As a critic of the backward and ultra-religious Lebanese society, and of course the primitive, feudal, theocratic political system in Lebanon, I check every day to see where the thousands who visit my blog come from.
I get regular visits from Dearborn Heights in Michigan (US) where there is a high concentration of Lebanese Shiite lovers and operatives of the Lebanese terrorist organization. I get visits from Damascus, where I suppose the Mukhabaraat try to control what Syrians read about their "dear leader", the butcher Assad. But the one most interesting visit this blog receives regularly is from a place near Beirut called " b'Abda " (in Arabic = بعبدا ), whose spelling (instead of the more conventional "Baabda") indicates a fanatic attachment to the Arabic language and the "glorious Arab-Islamic Umma" (sic).
Now, for those who are not from here and who have no idea what b'Abda is, let me explain. b'Abda is a town on the outskirts of Beirut where the Presidential Palace, the Ministry of Defense, and General Security headquarters are concentrated. This is the place where, for the past three or four decades, what used to be the pride of a liberal democratic Lebanon has become a cesspool of Syrian Baath-trained ruthless intelligence criminals and other abusers of human rights. As in Syria, military intelligence and an assortment of security services (general, special, internal, external....) keep the Lebanese population in check: arbitrary arrests, mysterious disappearances and killings, corruption and bribes whenever a foreigner needs a residence permit or visa...and of course, keep every ant and sheep in Lebanon towing the line behind the Syrian dictator next door in the decomposing country of Syria.
For one, the Presidential Palace has become the place where traitor generals from the Lebanese army (who barely graduated from Military School), end up as "consensus" presidents because this super-divided, tribal and ultra-religious country can never elect a decent civilian. The political process is bankrupt and dysfunctional, divided as it is between 18 religious sects, each led by an unelected Patriarch or Mufti or Mullah working on behalf of a foreign country, that compete for money and power, have and run their own militias that go to war every generation or so committing massacre after massacre, and thus control the destiny of the nation with religious fear-mongering and primitive style cronyism. Around these religious dinosaurs from the Stone Age of humanity is an assortment of political lackeys who go around pretending to defend their own "people" (i.e. the Christians of the north or the Christians of the central Kesrouan district, or the Sunnis of Beirut versus the Sunnis of Tripoli or Sidon, or the Shiites or the Druze..etc.) in their own little mountain village cantons, while transferring this political power (that they obtain by colluding and working for the religious dinosaurs) across generations of sons and grandsons in typical Middle Age feudalism. Each religious sect is in fact divided within itself into tribal, regional, familial clans, which is proof of the primitive and backward nature of Lebanese society. Each of these feudal lords has his own "palace" (Lebanese leaders must live in "palaces" to prove that they are better than their own constituency who live in houses) perched somewhere in the Lebanese hills, and are worshiped by illiterate peasants and villagers who, whenever their feudal leader dies or is killed in one of unending political vendettas, pledge allegiance to the feudal bloodline and then, and only then, elect them blindly at so-called elections in this false democracy that Lebanon has become.
So Lebanon, in its 60 plus years of "independence" since 1943 has had 11 presidents, three of whom were former generals of the Lebanese Army who no one believed are capable of running the country, but end up as presidents because the political system fails to elect one after the country was broken apart by bloody massacres and civil war. A compromise is usually reached over the least qualified, the weakest, the most incompetent person with a semblance of strength (i.e. a former military idiot) to be the "consensus" president, who to boot, must also receive the blessing of the Syrian dictatorship in Damascus. Yes, Lebanon cannot choose its president or prime minister or speaker of parliament without the Syrian dictator approving these choices. Imagine this "sovereignty" enjoyed by the "country" of Lebanon!
You see, the Lebanese people do not directly elect their presidents in universal suffrage; they elect their feudal lords as members of parliament on the basis of religion, and then these religious-feudal lords - who have no clue about the national interest other than preserving their political power base and their grip on their peasants - elect the president in parliament. But because these "members of parliament" are elected on the basis of their religious affiliation, they have stronger allegiances and ties to outside political and religious decision makers (from whom they derive their own legitimacy) than to their country and countrymen. For example, such Faustian deals with outside powers are made as follows, depending on the religious affiliation:
- Maronites and Catholics: The Vatican and France, occasionally the US.
- Greek Orthodox: Russia, Greece, and other centers of Eastern Christianity generally opposed to the West.
- Sunnis: Saudi Arabia and Egypt (hence the US when the latter two countries are in cahoots with the US).
- Shiites: Iran, and therefore Syria because of the Syrian-Iranian alliance.
- Druze: Sometimes Syria, sometimes Israel, sometimes the US... basically the Druze will take their orders from whoever happens to be the stronger outside player.
- Armenians: Russia and Armenia.
- etc.
Depending on the existing international and regional political climate and balance of power, the Lebanese feudal lords take their orders from these outside powers and translate them into domestic policy, which means that the country of Lebanon essentially has no "native" will. There are no Lebanese decisions per se. All political and policy decisions are made outside the country and are executed by the mercenary political leaders. The political peregrinations of the nation are all dictated by whatever the balance of power around the world and the region happens to be at any given time. This is why, throughout its existence, the country keeps ricocheting from one crisis, one war, one stalemate, one standoff, etc. to another. The country never seems to find a stable "native" indigenous basis on which to operate. As an example, the current stalemate inside Lebanon, now about 10 years old, is a power play between the US, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and others on a background of Iran's nuclear crisis and other regional issues. In other words, Lebanon may be a country (i.e. a patch of land with borders and a population), it may have the semblance of a State (with institutions and such), but it is not a nation of people bound by a defined and common sense of history and destiny. As a result, the country and the State are dysfunctional, do not serve their people, and never find with solutions to problems because the allegiances and the decision-making are both located outside the framework of the constituents of a nation.
