Freedoms: The Soul of the Republic

Probably the most overused concept in Lebanon, freedom is nevertheless neither a luxury nor a slogan. It is our very condition of possibility—the discreet breath that has allowed this improbable country to stand upright between sea and mountains, between languages, rites, memories, and wounds.

Without it, only a fractured territory of armed tribes remains. With it, Lebanon becomes a space—fragile, conflict-ridden, yet alive—where an attempt is still made to allow worlds that elsewhere turn their backs on one another to coexist.

Today, that freedom is under threat. Everywhere.

On one side, it is undermined by real or self-proclaimed “minorities” who, in the name of legitimate recognition, slide toward the outright negation of the other—toward cancel culture, the policing of words, works, and nuance. Emancipation then turns into a permanent tribunal, debate into an inquisition, criticism into blasphemy. On the other side, freedom is besieged by populisms, fundamentalisms, and authoritarian nationalisms bearing names such as Trump, Putin, Orbán, and their local avatars—cardboard strongmen who promise order and deliver only fear.

The malady of our time is not merely the “rise of fascisms” and other self-loving “isms” so often denounced by Pope Francis, nor simply the “decline of morals.” It is dogmatism in all its forms. It is the claim by every camp to embody Truth, to seize the center, and to expel from political humanity all that does not resemble itself. Here, in the name of God, censorship, bans, and threats prevail. There, in the name of Progress, people are erased, “deplatformed,” reduced entirely to a single misstep. In both cases, the same gesture is at work: closing the shared space, banishing doubt, forbidding fruitful disagreement. Girardian mimicry in all its splendor—and decay.

Lebanon is not immune to this plague; it is, in fact, a laboratory for it. We have known the Second Bureau, militias, Israeli and Syrian occupations, Iran’s long shadow, visible and invisible tutelage. We know all too well the security reflexes, the summons over a post, a joke, an opinion. We know what it means when a military tribunal claims the right to judge civilians, when security services raid a professor’s home as they would a criminal’s, when censors decide for everyone what may be seen, read, or heard.

And yet none of these police regimes—not even the sprawling system of Syrian-Iranian tutelage—has ever fully taken root. Because this country, by its very composition, resists tyranny. It may endure it, adapt to it temporarily, negotiate with it out of fatigue or fear; but it always ends up cracking it, bypassing it, mocking it. Lebanon’s heterogeneity—religious, cultural, social—never allows itself to be fully enclosed within a single apparatus of domination. This is our curse, but also our chance.

Contrary to the recurring fantasy of popular discourse—“we need an Atatürk or a Nasser to impose secularism,” “an MBS to fight corruption,” “an Assad to crush Islamism,” “a Sharaa to discipline minorities,” “a Bachir to secure a Christian reconquest,” “a general to put everyone in line”—Lebanon will never be saved by a strongman. Past experience has shown what our “strong presidents” and charismatic leaders produce: suspension of the Constitution, abolition of accountability, personality cults, and then total collapse—moral, institutional, urban.

Lebanon’s problem is not the absence of leaders. It is the absence of citizens.

For too long, we have confused political legitimacy with the cult of the za‘im, the sect, the flag. To borrow Weber’s terms, we have remained stuck between the traditional legitimacy of tribes and communities, and the charismatic legitimacy of “saviors”—pseudo-saints, generals, or warlords. We never completed the transition toward the only legitimacy that emancipates: rational-legal legitimacy, that of the state, the law, institutions, and shared responsibility.

Freedom, however, is not an extra layer added once order has been restored. It is the starting point. It is ontological: it constitutes the person prior to any affiliation. This is what Spinoza expressed through the desire to persevere in one’s being; what Michel Chiha affirmed when he made the person and property the pillars of a Lebanon open to the world; what Benedict XVI recalled in Baabda when he insisted that human dignity presupposes free choices, “not under the effect of purely external constraint.” It is what Mohammad Mahdi Chamseddine, Samir Kassir, Gebran Tuéni, Ghassan Tuéni, Hani Fahs, Samir Frangié, Nasrallah Sfeir, Hassan Rifa‘i, and so many others repeated daily until their last breath. Without this primary freedom, there is no citizenship, no responsibility, no justice—only pack reflexes, primitive hordes, dogs and wolves.

This is why censorship in Lebanon is more than an abuse: it is a betrayal of our vocation. Every time a group vetoes a concert, a film, a play, an article; every time a church, a party, or a militia brandishes the threat of the street to bend the state; every time an intelligence service summons a citizen over a word, a drawing, a sarcastic remark—another piece of the Lebanese soul is amputated. Fear is cultivated, self-censorship is produced, violence is prepared. Little by little, the very possibility of becoming a people of citizens is destroyed. The soul, the essential singularity of this country, is eroded.

The choice before us, a century after the birth of Greater Lebanon, is simple, brutal, and irreducible: either we continue to dream of a Leviathan that will settle our disputes at the price of our freedoms, or we finally accept the risk of democracy. That risk is not anarchy. It is the demanding learning process of pluralism, separation of powers, oversight of security apparatuses, and the imposition of limits on every form of the sacred—religious or identitarian—whenever it seeks to become a censor. It is respect for the Constitution and the norms of jus cogens that frame it.

Once again, Lebanon does not need a new enlightened despot. It needs men and women of state willing to burn themselves out in service rather than exploit office; judges who protect freedom as a norm, not as a tolerated exception; armed forces that see themselves as the last bastion of the Constitution, not as the armed wing of a regime or a clan. Above all, it needs citizens freed from voluntary servitude—refusing to delegate their thinking to a leader, a sect, or a foreign power. This requires overcoming fear of the other and trusting one another to build a shared future founded on a culture of connection. Memory and the past matter, but they cannot remain frozen; they move forward, and their role is to evolve, not to regress.

In a world where walls are rising again, where algorithms lock each individual into a mental enclosure, where extremes feed off one another until moderates are crushed, Lebanon could still offer something other than ruins. It could become once more what it should never have ceased to be: a space for experimenting with freedom, a laboratory of coexistence, a risky wager on humanity’s capacity to extend a hand without denying itself. This is not a utopia—it is a daily act of will and life.

But this wager will not be won through incantation. It requires concrete choices: abolishing prior censorship; removing all civilian cases from military courts; placing security services under genuine civilian oversight; educating, from school onward, in pluralism, doubt, and responsibility; protecting freedom of expression to the point of scandal—especially when it unsettles our religious, political, or moral certainties. Killing within ourselves servility and the cult of the leader. No one is perfect. No one is above criticism. Everyone is fallible, from cassock to camouflage.

Freedom is not an intellectual whim. It is our last frontier before chaos.

If Lebanon renounces what makes it singular—this impossible blend of pluralism and freedom—it will have nothing left to oppose the empires surrounding it or the dogmas inhabiting it. It will become just another parcel on the map of domination: trapped in the past like mosquitoes frozen in Jurassic amber, or the inhabitants petrified in the lava of Pompeii—remnants of history, dead yet still tangible, before dust eventually carries them away.

Taking freedom seriously again means restoring a soul to the Republic—and perhaps giving our shared history a chance.

That, ultimately, is our salvation—our true redemption.