The Hezb's Hegemony Through Censorship and Sanctions

When I recalled the substance of George Orwell's 1984 and Albert Camus's The Stranger, I sensed a certain thread connecting their respective descriptions of the instrument of control — or rather the general framework of domination — and what has been unfolding in Lebanon, particularly in recent years, since power consolidated itself in Hezbollah's hands and under its command.

There is a strange convergence between the worlds of Orwell and Camus, despite their apparent differences: the world of external oppression in Orwell, and the world of absurdity and existential detachment in Camus.

In Orwell, the individual is subject to absolute external surveillance. Big Brother does not merely monitor behaviour; he attempts to seize control of consciousness itself. The objective is not simply compliance, but the erasure of any possibility of internal dissent. Freedom is threatened from without, and the individual — Winston — seeks to reclaim his own selfhood through rebellion.

In Camus, the situation is almost reversed. No visible totalitarian authority watches over the hero Meursault. The problem is not external surveillance but inner emptiness. Meursault does not “rebel” because he simply sees nothing worth opposing. And yet society will not tolerate this neutrality: it puts him on trial not only for his crime, but for his failure of emotional conformity, for not having wept at his mother's funeral.

In 1984, society imposes total surveillance and the individual attempts to escape it in order to recover his humanity. In The Stranger, the individual does not spontaneously submit to established norms, and society exercises a retroactive surveillance over him to bring him back to “proper behaviour”.

In other words, Orwell describes a society that pre-empts dissent, while Camus describes a society that punishes it after it has appeared. Oppression in Orwell is political and institutional; in Camus, it is moral and social.

In Orwell's world, the individual cannot “stray” from the norm, because surveillance is both pre-emptive and total. And if he does stray — as Winston does — he will be entirely reformatted, compelled to love the very power that crushes him. This “restoration” is all the more terrifying in that it does not consist of a return to ordinary behaviour, but of a re-creation of the human being from within.

In both works, society cannot bear any deviation from the “model”, and so it exercises a surveillance whose ultimate aim is to return the individual to the norm, either through coercive persuasion — Camus — or through complete reprogramming — Orwell.

In Camus, the norm is moral and social, and what is demanded is that one feel as one should. In Orwell, the norm is political and ideological, and what is demanded is that one think as one should. Both worlds articulate something deeply unsettling: the problem lies not only in behaviour, but in the fact that society aspires to unify the human interior itself — feelings or thoughts. Meursault is condemned because he does not feel as he should; Winston is broken because he does not think as he should.

If we now replace the word “society” with “Hezbollah”, do we not discover that this party has accomplished the form of oppression Orwell describes in 1984, while treating all its partisans and defenders in the manner that “society” treats Meursault in Camus's novel?

Applied to Hezbollah, this analytical framework reveals that the party proceeded to a recomposition of collective consciousness — through persuasion, identity and narrative — in a register close to the “symbolic Orwell”, while resorting to direct punishment in the face of refusal, which belongs rather to the “concrete Camus”. It even added a religious dimension to its surveillance, that of accusations of apostasy and rupture with the faith. And its surveillance of socio-moral behaviour resembles what one finds in Camus: it extends to prohibiting the expression of certain forms of grief, since “the martyr ascended to heaven in joy”.

What is more redoubtable than death is to be reformatted to the point of no longer perceiving oneself as distinct from the power or the community.

It is precisely here that Orwell and Camus converge in the method Hezbollah has practised: the first by expressing the shattering of interiority, the second by expressing the punishment of those who refuse to inscribe themselves within “the prescribed framework” through the culture of sahsouh (Tr.'s note: a Lebanese term denoting the punishment inflicted on anyone who dares to express an opinion contrary to the forces in power).

One understands from this that Hezbollah's domination over a large part of the Shia community, and over essential levers of the Lebanese state, was not the result of a single simple factor, and cannot be explained by military force alone or by popular legitimacy alone. What occurred is the fruit of a complex historical accumulation combining violence, identity framing and the internal recomposition of society.

To understand this trajectory, three solidly interconnected mechanisms must be examined.

