There have always been, all over the world, political and ideological forces that give the magical connotation of words precedence over their conceptual connotation. For example, instead of saying: “Twenty people seized a military site,” they say: “The masses seized a military site,” and instead of saying: “Shots were fired at the demonstrators,” they say: “The demonstrators were massacred by gunfire.”
Magical connotations, which are difficult to measure and impossible to prove, have a greater capacity to incite and mobilize crowds than truths and facts. They do so through natural or supernatural images that spark the collective imagination and keep the flame burning. The false narrative thus becomes enshrined, after having been enchanted, into the consciousness of those who are ready to believe it. And from this influx of false and enshrined rhetoric arises a charged and tense atmosphere that leaves lies treated as certain facts and then generalizes and circulates these “certainties.”
The Lebanese who abide by reason and give the conceptual precedence over the magical, have memorized an entire list of terms whose meaning has been altered, either through exaggeration or total reversal, in order to achieve a mobilizational objective and create “certainty” around falsehoods.
For example, in the fifties, President Camille Chamoun was called an “isolationist,” meaning that he wanted to isolate Lebanon from the Arab and Islamic worlds surrounding it. However, Chamoun had a close friendship with Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey, Iran and Pakistan..., while his animosity was directed only to Nasserite Egypt and its loyalist officers in Damascus.
The same argument was used against those who supported Iraq in its war with Iran in the 1980s. They were called “isolationists,” bearing in mind that the Syrian regime was the only Arab player to support Iran.
The late politician Kamal Jumblatt named himself - and then others did so as well - the leader of the “Progressive Socialists,” despite being among the most conservative and traditional politicians in Lebanon. When he was Interior Minister in 1963, he banned the “twist,” which was very popular at the time, and ordered the French singer Johnny Hallyday’s expulsion from Lebanon. As for his “socialism,” it was rhetorical cover for extremely medieval and Sufi ideas and practices.
Since the idea of federalism was put forward in Lebanon, the rhetorical mobilization machine presented it as a proposal tantamount to secession although the term literally means “union.”
Advocating federalism, as every political science student knows, means advocating the transition from a simple, centralized union into a complex and decentralized one.
In any case, Hezbollah took this approach to language to an unprecedented peak. Like religious organizations in other countries, Hezbollah managed to claim the status of a party representing nothing less than God Himself. This bestows only humility on predecessors, parties that claimed to represent the working class or those that claimed to speak for the nation and the people...
Hezbollah also imported the Arab military and security regimes’ renowned narratives that transform defeats and calamities into shining victories.
Although it is both a religious and sectarian party, and although its top brass is limited to religious clerics, Hezbollah presents itself (and has found others present it) as the guarantor of national unity and a pivotal actor in the fight against sectarianism. On top of this, whenever it uses its arms domestically, the party stresses that its weapons are not for domestic use, and as it displaces Syrians and pushes them into Lebanon, it emphasizes that it is standing up to “takfiri terrorism” coming from Syria. Although the state’s monopoly on the means of violence is part of any definition of the modern state, Hezbollah presents itself (and found others to present it) as a pivotal partner of the state and an ally of its army.
However, the most significant thing Hezbollah did to destroy meaning is appoint itself the protector and liberator of Lebanon, as well as the guarantor of its dignity and civil peace. The fact is that Lebanon had not seen, at any point in its modern history, the kind of oppression, poverty, and humiliation that pervade across the country under the shadow of the resistance today. This state of affairs is supplemented by the breakdown of relations among its people and between its sects - a breakdown that renders civil war a hallmark of Lebanese life, from Ain Ebel in the South, to Kahhala in the mountains, to extremely tense points of friction in the rural Jbeil and the far North.
The misery is exacerbated by the fact that, especially in our region, this is a time in which public opinion and people who think are totally disregarded. Thus, for example, the Secretary General of “Asaib Ahl al-Haq” in Iraq, Sheikh Qais al-Khazali, can declare that the Israeli Mossad was behind the killing of Imam Ali bin Abi Talib, a statement made three days after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad claimed that his father Hafez did not have a hand in his accession to the presidency, a position he claimed to have reached through his own work within the party and personal effort alone.
The corpses of the communists who established notorious despotic regimes in Central and Eastern Europe and called them “people’s democracies” are probably rolling in their graves in envy of the pioneers of this linguistic coup in our region, at the forefront of which is Hezbollah.
