...an Iranian colony situated on the eastern Mediterranean, conveniently adjacent to Israel. Formerly inhabited by hardy Phoenecian traders, its official language is now Arabic, with the usual unpleasant side effects. The Leb civil war, between 1975 and 1990, lasted a little over 145 years and produced 120,000 fatalities. The average length of a ceasefire was measured in seconds. The Lebs maintain a precarious sectarian balance among Shiites, Sunnis, and about a dozeen flavors of Christians. It is the home of Hezbollah, which periodically starts a war with the Zionist Entity, gets Beirut pounded to rubble, and then declares victory and has a parade. The Lebs have the curious habit of periodically murdering their heads of state or prime ministers...? What are the rewards that the ruling clique hopes to reap after the country becomes a pile of sand? Does the presidency of the republic deserve this price?
Does anyone care about the pain and anguish of those who cannot find a free bed in a hospital or medicine in a pharmacy? Does the increasing suicide rate of desperate young people- who can’t immigrate out of the country after having their future stolen from them- mean anything to those with a rigid sectarian mindset? Will the resistance’s weapons, which killed the people of Madaya, Yabroud, and al-Qusayr, console the mothers who can’t transfer money to their children living in limbo abroad because the banks are preventing her from doing so? What is the purpose of all this? Rather what are the politicians, bankers, and blood merchants hoping to gain from the destruction of this miserable country? Indeed, will Lebanon’s ruins and ashes allow for their greedy and depraved deals?
The current dark state of affairs could lead us to forget that we are not mere hostages of small politicians, and nor are we cards to be played in an insane region; it leaves us forgetting that before anything else, we are human beings who have struggled to retrieve our dignity from our occupiers and their clients for a long time. This is what stands between us and death. Thus, it is urgent that we document the crimes that the clique clinging to power is committing against the Lebanese, just as writers and researchers have documented the horrors of the Nakba and the Holocaust. Otherwise, we would leave room for forgers, opportunists and parasites to shape them.
While the popular movement was forcefully put down through sectarian mobs, silencers and bags filled with Ammonium Nitrate that destroyed Beirut, this doesn’t mean that shaping memories and history should be vacated in favor of the narrative of the alliance clinging to power and their lies and fabrications. From the depth of our graves and the gutters of our poverty, with our empty stomachs, we must not forget the names and faces of the members of this repulsive, criminal alliance. They caused the afflictions that people of this country do not deserve, leaving them living under conditions that make the most
We must memorize their lines, dogmatism and their manipulation of simple people’s feelings, inciting them to hate, kill and steal, with rhetoric adorned with claims of virtue, reform and purity. We hope that the day we denounce their arrogance and depravity to their faces is not far off; we will remind them of how they misled their citizens and crushed them under the weight of corruption, fear and poverty.
These generations might not be lucky enough to see the day. It seems that there is no escaping the formulation of the story of the darkest of days that had been brought upon the country by belligerent mobs and mercenaries to whom the country unfortunately submitted to, as the majority preferred the cave to the breeze of freedom. It is the story of a crime whose victims haplessly and silently watch themselves being led to their demise after their hands and feet were made heavy with chains of hate and fear. This story will be the Lebanese of the present’s contribution to the history of human savagery and man’s viciousness toward his fellow man.