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Wind of Discontent. The fellahin have begun to stir. Recently, an unheard-of incident shook the country: a band of laborers beat up a graft-taking overseer on a pasha's estate, then attacked the pasha's son, set fire to his house and had to be subdued with a machine gun. Some fellahin have grown bold enough to try to seize land from the pashas. When the government recently proposed to raise bread prices, there was such an outcry from the poor that the plan was hastily dropped. The government politicians who until recently were always glad to whip up an anti-British riot to draw the people's attention away from their misery, now have clamped down on such demonstrations: they are afraid that the rioters might forget about the British and turn against the government.
The situation is ready-made for 1) the Moslem Brotherhood, which is busily organizing recruits toward the day when it can unleash terror, and 2) the Communists.
There is no visible Red leadership (Communism is outlawed), but the party is split into efficiently run cells. Membership, especially among students, is growing. New Communist-front papers are gaining circulation fast; they operate carefully within the press laws. The politicians actually help the Communists by denouncing any advocate of reform as a Communist. Says a Western diplomat: "Up to the turn of the year we were reporting regularly—and we keep very close watch on this—that there was nothing like a Communist Party in Egypt. But this conclusion of six months ago is definitely not true today. Communism started raising its head, as near as we can place it, toward the end of February or the early part of March. Then Communist-front papers started to appear. Newsprint costs $364 a ton out here. The papers carried no ads. How could they exist? Obviously by subsidies. Whom were they subsidized by? That takes no imagination whatsoever.
"The Communists are playing an extremely clever line. They are anti-monarchy, antigovernment, anti-British, anti-American, anti-everything. They are taking the vast, creeping discontent in this country and surely binding it into a movement."
Forms Without Content. From the day the British occupied Egypt in 1882, the ancient land began to get its first experience of modern government. In the 64 years they stayed, the invaders did a brilliant administrative job: they balanced the budget, reformed the government bureaus, reorganized the army. But they did little to redress Egypt's social and industrial backwardness. By 1922, when Britain declared Egypt independent, the land had developed the forms of democratic government, but not the content. Egypt today has a constitution, a parliament, elections, a budget and an income tax. But the constitution is rarely observed, the parliament represents only the pasha class, elections are invariably rigged, the budget is hopelessly padded with graft, and income taxes are hardly ever paid.