Power is in the street so who will take it?

August 19, 2021

Sajaan Azzi

@AzziSejean

(See Translation in Arabic Section)

On August 19, 1934, Adolf Hitler secured 88% of the vote and declared himself Fuhrer of the German people. This high rate was undemocratic; The higher the percentages, the more it became clear that the people are victims of a populist and demagogic brainwashing that leads them into blind mass choice instead of a conscious individual choice.

The tragedies of peoples are generally born from the ecstasy of their masses.

Few are the leaders of nations who swept the emotions of the people and were not swept by vanity. As the greats cover their ego with great achievements and positive logic, the owners of mediocre minds are inhabited by vanity and they overflow with arrogance.

Arrogance produces an illusory sense of cognitive self-sufficiency that causes the leader, and the president, to reject thought, opinion and advice. Refusal of these leads to tyranny and failure. And the more failures are exacerbated, the more disasters drag in others ... We are in the midst of disasters.

No one in Lebanon reached the 88% rate, neither in elections nor opinion polls. Despite that, some people developed an “illusory sense of cognitive self-sufficiency,” and began to act with tense and moody arrogance, until the Lebanese crisis became hostage to vanity as much as it was to the conflicts of the Middle East.

There is no problem when vanity kills its owner; the problem is when arrogant people kill their own people. Therefore, it is the duty of the people to anticipate the rulers and seize power.

In his book History of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky stated: “Power is in the street and no one takes it.” For the Lebanese, authority that has been displaced from legitimacy is waiting for the people to return it to a free, patriotic and strong state.

Who seizes power: the fading covenant? the people? Army? Hezbollah? Party Alliance? The alliance of the people and the army? An international guardianship?

The “revolution” was supposed to do the job but it receded even though everything that happened and is happening constitutes enough material to ignite a thousand revolutions.

By the way, how is it conceivable that all government formed after October 17, 2019, ignored all rebel groups? How can a serious revolution allow the formation of a government without it? The situation is open to all scenarios as it collapsed on all levels.

We began to notice a serious and expressive phenomena: the people have forgotten sovereignty in the face of hunger, the enemy in the face of the oppression of kin, the law in the face of the downfall of institutions, and private property in the face of loose right (Have you heard from the families of the victims of Akkar and the port?).

The struggle over the crumbling state extended to the steadfast homeland. We are here at this fateful junction: Shall we defeat Hezbollah and Lebanon unite? Will it defeat us and divide Lebanon or do we win together and live together?

The first two cases are impossible because they are a civil war project that the outside desires to return, and we do not desire to remain united.  As for the third case, it varies between the possible and the impossible.

It is possible if we all commit ourselves to the state of Lebanon, and Hezbollah ends the ambivalence between it and the state, and we sit together and build a neutral, democratic, decentralised, and civil Lebanon. It is impossible if Hezbollah pursues its parallel project to the Lebanese state and opposes the people. This is what we do not wish for.

Lebanon needs rescue, not drowning; unity and not division, and a way out of the tense and growing arrogance, especially since all challenges facing this country are projects of division if we do not resolve them together, the most prominent of which are: the Israeli danger, the Iranian exodus, the illegal Syrian settlements, the Palestinian settlement, sectarian conflict and societal contradictions.

Just as we are all responsible for the emergence and development of these dilemmas, we are also responsible for giving a clear and final answer to them so that we can decide our fate, because co-existence with these dilemmas is impossible.

Thus, the quality of these dilemmas is not resolved by compromises but by solutions. There is no settlement for any phenomenon that affects Lebanon, the system, formula, and formative fabric.

Until now, our disagreement over these dilemmas is still the most common otherwise we would not be in this despicable situation. We only got here because we were treating this difference with compromises, procrastination and ignoring until they had no effect and we were faced with the equation “to be together or not to be”.

It is not enough to declare our desire for national partnership without the will to act, change behaviour, remove foreign allegiances, and agree on the “different”. Since independence, Lebanese unity has been stabbed and stabbed again.

Lebanon split and fused. It reconciled then reconciled; exploded then stuck. It cracked and then relapsed. Torn apart and collected. It split then united until it split and we split...

Lebanon is a federal state that aspired to become a centralised state but failed. The State of Greater Lebanon is made up of groups that were fighting before, during and after the Emirate of Mount Lebanon.

Our collective history is news of fighting, fleeing, invasion, dominance and control, unlike our private history, which is limited to its creations on elites and individuals.

Despite that, we ventured and established the State of Greater Lebanon, a summary of the components of the East, so that it would be acceptable in its Arab environment.

We Christians refused to be a “second Israel” in the East but rather the subject of a consensus between East and West. But some insist on making Lebanon a state that co-exists with military situations like Israel with Gaza, Hamas, Syria, Hezbollah, Iran and the Takfiris.

Our project is peaceful and civilized co-existence between Islam and Christianity and with our natural surroundings. We are the fathers and sons of this East since Canaan, Aram and Cadmus, Walham, Tanukhites, and Ma’anis were victorious. We believed in Arab affiliation and launched the Arab idea to liberate the peoples of the region from “Turkisation,” not the Lebanese from Lebanonisation. In the absence of a strong president and a historical saviour, the salvation of Lebanon depends on:

1) A new popular revolution that will meet with a real government, not in the manner of the future government that will reproduce the same political class;

2) An understanding with the commander of the Lebanese army to expand its national role within the framework of a state of emergency whose declaration was delayed, provided that the army controls all the Lebanese regions and not over other regions;

3) Continuing to seek to hold an international conference on Lebanon, declaring Lebanon’s neutrality; and

4) A collective exodus from the prison of vanity, arrogance, hatred and an illusory sense of cognitive self-sufficiency.