Lebanon: Inherited Consensual Democracy and Rule of the Mafia Princes
Dr. Joseph Hitti
May 24, 2008
A recent sample of the mediocrity that is endemic to the Lebanese political establishment is Michel Mouawad, a "rising star" in that establishment (specifically in the March 14 stew of luminaries) for the single reason that his mother is a Member of Parliament who herself rose from the obscurity of housewifedom after her husband, Michel's father René, was assassinated in 1990 by the Syrians who had just brought him to power. (This is a standard practice by the Syrian regime to kill their own collaborators once they are done using them, like they killed Rafik Hariri in 2005).
In other words, here is a perfectly average guy - like many of the sons of other Lebanese politicians - who took the political mantle for the single criterion that he once was a sperm in his father's gonads that fertilized an egg in his mother's ovary. This is, of course, not unique to the Lebanese system: Just look at George Bush, or the Kennedys, or Bilawal Bhutto (the 19-year old son of Pakistan's Benzir Bhutto). But the difference is that in Lebanon and the Arab world at large, this is virtually an absolute rule, not an exception. Mubarak of Egypt is grooming his son Gamal, Syria's President Bashar Assad (the ultimate imbecilic ophtalomologist-wannabe who was "voted" President by default because not only his father Hafez died, but because his older brother, Bassel, also died), Mouammar Qaddafi's son Saif, etc. These inherited political mantles take place in so-called "republics" which once rebelled against a monarchy under the pretense of abolishing these arbitrary hereditary transfers of power. I have a lot of respect for the hereditary emirates and monarchies and sultanates because they don't pretend otherwise.
In Lebanon, this affliction is even more endemic, transcending religious and political party lines, with the political transfer happens almost instantaneously with the gonadal transfer of genes, and without waiting for the paternal gene pool to die off or the progeny pool to prove it is viable or worthwhile. In other words, genes in Lebanon trump up such other credentials as merit, competence, IQ, education or any such reasonably demanding criteria for political office.
The former Lebanese President "General" Emile Lahoud, the last of his class in the Officers School, became an officer and rose to the rank of General because his father pulled strings ("wasta" in Lebanese) to get him admitted into the school. But he was so bad that after he graduated, he was exiled to the Lebanese Navy, which is almost non-existent and one step higher than the lavatory cleaning regiment of the Lebanese military institution. So when the Syrian occupation made him a President because of his treason to his fellow Lebanese - often collaborators are chosen from the pool of degenerate imbeciles of the occupied country - he thought so highly of himself that he decided in turn to pass the mantle on to his son, whom he had named him Emile as well, like these American backwoods types in Texas who discover an oil well in their backyard and think they have become tycoons, so they create dynasties of backwoods tycoons carrying the same name for generations with the roman numerals I, II, III etc. suffixed to their names.
Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri is grooming his son Bassel, whom he affectionately named after Hafez Assad's other son who would have been, predictably, the Syrian President today had he not died in a car accident on Syria's deadly desert highways. Bassel Berri, for better or for worse, is therefore destined for a future lordship over the disgruntled, suicidal, dispossessed, disenfranchised, chronic liberationists, acutely resistance-inclined, eternally-victimized Shiites, notwithstanding the millions they make from the hashish (in Lebanon) and diamond (in Africa) trades and the billions they receive in aid from Iran.
Hassan Nasrallah, the divine Shiite prophet of Hezbollah, gave his son up in martyrdom long time ago, which means in this case that the gonadal transfer was quickly followed by a transfer to Paradise and straight into the lap of the 70 virgins, which pre-empted the political transfer. Come to think of it, why would anyone choose to lord it over 1 million bearded and veiled Lebanese Shiites, when you can bask in the delight of 70 virgins in heaven?
