reluctant to fire on their own people.

Then, on Jan. 29 came the firing of Mubarak’s cabinet, their replacement by military figures, and the appointment of Egypt’s intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, as vice president.

These token gestures were taken exactly as such by the protestors and can be best summed up by one of the protest signs: “I will go home when Mubarak goes home.”

The latest Mubarak tactic, according to numerous locals via Twitter, is to sow chaos through theft and vandalism to make the citizens support their government again.

The prisons have released all their prisoners, and the police now roam the city in plain clothes, looting homes and destroying priceless antiquities in the public museums.

Though the army has not showed any violence towards the protestors yet, the protestors’ enthusiasm for them has waned as jets now strafe the protestors to intimidate them.

Despite the arrival of Mohamed ElBaradei (former Director general of the United Nation’s International Atomic Energy Agency) to lend his support to the protests, the U.S. government refuses to endorse the well-known moderate as a transition figure and repudiate the dictator Mubarak. If the U.S. is to have any shred of legitimacy left, it should cut all foreign aid to Egypt and stop supporting Mubarak.