A Thousand Plateaus

There are moments when a sentence cast into the media storm reveals more than entire treatises of doctrine. When the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, declared a few days ago that “it would be acceptable if they took it all,” invoking the notion of an Israel extending, in a biblical reading, from the Nile to the Euphrates, before adding that “Area C is Israel,” he was not merely departing from diplomatic reserve—though that goes without saying—but displaying a political partiality which, if unsurprising given Washington’s near-unconditional alignment with the Hebrew State, remains intolerable in its gravity.

Saad Hariri bears something of a cursed hero from a Greek tragedy. Twenty-one years after the assassination of Rafik Hariri, Saad returns to a city that no longer quite resembles the one he left behind. The centers of decision-making have shifted. He knows this well. Saudi Arabia, which once contributed, under the leadership of Fahd and later Abdullah, to anchoring Rafik Hariri on the Lebanese stage, has for nearly a decade multiplied negative signals toward Saad. Saudi media outlets have widely expressed their dissatisfaction at the prospect of his relaunching his political movement after four years of suspension.

It must be stated plainly, without equivocation: one of the recurring blind spots of Western democracies lies in their relationship to time. Democratic time—defined by alternation, electoral urgency, limited mandates, and the constant need to produce visible results within a short horizon—is indeed a rhythmic, segmented, fractured time… and therefore a fragile one. By nature, it is impatient, perpetually searching for exits, compromises, and provisional stabilizations. It clings to the belief, rooted in a teleological and almost gnostic conception of History, that history itself can be bent through goodwill, negotiation, and shared rationality. That it inevitably advances in the right direction.

Fourteen years ago, on February 1, 2012, former MP and minister Nassib Lahoud passed away. In these times when populism is wreaking havoc across the world, and Lebanon seems, once again, to have been a forerunner of the current wave, it feels necessary to evoke the memory of a man who, over the last three decades, carried and defended another vision, another practice of politics. All the more so in Lebanon, where gregarious passions naturally propel either the exalted “historic leader” or the disenchanted utilitarian fox draped in the rags of sectarianism, rather than composed statesmen with modern ideas and a deep, strategic understanding of public affairs.

Every twenty years, a gambler arrives, who stakes the country, its people, its inheritance, sunrises and sunsets, boys and girls, waves and sea on a poker table. Nizar Qabbani Thus, Naïm Qassem seeks to sacrifice Lebanon for Iran. After sending his followers to die for Assad’s Syria, after allowing the inhabitants of his revolutionary home to be atomized for Hamas, he now seeks to conclude in style, through a collective suicide, at a moment when the Iranian mother-house itself is under threat, facing the supposedly invincible armada deployed by Donald Trump in the waters of the Middle East. The latest statements by Hezbollah’s Secretary-General might almost pass for the bravado of a hardened strongman—and perhaps they still do for part of his flock, weaned on the myth of the Aryan Übermensch manufactured by Iranian clerics. Yet this so-called “bravery”—once acknowledged in the late 1990s by the vast majority of Lebanese when it came to defending Lebanese territory against Israeli occupation—has since degenerated into strategic suicide, even if the word “strategic” itself now sounds grotesque in this context.

If basic decency prevents us from rejoicing even at the death of a monster, it does not prevent a certain sudden lightness from being felt, or even a fleeting sense of relief, upon hearing the news. Rifaat al-Assad is dead. Faced with the retrospective and retroactive feeling of powerlessness and desolation in the face of the worst atrocities in history, one consoles oneself as best one can. Assad takes with him a part of the darkest memory of the contemporary Levant: cities crushed for having screamed too loudly against barbarity, neighborhoods razed to serve as examples. One need only read the testimony of Michel Seurat, who paid for it with his life, to grasp with dread how Hama and Homs, in 1982, became laboratories for Assad’s almost clinical experimentation with death. Lebanon too, from Tripoli to its humiliated margins, paid the price for Rifaat’s inhumanity through his militias, the so-called “Red Knights.”

Has obscenity become the driving force of History? A careful observer, following the thread of events, might well conclude that it has. For there is indeed something obscene in the way the contemporary world continues to celebrate its simulacra of order, even as the dikes— all the dikes—are collapsing on every side. True, the logorrhea remains; institutions proliferate. Grand speeches have perhaps never been so abundant. Yet they now drift in a disturbing void, ringing irredeemably hollow—when they are not swallowed by the formless mass of disinformation and the nauseating tropes of populism and identitarianism.

The now-iconic image of a young woman setting fire to the portrait of Ayatollah Khamenei to light her cigarette says it all, symbolically speaking: the Iranian theocracy is dead and buried. It is only a matter of time. Admittedly, the Iranian authorities can still repress, arrest, torture, rape, execute, and massacre with impunity, as they have done repeatedly since the Green Movement of 2008. Yet the wall of fear has definitively collapsed this time, as evidenced by the regime’s loss of control over several cities, an unprecedented development since the Islamic Revolution itself. The clerical regime is drawing its last breath. The narrative that sustained it since 1979 has been drained of all substance, and the power derived from it had long survived only through coercion, fear, and the mechanical invocation of a mythologized past in which almost no one still believed, save perhaps a handful of Qassem Soleimani’s devotees in Lebanon and Iraq. What the world is witnessing today is nothing less than the exhaustion of a political model that has ceased to generate meaning for decades.

There is, in the image of Nicolás Maduro paraded in New York like a petty drug trafficker, something that echoes Vercingetorix being displayed as a war trophy in Rome before Julius Caesar in September 52 BC, after the siege of Alesia. No one is suggesting shedding crocodile tears for a populist dictator at the helm of a defiant state. Maduro, moreover, is neither Lumumba nor Che Guevara. He is simply one of those figures Latin America has always known how to produce in its darkest hours: characters straight out of The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez, whose outward flamboyance masks a total absence of grandeur. Spectral. Ridiculous.

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.