We, the Social Nationalists, aspire to a dignified life for our nation—a life ennobled by the supreme values of right, justice, fraternity, and equality, in which the human being enjoys freedom, inner tranquillity, security, and peace. Such a life, however, is not attained through rhetoric or wishful thinking, but through conscious action, sustained struggle, and deliberate sacrifice. For this reason, our movement is, by its very nature, a movement of continuous struggle. Antun Saʿadeh affirms: “Had we not been a movement of struggle, we would not have been a movement at all; for life does not exist without struggle.” [1] Whoever rejects struggle, therefore, rejects freedom and attains nothing but humiliation and servitude.

Our national movement is grounded in a moral doctrine that seeks to realize social unity, revive the nation’s renaissance, safeguard its rights, and secure its supreme interest. It aims to cleanse society of backwardness and corruption, and to remove the conditions that drive segments of our people into deviation, dependency, and submission to reactionary currents that threaten civil peace and social stability. Foremost among these conditions are the absence of national consciousness and the spread of blind religious partisanship, both of which have generated entrenched patterns of hatred, rancour, and a culture of fanaticism, extremism, narrow isolation, and social division.

Our struggle is, as Antun Saʿadeh himself described it, “a battle between a new life and an old life—a battle between elevation and degeneration.”[2] This formulation invites an unavoidable question: is not what we witness in our present reality a manifestation of degeneration itself? Are we not living in an era marked by corruption, weakness, regression, fragmentation, and decay?