Chinese Maoism used to sum up its politics during particular stages with easily remembered, almost poetic slogans. For example, in 1957, Mao ZeDung said, “let a hundred flowers blossom”, to encourage intellectuals to critique party and government policies. The intellectuals who believed in it and did indeed critique were all imprisoned.
In Lebanon, we woke to a new phrase-slogan a few days ago- that of the next phase: “heading towards the East”. Since the call’s economic meaning undermined itself the moment it was uttered, we assume that what is demanded of us is furthering our immersion in the East. For heading somewhere to get aid necessarily entails an impact that goes beyond aid as such. The Arabs who headed West early on are the ones who produced what came to be known as the Nahda (Renaissance), which, when it comes down to it, signifies nothing more than approaching the Western model and imitating it.
With regard to the situation that we are faced with, some clarifications are called for: the new call does not, for example, imply that we ought to learn from the great civilizations of China, India and Persia, or from and about Indian democracy or to study the process through which hundreds of millions of Asians dramatically improved their economic conditions as a result of Western economies’ adoption of outsourcing. Of course, the wonderful book "Kama Sutra" is not to join our "respectable" library.
The East, here, refers to what is opposite of the West or being anti-Western. Defining through negation is always insufficient, but this inherent insufficiency is exacerbated by the fact that no one is absolutely anti-Western today. Neither China nor India or Russia, if we consider it to be Eastern, are absolutely anti-Western, to say nothing of Japan and South Korea. This so-called East may have died with the Maoists who declared once that "the east wind will overcome the west wind" only to dive into the "Cultural Revolution", whose number of millions of casualties historians are still tirelessly working to determine. North Korea may be the last remaining example of an absolutely estranged "East", totally isolated from the "West" and following the “Juche” theory of self-reliance and self-sufficiency.
In all likelihood, heading East, defined as an antithesis to the West, signifies, above all else, a rejection of Western democracy and the assumption that it is a cultural invasion that “tears the nation apart” and weakens it.
It is indicative that a particularly large number of those who had been adherents to Maoism, promptly embraced nationalist and religious movements, most prominently Iranian Khomeinism. Resisting the West is what matters to them, be it under the banner of Maoism, Khomeinism or under any other faction hostile to democracy and pluralism. The important thing is to find a totem to worship who can lead our struggle and whose leadership can unite us: Mao, Kim, Khamenei, Assad ... any of them would do.
As for Lebanon in specific, this easternization entails blowing it to pieces, a task that remains impossible without one possibility or a second, or both of them occurring simultaneously: seizing direct control of its political and economic system and maintaining a state of permanent war with an enemy. Such a situation, if actualized, necessarily entails civil war, sectarian and regional, becoming the regime that governs our lives.
Conversely, Lebanon’s value lies precisely in that it belonged to the East and was able to belong, at the same time, to a wider world. It could perhaps be said that Lebanon provided a reasonable model for transcending the concept of "belonging" in its narrow and parochial sense.
Of course, “belonging”, in this sense, is not new. Once upon a time, a campaign was waged against Orientalists, who had moved between many worlds and cultures, because they were, according to their critics, fabricating a non-existent East, but the West-East dichotomy had not been entrenched as it was, at the hands of Orientalism’s critics, after the critique was made.
The phrase "Eastern Christianity" was magnified, undermining any kind of pluralism within this East, and claiming that Christianity is about to merge into Islam and that the Crusades are nothing but an anomalous transient betrayal. Out of this Easternism, a new "Levantinism" concerned with supporting Bashar al-Assad, the symbol of our identity and protector of our dignity, was later conceived!
As for our criticism of Israel, we have not focused on its racism and settlements as much as we have on the fact that it does "not belong" to this region that is rife with racism and tyranny. What fool would freely choose to belong to this region?
But to market this Easternism, the Easternism of wars and civil wars, lies had to be conjured up. In order to perpetuate war, it was said that ISIS had been about to enter the homes of Lebanese, house by house, but for the saviors who came to our rescue at nick of time.
To perpetuate war, we removed from history and our memory the 1949-1968 period, when Lebanon managed, through peaceful means, to avoid "the wolves" that Secretary-General of Hezbollah warned us about. The fact is that the "wolves" did not arrive until after the first resistance paved the way for an occupation that ended with the Liberation of the second resistance, which thus demanded that we indefinitely lead lives of a very Eastern resistance.
They erased our knowledge of the past, which, as we well know, is a requisite for moving to the future in such a strange way: miserable souls, hungry stomachs and gagged mouths from which only talk about dignity and allegiance to the leader come out. This is the East that it is demanded we head towards and immerse ourselves in.
