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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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