Now, It Is Our Duty To Persevere

Translated by Mahmoud Al-Shafei

Reviewed by Nada Tamer 

My Brothers,

I want you to know that this Revolution is the embodiment of the nation’s aspirations and sentiments. It is founded upon the firm conviction that it serves as an expression of supreme principles, goals, ideals, and the fulfillment of the hopes of a developing people. Therefore, safeguarding this Revolution is a duty we owe to our children and grandchildren.

If we can perceive the Revolution through this lens, it will undoubtedly continue to forge ahead. For individuals are destined to pass away, but principles and goals are what endure throughout generations.

Our fathers and forefathers called for these principles, yet they remained unfulfilled. Now, it is our duty to persevere on this path until we achieve those goals, thereby paving the way, the way of grandeur, strength, and manifest victory, for the freedom and independence of this people.

We all felt that nightmare weighing heavily upon our chests. Today, we have liberated ourselves, and we must continue our quest until we eradicate that nightmare once and for all and rid ourselves of it permanently.

"Do not let these snakes slither again!" an attendee roared. To which Gamal Abdel Nasser responded with the following:

As long as you remain united and solid, no "snakes" shall ever dare to raise their heads among you. We must remain united and reassured, never lowering our guard, so that the forces of reaction can never seize us again. This Revolution is one of goals and principles; as long as these remain, no snake shall ever dare to raise its head.

"We, the workers in the companies, feel there are 'weevils' gnawing at our bones. But I  assure you, we are the arms of the Revolution; you will find us everywhere, ready to depart immediately for the Canal at your signal." A worker then stressed. Gamal Abdel Nasser responded with the following:

Such "weevils" exist everywhere. Our duty now is to root them out and to define every individual’s exact place within this state. It is utterly inconceivable for us to tell a worker, "This company belongs to you." Whoever tells you this is misleading you. We must proceed step-by-step toward achieving social justice among all citizens; the country must evolve gradually.

If we have succeeded in achieving equality, the nature of things dictates that every individual must consider the other; all must cooperate for the nation’s advancement. Only then can we increase the national income so that we may all lead a decent life.

We want workers and capital owners to march forward in unity. If we were to grant all workers' demands while neglecting the needs of the companies, the result would be an increase in unemployment; no company would survive, and your children would find no work. We cannot compel a company owner to meet all demands at once, as this would lead to the flight of capital. The supreme interest of the nation dictates that we encourage capital owners so that companies may spread throughout the country.

Be mindful that the government does not possess sufficient funds to undertake the necessary industrial renaissance alone. We must encourage anyone who wishes to invest their capital for the benefit of both the country and the workers. We shall always strive to bridge viewpoints so that every individual receives their fair share in this life. Your duty, all of you, is to unite and cooperate for the loftiness of this nation.

ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ

Speech by President Gamal Abdel Nasser to the workers' delegation of Kafr El-Dawar

On April 7, 1954