First: Coercion — the founding of power and the imposition of accomplished facts

In the nineteen-eighties, within the context of the Lebanese civil war, the confrontation was not merely political: it was a struggle for existence and hegemony within the community itself. This period was marked by the liquidation or removal of intellectual and militant currents — Hassan Hamdan, Hussein Mrouwa and others, including among the resistance fighters, of communist, leftist or liberal allegiance. Confrontations also set Hezbollah against other Shia forces, notably the Amal movement in what became known as the “war of the brothers”. Hezbollah resorted to violence, kidnappings and direct deterrence against the Lebanese environment as well as foreigners — bombings of embassies, taking of hostages. And it imposed certain modes of behaviour by force or by threat across various communities.

This means that Hezbollah did not emerge in an environment of “free adherence”, but in one that had been partially reconfigured by constraint. We are here confronted with what might be called the foundational Orwellian phase, where boundaries are first imposed before legitimacy is constructed.

Second: Social control, or the transformation of coercion into “natural behaviour”

After the consolidation of hegemony, the most decisive mutation took place: it was no longer a matter of controlling alone, but of recomposing society from within.

This process was accomplished through the imposition of religious, social and cultural behavioural norms, through an attempt to impose the veil by threats of disfigurement with acid, and subsequently through material incentivisation — sums of money paid in exchange for wearing it. A sharp binary was then constructed between “resistant” and “traitor”, between “conformist” and “deviant”, and an intense social pressure was brought to bear on those who diverged, ranging from reputational damage to ostracism and accusations of treachery.

At this stage, oppression was no longer always direct: it had become diffuse, integrated into the social body itself. Society had begun to monitor its own members. It is here that one encounters the Camusian logic: the individual is not sanctioned merely for what he does, but for his refusal to conform to the collective model.

Third: The construction of the framework that produces conviction and identity

The most decisive step in the success of this model was the construction of a powerful narrative capable of giving meaning to everything that had preceded it.

This narrative rested on the idea of resistance and dignity, on the protection of the community against external threats, on the valorisation of sacrifice, suffering and martyrdom, and on the fusion of the religious with the political and the identitarian. In parallel, networks of social services were built, along with educational, health and cultural institutions, and an architecture of internal solidarity, visible in the multiplication of religious occasions and the creation of rites and customs largely imported from Iran.

It was then that the decisive mutation was accomplished: the passage from a subjected society to a convinced one — at least in part. It is in Erich Fromm that one finds the explanation of this behaviour: the human being does not only flee oppression; he sometimes chooses conformity because it grants him a sense of security and belonging to the community.

Fourth: Recourse to political coercion and repression

Despite the success of social control and the construction of a body of convictions, political coercion remained present at moments of crisis. It manifested through decisive internal events such as those of 2008, through a climate of assassinations and political deterrence stretching from the martyrdom of Rafic Hariri to that of Lokman Slim, and through the entrenchment of uncrossable red lines — the Doha accords, the blocking third, the black shirts.

These moments fulfil a fundamental function: the permanent reminder that force remains present. The balance is thus maintained between conviction on one side and fear on the other.

Fifth: How did the “apparent consent” take shape?

What resembles “consent” within this environment cannot be simplified: it is the result of an interweaving of complex factors. Genuine conviction in one part of the population, adaptation in another, fear or silence in others still, and the absence of credible alternatives completing the picture. “Consent” is in reality a composite structure, and not a single unified position.

At the end of this long trajectory, we find ourselves in a situation where the party dominates no longer through force alone, but through the identity and the framework by which the individual understands himself, his suffering and his choices, perceiving them as logical, legitimate and meaningful. Society then participates partially in reproducing this hegemony by itself. Control thus ceases to be solely external and becomes internal as well.

What of today?

But recent transformations, under the pressure of regional events and external violence, have brought to the surface a gap between the narrative and reality, interior questionings that remain for the most part silent, and undeclared reassessments. Against this, the external danger continues to tighten cohesion, and social pressure prevents open explosion.

We are therefore living today through a phase of silent trembling, without any clear or definitive transformation on the horizon.