In the 1960s and 70s, the Arab world was rife with polemics. In Arab Nationalist circles, Baathists and Nasserites argued heatedly. Some other titles revolved around prioritizing “unity of the front” over “unity of objective” or vice versa, and whether attaining Arab unity would liberate Palestine or the other way around. Later, with the Palestinian resistance and the “new left”, the polemics’ margins widened to include comparisons between classical war and “guerrilla war of popular liberation”, which was linked to the question over the extent to which “petit bourgeois regimes” could play revolutionary roles. Those who repudiated this possibility resolved that these regimes’ armies do not fight. In 1973, when they did fight, the debate ended. The question over whether total liberation of Palestine or a democratic secular state ought to be sought was also debated, but the Arab regimes’ interventions weighed in on it before the infamous and shameful Ma’alot operation ended it.
In Marxists circles, the issues raised in the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party (1956) remained a heated subject. The fieriest debates were over the path to revolution, violent or parliamentary, and over “non - capitalist” development. Many other headlines featured: Soviet-Chinese conflict, Marxism and the national question, disputes that led to splits among communist parties, the ever-present question of the nature of the relationship with “petit bourgeois regimes” of Nasser and the Baath and Palestinian resistance. In 1973, the coup waged against Allende’s government in Chile ignited some debate about revolutionary change and whether the state, as a “tool in the hands of the bourgeoisie,” could be its vehicle.
Later, a multifaceted debate ensued over democracy and the acceptability of welcoming foreign intervention in order to establish it. This was a revival of an old debate that had perhaps been started by the liberal Armenians of the Ottoman Empire who disagreed with their reformist Turkish Muslim colleagues over the issue.
In parallel, arguments over economic issues like development and dependency and oil and oil policies did not stop. As for the ever-present discussions that never changed, the debate persisted over dyads and their reconciliation: Arabism and Islam, socialism and Islam, socialism and nationalism and of course authenticity and modernity.
This state of heated debate was not clear of malformations, like the fact that some of the advocates of nationalism were civil servants working for their “nationalist” regimes. This extends from the Egyptian Nasserite Ismat Seif al-Dawla to the Iraqi Baathist Saadoun Hammad. Another is that some Marxists did not rid themselves the prison of their quasi-religious devotion to texts and archives, questioning whether this or that assessment was consistent with what Lenin had said in the "State and Revolution" or “What is to be Done”?
However, the biggest failure was that the fabric of our societies and the relationships between their components were not discussed and were instead usually addressed with denial. Despite the eruption of two civil wars, in Jordan in 1970 and in Lebanon in 1975, and the increasing “sectarianization” of many regimes at the expense of their ideological pretenses, addressing this issue remained akin to transgressing a taboo. This taboo surfaced with many faces: there is the ideological face, which seeks to preserve the purity of the conceited system of thought by those who held it, the security face, which prevents any reckoning with the real problems of the community concerned, and the moral face, that of a traditional culture that has decided that highlighting difference and disparity is "shameful" and a crime against a divine unity.
The communities that established Levantine states bear responsibility because they did not engage themselves in discussing their states: the Lebanese Christianity preached and ordered the rest to become Lebanese. Iraqi Sunnism was hubristic and considered its leadership a bestowal that was not to be returned. Syrian Sunnism assured its people that it was preparing for the country's evaporation as soon as the blessing of Arab unity was arrived at. Palestinian nationalism was distracted by liberation from the people who were to be liberated.
Deplorably, the explosion of this long-forgotten issue, that is, the social fabric, was most devastating to our societies, and it was especially devastating to the polemic, which has become scarce in our intellectual and cultural lives. It is no accident that Beirut's silence, as a result of its civil war, silenced much of that "chaos".
Of course, this stifling of polemics came together with other factors, among them was the grand ideologies' defeat after the Cold War - the ideologies on which most of the old controversies were based or revolved around. In turn, political culture declined in general in favor of technical schematics and localized fragmented perspectives, before defamation, especially after the rise of social media, attained a very high podium.
However, the fragmenting of societies is, nevertheless, the most prominent cause of polemic’s death. This is because no one is interested in talking to anyone any longer, let alone persuading them. In Lebanon, for example, “the people”, in 2005, announced that they had become at least two peoples, and in Iraq, a civil war exploded in 2006, cementing thick and heavy borders between groups; in 2007 the “war between brothers” split Palestinian authority in two, one in the West Bank and the other in Gaza. In Syria, since 2011, at the latest, the ruler has become the enemy of the people, from whom there is no other enemy.
In this sense, polemics fell victim to a disregard of reality and the need to debate it. This reality swiftly avenged itself.
