The Endless Road

The comedian known as Egypt's Bob Hope, Abdel Moneim Ibrahim, danced around the stage of a Cairo theater last week and cried: "I'm going to be nationalized! I'm going to be nationalized!" The audience roared, but immediately after the performance the unamused police arrested the comic. The incident illustrates the intensity of Gamal Abdel Nasser's drive to socialize Egypt, as well as the high political cost his people are paying for it.

Since last summer, Nasser has turned Egypt into perhaps the most thoroughly nationalized state outside the Communist bloc. In a series of sweeping decrees, he has taken over almost all major or middle-sized factories, stores, virtually outlawed annual earnings higher than $15,000, limited landowners to a scant 100 acres. Warned Nasser: "Socialism is an endless road, and nobody knows how far it will be necessary to travel along it." On that endless road last week, Dictator Nasser planted some new, ominous signposts pointing toward even tighter one-man rule.

Pyramids & Purges. Recalling the Syrian defection from the United Arab Republic, which opened Nasser's eyes to the number of "reactionary elements" surviving at home, he dissolved the National Assembly and his National Union Party, announced a complicated triple pyramid of electoral arrangements in advance of "free" elections, to be held perhaps next year. At the peak of the pyramid will be a single list of carefully screened candidates who "believe passionately" in Nasser's brand of socialism.

At the same time, Nasser arrested leading army officers, including some close to U.A.R. commander in chief, Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer, an old friend considered responsible for giving Nasser bad advice during the Syrian fiasco. The army shake-up so far has brought imprisonment or house arrest to an estimated 400 officers, many of whom have been sent to El Dakhla. a sand-rimmed Alcatraz in the desert wastes of the upper Nile. There they are joined by growing numbers of civilians, imprisoned for anti-Nasser sympathies. Government spies are everywhere. One Mme. Badrawi spent half an hour at Cairo's swank Automobile Club denouncing Nasser and provoking other society matrons to be equally frank. As she was about to leave, Madame tripped--and from under her mink stole dropped a midget tape recorder.

Prisons & Cadillacs. Tough measures, argue Nasser's defenders, are necessary to keep the socialist reforms from being wrecked by the rich, the lazy, the discontented. Certainly, compared to the Egypt of Novelist Lawrence (The Alexandria Quartet) Durrell, who described "a human misery of such proportions that one's human feelings overflowed into disgust and terror," Nasser's Egypt is a vastly improved place. Largely gone from the cities are the droves of diseased beggars. In the countryside a few hundred thousand fellahin are farming their own land for the first time since the Pharaohs. Cairo's luxury hotels, once playgrounds of wealthy Egyptian society, now accommodate mainly cruising tourists, and the gaudy belly-dancing nightclubs have been toned down by the sober military regime.

The question remains whether Nasser can reform Egypt's vast, ineffectual and torpid civil service (the "big-bottomed, doe-eyed coffee slurpers," as British Correspondent Desmond Stewart describes them) to the point where his economic plans will become reality. It is relatively easy to suppress the rich, but it will prove infinitely harder to build up Egypt's moribund economy, and in effect create a viable middle class to replace the deadly extremes of rich and poor. Meanwhile, Nasser simply continues to harass the wealthy. By last week about 500 of them were in Cairo jails after having their property seized. Some of them still managed to submit to the treatment in style.

In the fashionable suburb of Maadi, Fuad Serag el Din Pasha, who may be worth as much as $30 million, donned his finest silk suit, anchored his necktie with a diamond stickpin, lit up a rich Havana cigar while the cops waited patiently. Then pasha and police entered the quarry's air-conditioned Cadillac, and drove off to Cairo's Citadel prison.

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