More than twenty years ago, Egypt decided to abandon the war option and pursue the path to peace. Although its decision was met at the time with a great deal of hostility from its erstwhile comrades-in-arms, peace has since become the declared strategic option of all the front-line Arab states. And yet, two decades after Egypt officially adopted the peace line, a culture of war or, at best, of a temporary truce, continues to dominate the thinking of certain circles. Meanwhile, the information media and cultural organs of the state, which are supposed to serve official state policy, are dragging their feet when it comes to actively promoting a culture of peace. This has allowed our official media to be used in the recent period as a forum for angry voices talking of enmity to the United States and of the Arab-Israeli conflict in terms clearly inspired by a culture of war and designed to fan the flames of public sentiment.

The effects of allowing this trend to grow unchecked will be ruinous for Egypt and condemn it to a bleak and desolate future. The best description I read of the phenomenon was an article by Dr. Salah Eid published in Al-Akhbar on 25 October 1999 under the title, Is There Hope? In the article, the writer warns, in a sober and clear-eyed manner, of what he calls “a growing cultural trend that is inviting us openly to pursue the path of war, revenge and conflict, and that uses the mass media, whether audio, visual or printed, to incite the feelings of Egyptians and push them to direct their efforts at revenge and conflict once again.”

That this trend should manifest itself in a number of opposition papers does not worry me unduly. After all, it is normal in a wide society like ours to find different viewpoints, including some marked by excess and others caught in a time warp that is completely out of touch with the realities of the age. The members of the latter group are calling for a return to the past, some to a recent past that dates back only forty years, others to a remote past going back fourteen centuries. What does worry me, as it does Dr. Eid, is that a trend so at odds with what has been the basic orientation of the state for the last two decades should be given free rein in the official state media.

In providing a forum for the advocates of a return to Egypt’s pre-peace line, the mass media have lost sight of the fact that the choice of material they disseminate should be determined to a very great extent by the cultural climate in which they operate. Thus the material suitable for a culture of peace is not suitable for a culture of war and vice versa. The state-owned media have a duty to promote and expand a peace culture, in the realization that a war culture or even, to a lesser extent, a truce culture, will divert our energies from what should be our main target at this juncture: building up a strong society capable of facing external challenges effectively by using the same tools as those used by advanced, successful societies, not the tools of a Bedouin mentality used by those addicted to failure who want us to remain locked for centuries in what Amin El-Mahdi, in his profound book on the Arab-Israeli conflict, calls “a duality of war and defeat.”

It is certainly more difficult to focus our energies on building up a culture of peace in harmony with the spirit of the age and capable of coping with external challenges in an effective and constructive manner than it is to allow ourselves to be passively sucked into the slipstream of a culture of war. A culture of peace requires planning and concerted scientific and cultural efforts, while a war culture requires little more than strong vocal cords and the ability to use them in spouting big talk. Comparing the two is like comparing the success story of Ahmed Zeweil (and of other Egyptians who have made their mark on the international scene) with the story of the loud voices that dominated our airwaves in the recent past. There is no doubt that it is easier to rant and rave, to cast ourselves as victims of a vast conspiracy, than to play by the rules of a civilized game compatible with the requirements of the age, that is, one in which scientific planning and educational curricula are geared towards promoting a culture of peace.

A state which in its wisdom chose and remains committed to peace as a strategic option would serve society best by calling its wisdom into play once again and firmly upholding the cause of a culture of peace. To begin with, it must not allow the advocates of hate to spew their poison through its mass media in open contradiction with the line it adopted when it made peace its strategic option and abandoned the culture of war. We must recognize here that nations, like individuals, go through different stages of development. When an adult displays the behavioral patterns of a child, whose effervescent nature, limited knowledge, immature thinking and paucity of culture and experience sometimes leads it to behave rashly and without weighing the consequences of its acts, he is accused of arrested development. So too with nations: a mature nation cannot continue to act against its own best interests by allowing a culture of war to take hold.

The period during which we allowed ourselves to be manipulated by bombastic slogans has had a disastrous effect on the economic, political and cultural life of the country, and opened the door to sterile schools of thought holding themselves up as “the solution” to our myriad problems. Every effort must be made to show up the huge difference between the “rhetorical” achievements of the ’sixties and the real achievements today, to underscore the fact that we managed to build up the country’s infrastructure and successfully implement a policy of structural economic reform by turning our backs on a culture of war that required us to direct all our resources towards a futile undertaking at the expense of social and economic progress. The Egyptian people should be reminded that while they were held hostage by the emotional rhetoric of the culture of war, political life was devoid of freedom and democracy, economic life was in ruins and the social climate allowed the forces of darkness to flourish and drag us further away from stability and prosperity. 

The price of allowing the dichotomy we are now living to continue will be exorbitant. On the one hand, there is the official line of the state, which is peace, with all this entails in the way of setting in place the mechanisms that can foster and nurture a culture of peace, much as France and Germany succeeded in doing after 1945; on the other, there is a trend that is actively fostering a culture of war through the state-owned media. Like a horse being pulled in two directions at the same time, the Egyptian people have no clear idea where they are heading. While anyone has the right to believe in a culture of war, exactly as anyone has the right to believe in a culture of peace, no one has the right to defend the present disparity between the official line of the state, which makes peace a strategic option, and a media blitz, conducted through institutions belonging to that very same state, that is promoting a culture of war.

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