Hezbollah, What Have You Done to Your Brothers?

Hezbollah, you probably had something to prove! By launching a "salvo of missiles and a swarm of drones" towards Israel in the early hours of Monday, March 2, you certainly had something in mind. To this day, the consequences are incalculable: more than seven hundred dead, ruthless eradication of entire neighborhoods, nearly nine hundred thousand displaced from their homes, including more than 150,000 who found refuge only in the precariousness and promiscuity of collective shelters!

Why didn't you keep a low profile?

You could not have shown such immaturity when you knew that the Hebrew state's retaliation would be disproportionate. In your capacity as a "self-proclaimed resistance movement," you were not big enough to measure yourself against the IDF, especially since you had been decapitated on September 17 by the "pagers." What then was the purpose of your act of provocation? Your pathetic fireworks could not reverse the course of the situation, especially since the missiles fired from Iran had proven ineffective and insufficient and had provided proof of the vulnerability of a clerical regime on the ropes.

It will be alleged that your decision of March 2, a date to remember, was not yours and that it was dictated more by Iranian offices than by strictly Lebanese interests. It will also be argued that you could not stand idly by when the Supreme Leader was shot down and Iran was daily torn apart with impunity. Let us therefore admit your subjection to the big brothers of Qom, Isfahan, and Tehran and confess, in passing, that it does not honor a purportedly Lebanese "resistance."

The useless sacrifice and the victorious defeat

Hezbollah, you have, in short, "entered the furnace" and you have dragged your people into it, while the ayatollahs' regime had already lost its splendor and was already living on borrowed time.

It was said that your vengeful action was pure madness, a headlong rush, and above all, suicide. But was it not rather a sterile sacrifice?

You could not absorb the loss of the Supreme Leader without shedding blood. You would have seemed ungrateful, the Iranian regime having invested so much in your structuring and military training. Lacking an adequate lethal arsenal and unable to cause casualties (or so few) in Israel, you would cause them in your own community. Insane and criminal proof of fratellanza, this brotherhood of arms that governs suspicious causes!

An anthropologist had already warned us against useless sacrifice which can easily take the form of self-immolation (1). Suicidal, your armed intervention certainly protected your "fantasized communal identity," but at the expense of the real survival of your confessional group. Look closely at the conditions in which the displaced people from the South and Dahiyé survive, scattered as they are throughout the national territory. Consider well what you have done to them! Yet, despite their daily miseries, their attachment to you is unshakeable and unwavering (2). This is because they operate in an eschatological domain, that of "victorious defeat." And as an illustration, the spectacle of your affiliates who, in denial of their reality, maintain that you are triumphant while you are in full rout.

Hezbollah, you offered the Shiite social body to a media lynching to respond "always ready" to your mentors and benefactors from the Iranian highlands. Would you, by a reversal of priorities, have made your own people the scapegoat? This political reason's bewilderment can only be explained as the mirror of an archaic mentality, or at least the expression of a hypnotic state. And the rest is of the same ilk!

Faced with this distortion of common sense, what to say except: "So much misery for so little glory"!

1-Paul Dumouchel, The Useless Sacrifice. Essay on Political Violence, Paris, Flammarion, 2001.

2- Except perhaps when they express themselves stealthily.