(Wikimedia Commons public domain)
A few more lines:
In April of 1976, Syria dispatched its army, ostensibly to put an end to the civil war. In fact, they were probably undertaking an effort to restore the boundaries of ancient Greater Syria, which had included modern Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel, as well as the modern state of Syria itself. (Ba’thist ideology sometimes resembles that of Hitler’s National Socialists. In the quest for restoration of the more glorious ancient Syria, the Syrian Ba’th leaders were reprising the earlier Nazi quest for Greater Germany.) Syrian forces seized the Bekaa Valley and the northern port city of Tripoli and began to tighten their grip on the rest of the pathetic country of Lebanon.
In order to explain the situation in Beirut, journalist Thomas Friedman cites Leviathan, the classic seventeenth-century work of English political philosophy by Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes, who was an advocate of absolute monarchy, argued that the worst of states was anarchy, “the state of nature,” in which “every man is enemy to every man…wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition,” Hobbes continues, “there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth… no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.“[1]
“I don’t know if Beirut is a perfect Hobbesian state of nature,” wrote Friedman after nearly half a decade living in the midst of Lebanon’s civil war, “but it is probably the closest thing to it that exists in the world today.“[2] In fact, though, however true the rest of Hobbes’s prediction may be, the people of Beirut and Lebanon have done all within their power to avoid being solitary. As the larger Lebanese society broke down, other community bonds came to the fore. People became more and more closely linked to their families, their clans, their religious denominations, and their neighborhoods. These alternate communities prevented them from feeling completely solitary, utterly alone in the horrifying chaos that their country had become. However, these clan and religious loyalties were a major cause of the Lebanese problem in the first place, and, while they indisputably helped people cope with a hellish situation, they also served to prolong that situation. Lebanese Druze found it difficult to relate to Lebanese Maronites, and Lebanese Shiites found it difficult to relate to Lebanese Sunnis, because the concept of “Lebanon” or “Lebanese” had ceased to have real meaning. The Druze therefore had little in common with the Maronites, or the Shiites with the Sunnis, except for their shared rivalry. And these old distinctions became barriers to communication and cooperation. Each faction necessarily became self-sufficient and justifiably suspicious of every other faction. The Lebanese people had, in fact, fallen back in many instances into a perfectly tribal existence. It is a situation well depicted in the Book of Mormon.
[1] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: Or, Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, 1:13.
[2] Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem, 30.
Posted from Jerusalem, Israel
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