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Happy Nausea. But Nasser's one-man rule has not brought unmitigated bliss to Egypt. The banks and insurance companies were nationalized, and their owners paid off partly in bonds that may not be redeemed for years to come. Contractors whose earnings reach $69,000 a year are taken over, or forced to accept joint participation by the government. Wiped out are the great landowners; farm holdings are now limited to 100 acres per family. This form of socialism is benign enough. It leaves most of the nation's commerce in private hands and does not affect the overwhelming number of small farmers, who own far less than 100 acres.
The press was nationalized in 1960, and its editors are picked by the regime; they, of course, do not criticize Nasser's policies. Political activity in the usual sense is banned because, as Nasser puts it, "if I had three political parties, one would be run by the rich, one by the Soviets, and one by the U.S." The only party permitted by law is the official Arab
Socialist Union, which is supposed to provide democracy by its representation in every village, factory and urban district. There, leaders are chosen to pass local views along to provincial and national committees.
Nasser's revolution has never been particularly totalitarian, but there was a nasty period in late 1961, when Syria broke away from Egypt. Hundreds of people, including army officers, were arrested. Foreign diplomats were shadowed by secret police. But since then, the atmosphere of fear has largely vanished. General Mohammed Naguib. the 1952 revolution's first leader, who served for two years as a front for Nasser and was then deposed, still lives quietly in a Cairo villa near the Nile and is permitted to move fairly freely about the city. Old Nahas Pasha and other former Wafdist enemies of the new regime remain in their homes, which, in most cases, they have been allowed to keep.
Nasser's government has moved impressively into the fields of education and health. Primary schools were erected and staffed at a rate of two every three days. Education is free, and Egypt's universities are crammed with 126,000 students, including 20,000 from other Arab lands. Improved hygiene and free clinics have only increased the population pressure: the new arable land to be provided by the Aswan Dam will be barely enough to feed the estimated 55 million population in 20 years. In short, at tremendous cost, Egypt will not have gone forward but merely stood still. Faced with this challenge, Nasser has begun a nationwide birth control campaign. Oral contraceptives are being sold below cost (a month's supply for 46¢), and Egyptian women are said to relish the pills because they induce the same feeling of nausea experienced in pregnancy.
The pressure of Egypt's millions, in fact, is one of the things that makes other Arab states wary of being too closely embraced by Nasser. Egypt, like China, is always threatening to spill over its borders into the relatively empty land of its neighbors. Individualistic Arabs, as well, are nervously concerned about disappearing into the straitjacket of Nasser's one-man rule.