Raising The Standard of Living, Expanding Access to Education, and Awakening Social Awareness in The Country Are Necessary

Translated by Inga Makary

Reviewed by Mohaned Mohammed

The revolution is the only means that enabled Egypt to get rid of its corrupt past. Meanwhile its goal is to end the exploitation of the people, achieve their national aspirations, and instill mature political awareness, which is an essential element for establishing proper democracy on sound foundations.

We are proud of our revolution because it is peaceful, not a drop of blood was ever shed. The most dangerous enemies of the people within the country are those who serve foreign rulers, terrorists who seek power through assassination, a method that nowadays has been eradicated, and reactionaries who attempt to revive exploitation.

We have freed ourselves from a corrupt king and a royal system that does not keep pace with the times, all without fighting. Our ultimate goal is to achieve genuine democracy for Egypt and a proper parliamentary government, not the parliamentary dictatorship imposed by the palace and the reactionary class on the people.

To achieve this goal, it is necessary to raise living standards, expand access to education, and awaken social awareness in the country, so that the people understand the duties imposed on them by nationalism.

It was inevitable to impose certain restrictions to prevent the enemies of the people from exploiting them and poisoning their minds. If we exercise authority, it is only to pave the way for a better life for men and women in our country. We are eager to remove these restrictions once we feel the people are safe from their enemies.

If the United States of America adopts a courageous policy and assists colonized peoples in freeing themselves from foreign control and exploitation, there will be no way for communism to infiltrate any part of the Middle East or Africa.

True independence is the greatest defense against communism. Free men are the most enthusiastic defenders of their freedom. They will not forget those who stood by their struggle for independence.

The Arab League is a genuine force. The Joint Defence and Economic Co-operation Treaty is the foundation for coordinating our defensive efforts in the Middle East.

Israel’s policy is aggressive and expansionist. It will continue its efforts to obstruct the strengthening of any state in the region.

Nevertheless, we do not want to be the initiators of conflict, for war has no place in our humanitarian policy aimed at improving the conditions of our people. Much remains to be done in Egypt. The rest of the Arab world also faces many tasks. War would deprive us of much of what we seek to achieve.

Egypt’s program for rebuilding its economy consists of three main pillars. The sole objective of this program is to raise the living standards of the people.

Aspects of this program include:

1. The Agrarian Reform Law, which frees farmers from feudalism.
2. The withdrawal of British forces; a crucial step in achieving national sovereignty.
3. The establishment of an industrial bank to support industry, as well as a Production Council to plan industrialization.

The main project in the country’s program is the construction of the High Dam, primarily aimed at increasing agricultural production in Egypt by approximately 50%. The construction work is set to begin in early 1955, and is expected to take ten years.

Before the revolution, the trade balance was unfavorable to Egypt. Both the domestic and foreign markets were largely influenced by the British. It was the revolution’s duty to free Egypt’s economy from British control. For this reason, we sent economic missions to foreign countries to create new markets for Egyptian products. The government adopted a policy of barter, exchanging machinery and tools for Egyptian cotton.

ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ

An interview with President Gamal Abdel Nasser, published in Foreign Affairs magazine, in which he discusses Egypt’s revolution and its goals

 Dated 20/12/1954