Right now, the country's political tribulations have nothing to do with the will of the Lebanese people as a whole. They have to do with the split in the Islamic world between Muslim Sunnis (led by Saudi Arabia, supported by the US, and a horde of acolytes and mercenary countries linked into this bizarre coalition by economic and other political interests), and Shiites (led by Iran, backed by Russia and China and a horde of mercenary countries with their own little interests). None of these countries' interests have anything to do with the welfare of the Lebanese people, as would be in normal countries, on matters such as basic services, economic opportunity, education, etc. Lebanon, for example, has not had reliable running electricity for close to 40 years, since the current "crisis" began in 1975. There is no reliable running water. Roads are barely maintained. There are no sidewalks. Crime is rampant and not one crime (among thousands of crimes, some huge, others petty) has ever been solved or a guilty party identified and prosecuted. The only instance where a crime has ever been investigated and solved is the assassination of the former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, and the reason that this one crime was ever investigated is because Hariri was a billionaire who bought everyone and everything around him, and because the international community, through the UN Security Council, got involved. Imagine what it is to be an ordinary citizen in Lebanon where you know that there is no recourse to the State's institutions to seek redress against harm or injustice. What do the Lebanese do? Most give up and live lives of resignation and fatalism, resorting to God, saints, divine interventions, and chiromancy.... Others leave the country (by the millions), and others take matters in their own hands and get weapons, and/or join the ranks (for protection) as blind followers of the same feudal-religious lords that are the root cause of the problem to begin with.
Nothing in Lebanon is done with the human in mind; the last factor that the country's governments and institutions consider when they pretend to enact policy is the Lebanese individual, the human component of the country. Public education never really existed to begin with, as the country's education is monopolized by the religious orders of the Muslim and Christian sides. The country has gone through numerous wars, killings, massacres, invasions, occupations.... The country's army serves as the police, hunting petty criminals only when this has no impact on the political-religious divide because it if it did, then the army would splinter into religious militias overnight. And so the country as a state relies on outsiders for defense purposes: the Syrian army was the country's army for several decades. The Palestinian PLO was the army of the Lebanese Sunnis during the 1970s and 1980s. Israel invaded several times, allying itself with various groups depending on the moment, from Christians to Druze and, yes, the Shiites. The Multinational Force of the 1980s. The large UN contingent in the south of the country - UNIFIL - that has been stationed there since 1978 because the Lebanese never agreed if they should send their pathetic army to the southern border because of a political division over what to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict next door.
Back to " b'Abda ". It is also the headquarters of the Defense Ministry where basement dungeons reek of persecution and torture. Military Intelligence, thanks to three decades of Syrian rule, has become a clone of the Syrian totalitarian security apparatus: They watch their own people for any dissent; they arrest arbitrarily for so called "threats to the nation" or "disrespect for the president" etc... Last year, three teenage bloggers were arrested because they criticized the Lebanese Syrian-puppet president Michel Suleiman, who is nothing more than a powerless emasculated "consensus" personage who sits in his "palace" dispensing grandmotherly advice to his otherwise terrified people because he can't do anything else. Suleiman is married to the Syrian regime's Assad family, and will never do anything to upset the Syrian tyrant now killing his own people. He says he is with sovereignty, but supports the illegal Iranian terrorist organization of Hezbollah in its usurping of sovereignty by running its own parallel army, security zones, barracks, telecommunications network, and its launching wars against Israel independently of the State.
The General Security apparatus in Lebanon is also housed in b'Abda, and is essentially the Intelligence arm of Hezbollah which now runs the Lebanese government of castrated President Suleiman and Prime Minister Miqati. The latter is himself a politically powerless Sunni numskull who made it simply because he was "acceptable" to all the competing militias and parties, and is also a billionaire, as if money somehow is going to give him the balls he doesn't have. For some reason, the Lebanese Sunnis like to have billionaires represent them as prime ministers, even though history has shown that billionaires often fail as political leaders because they think they can buy people's allegiance sufficiently well to run the country. It hasn't worked for Rafik Hariri who, after a career as a puppet prime minister and top collaborator with Syria and Saudi Arabia, was killed by the same Syrians once he realized that his stupid bet (that he could run the country like a grocery store without paying the Syrian mafia) could not work.
And so, from this paradise on earth that Lebanon is - political dysnfunctionality, religious barbarity, chronic national discord, chaotic and unregulated urbanism, servile mercantilism of the worst kind, a ruined environment, periodic warfare and assassinations, one of the most corrupt countries on earth (check the UN's ranking), a country the size of a finch's asshole that produces more saints, holy men, sayyids and fornicating, child-molesting priests and nuns than any other on earth, a place that looks more like the bald and disfigured mountains of Afghanistan than those of Switzerland, a crucible of deep barbarity and backwardness happily married to a superficial and utterly commercial modernity that the country sells to credulous tourists.... - my blog is visited regularly by " b'Abda " because the Syrian Shiite Neanderthals and Cro-magnons of Lebanese Security fear blogs like this.
To those bastards at b'Abda: ايري فيكم . One day, the people of Lebanon will rise up like their brothers are doing across the Arab world, and they will come knocking at your doors....And they will bring an end to this charade of a country that you have turned Lebanon into.
Hanibaal
0 comments:
Post a Comment