American cinema introduced us to the archetype of the vigilante, and Clint Eastwood was probably the ultimate icon of this thrilling movie genre.
The vigilante takes delivering justice, for both himself and his community, into his own hands; he refuses to turn a blind eye to any wrongdoing and does not rest until he has rectified the situation and made things right. He does so because he feels that the state has neglected this duty and that its institutions are corrupt and complicit, while the complex legal procedures in applying the law disappoint those seeking immediate justice. He is perhaps also driven by a conviction that society is itself oblivious to dangerous threats that it is being distracted from.
These convictions are not disconnected from more complex ideas, like anarchist hostility to the state, and the notion that direct violence brings about change, which is not held by fascists alone, or the belief that elites should represent a people who do not know their own interests and need not be consulted on the way they are represented.
Militias, if we are to take their ideological claims at face value, entails a lot of vigilantism. Hezbollah's experience speaks to this vigilantism eloquently, as the party presents itself as liberating and defending its people on behalf of an absent and complicit state and a perverse society that has been led astray.
But it seems that, today, the majority of Lebanese find themselves faced with a regional vigilante that is rapidly growing increasingly enraged with the decisions of their country’s legitimate authorities. Iran’s campaign began with the remarks of its foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, who prophesied that Beirut's plan to monopolize arms would fail. Next, Ali Bagheri Kani, a member of the Strategic Council for Foreign Relations in Tehran, claimed that disarmament would not succeed because Hezbollah is "a movement that grew out of the Lebanese people."
In turn, Ali Akbar Velayati, an advisor to the Supreme Leader, stressed his opposition to the decision because the party's weapons "have always helped the Lebanese people and the resistance," and that the same is true for the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), without which "the Americans would have swallowed Iraq." As for the irrefutable claim he made in defense of his position, it is that the PMF "plays the same role in Iraq as Hezbollah does in Lebanon."
Vigilantism has been at the core of the Iranian experience since the revolution of 1979. That year, Egypt and Israel achieved peace through the Camp David Accords; up until then, Egypt had been more implicated in the conflict with the Jewish state than any other Arab country and incurred much of the immense costs that came with it. At a moment, albeit fleeing, when peace in the region seemed to have perhaps been on the horizon, Iran declared its intention to "eliminate Israel," and Khomeini famously fulminated that: "If Muslims united and every one of them hurled a bucket of water at it, Israel would drown."
Evidently, there are substantial differences between the local and regional vigilante. The former are the ones who fight and die if Lebanon moves in the wrong direction. They are the ones who do the dirty work, as we are seeing with their smear campaign against Prime Minister Nawaf Salam. They are also the ones tasked with intimidation - their tactics have lost much of their capacity to deliver their desired effect, as with the motorcycle parades in Beirut's southern suburbs.
And while the regional vigilante devotes itself to improving its negotiating position internationally, as well as striving to link its cause to the causes of other countries, such as Russia (which shares its hostility to the Azerbaijani-Armenian corridor project), the local vigilante is increasingly cornering itself, and its cause is becoming increasingly removed from any of the Lebanese people’s causes.
As the regional vigilante, whether it is exaggerating or not, continued to emphasize that "the Iranian people are united around it in defense of their homeland", six Lebanese soldiers were killed when an arms depot explosion that the party had left behind in the South blew up.
Naturally, both sides share the same founding narrative. Hezbollah portrays Lebanon and its state as being distracted from the danger surrounding them, if not complicit in perpetuating it, and Iran paints the same picture of the region, which it sees as complicit in an array of treacherous and oppressive schemes. And of course, both here and there, these same two vigilante groups are the hope and savior.
Today, though, this narrative is not taken seriously because its holes have rendered it logically untenable. If the arms being clung to had returned from the front victorious, the idea of clinging to them would have been digestible. As for the maxim being followed, it is stupefying since these arms have been emphatically defeated, we absolutely must cling to them! This line of reasoning is derived from the lexicon of collecting relics and artifacts of all things passed and obsolete.
Accordingly, unpersuasive ideas have been added to unintimidating weapons. The vigilante was neither vigilant nor a protector. This state of affairs renders the implementation of the Lebanese government's plan all the more pressing, though it does not exempt us from the real need to maintain apprehension.
Indeed, the nature of the two vigilantes’ relationship is a valid concern, as the intensity of lovers’ feelings weakens their ability to weigh things rationally. This bond can become suicidal when the lover is determined to please his beloved at any cost and under any circumstance. The lover sees his beloved even if they have perished and vanished, if not with his eyes, then in perverse visions. That has the potential to destroy both, and it could destroy others (us among them) with it.
