Festering Tribal Blood-Feuds
How is it possible, any intelligent person might ask themselves that one segment of an ancestral society can feel such unmitigated scorn and hatred for another, over a religious disagreement that took place a full six centuries earlier? This kind of mutual spite is fully pathological, a syndrome of an ill society that simply cannot tear itself away from a carefully nurtured primal hatred; the fuel that keeps the fires of enmity burning bright.Among the Lebanese, of all people. How can that be? The Lebanese with their folk wisdom, their sense of humour, their enterpreneurial spirit, their pride in ancestry. That's on one level. On the other is the suspicion with which they continue to view one another through the lense of sectarian hostility. A suspicion that is one short tread away from full-blown aggression. Wisdom has it that no one is a stranger; come to know the person formerly regarded as a stranger and you see yourself.
Ignorant intolerance demonstrates that if there is an unwillingness to discover commonalities because of a greater urge to nurse age-old grievances there is ample room to demonstrate the urge to submit to blood-feuds of ancient memory. The Lebanese people in the aggregate have much in common; a common ancestry, tradition, social customs and history. It's the divergences in all that make them strangers and enemies toward one another.
If a community of brethren opt to remain strangers and select differences rather than similarities in background and aspirations what hope is there for the success of a state to represent them all in an exercise of valuable communal living? If a community of like-backgrounded groups choose to visit hostility each on the other what chance is there that they will agree to live peaceably among other member-states in the region with whom they share nothing at all but geographic proximity?
A slow-simmering, low-impact civil war is on the horizon in Lebanon, encouraged and stimulated by diverse, antithetical positions on the politics of religion and territorial imperative. History revisited. "The most dangerous thing Lebanon is witnessing is a foreign plot to push it into internal sedition and civil war," according to Sheik Nasrallah, the leader of Islamist Hezbollah. And he's right.
He has allowed himself to become a tool of two external entities, two bordering states, each with their own agenda. That agenda doesn't include autonomous statehood in perpetuity for Lebanon, nor does it include internal peace and prosperity for the country. Just who is it who has sold out their country? The bulk of the Lebanese population who wish to live in peace and solidarity among one another or the fanatical Shia proxy army for Iran and an Alawite Syria?
Lebanese-born Americans wring their hands in despair witnessing the disintegration of their homeland. Living far away from the tribal tradition of ancient grievances they view past and current events through a different lens, that of broad-based civility and communal acceptance of diversity while adhering to valued principles of democratic freedom and equality of opportunity under law for everyone.
But Lebanon is not alone in its fractionalized society, one group at a simmering level of hatred for the other. In the geography of the Middle East that condition appears to be endemic, honouring old traditions of tribalism.
Labels: Human Fallibility
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, January 28, 2007
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