Amin Gemayel himself, the total-failure of a former Lebanese President, whose mandate among the hillbillies of the Maronite Christian mountain heartland is also divinely-descended since, the motto of the Phalange-Kataeb Party being "God, Homeland, Family", political power flows directly from God to the Country and straight into the DNA of the Gemayel family. What is unique about Amin Gemayel's example is that a single gonadal transfer was followed by four separate political transfers, each in the aftermath of a Grim Reaper action in the Gemayel gene pool: Amin inherited his uncle Maurice's parliamentary seat upon Maurice's death circa 1972, his brother Bashir's presidency upon the latter's assassination by Hafez Assad in 1982, his father Pierre's leadership of the Phalange Kataeb Party in 1987 when his father passed away, and lately his own son Pierre's parliamentary seat in 2006 when his son was assassinated by the Syrians. If he keeps his health going, he may in fact, inherit his own grandchildren after the next Lebanese war in another generation or so. This goes to show that genes, in gonadal-to-political transfers like this, are recyclable. Even if one is a failure in the first instance, he can keep trying not to be a failure in a second, third, or fourth attempt, as long as one has the genes. Nature, in Lebanese feudal systems, does not need nurture.
Another God of the Lebanese political pantheon who "suffered" a similar fate is Ghassan Tueni. After a political career including an ambassadorship at the UN in the 1970s, Mr. Tueni, who holds one of the virtual monopolies on the Lebanese Press through his newspaper the An-Nahar, bestowed the mantle onto his son Gibran. Unlike many of the gonadal recipients in the Lebanese feudal system, Gibran did try to earn some of the mantle, and he deserves some merit. However, when Gibran was assassinated by a Syrian car bomb in 2005, his father Ghassan retrieved the mantle back and has now replaced his son in office, a case of upward politico-gonadal transfer, from progeny to parent. One word on the press monopolies in the Lebanese "free" press: You see, in Lebanon, you have to be a member of the Press Mafia (the Press Syndicate) to be allowed to start a newspaper or nowadays to have a TV channel, and in order to be a member of the Press Syndicate, the Dons and Godfathers (like Ghassan Tueni) have to induct you into the Syndicate. Which means that the political-feudal-religious conglomerate that runs Lebanon also controls the press and public opinion. In this Mafia environment, each politician or one of his crony poodles has a newspaper and/or a TV channel, and all public opinion in Lebanon is a charade of free speech since each of these media outlets is a mouthpiece for a politician or a religious group...). Ghassan Tueni, in the pantheon of the religious-political-familial-feudal Mafia is one of the "representatives" of the Greek Orthodox Christians in Lebanon.
Hariri and Aoun present interesting, though not surprising cases, of "reverse transfer" whereby gonadal supremacy over the political does not begin in the gonadal realm. It, in fact, starts - by virtue of money (Hariri) or power (Aoun) - in the political realm, from very modest gonadal origins. However, once established, the political charcater morphs into a gonadal dynasty that is then propagated strictly via gonads.
The list is long and I could go on and on with the Murrs, Hariris, Jumblatts, Salams, Frangiehs, Chamouns, and yes - even reformist Michel Aoun himself is surrounded by a couple of sons-in-law, nephews, and the like who, regardless of their competence or merit, are in the top echelons of the Free Patriotic Movement, simply because of their partial gonadal connection to the new patriarch Michel Aoun. I bet you if Lebanon was more advanced on women's rights, one of Michel Aoun's three daughters (he has no sons) would be running around in that top echelon and lining herself to inherit the political mantle. But eggs in Lebanon are still not as valued as sperm is. So it may be a while.
Back to what started this peregrination deep into Lebanon's political Fallopian tubes and Vas Deferenses: Michel Mouawad. Here are some of the great ideas that this budding genius was pontificating about the other day following the Doha Agreement:
March 14 General Secretariat member Michel Mouawad to LBC Television:
May 23, 2008 (as poorly translated into English by the NowLebanon web site that supports the dinosaur luminaries of the March 14 brew. Between parentheses are my comments to emphasize the genius of the young man and the bad translations of NowLebanon) (http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDetails.aspx?ID=44240)
Mouawad: Our biggest compromise was to give the opposition the obstructing third. It was done because of our fear that civil war would bring down the project of March 14. (Smashing! I am not sure what tract is the object of the "obstructing")
Mouawad: Lebanon cannot be rebuilt as long as the state does not have exclusive control over weapons. (Far reaching!)
Mouawad: The primary mission of the president who will be elected on Sunday is to strengthen presidential authority and stretch it all over Lebanese soil.(Brilliant! I had no idea that presidential authority was so elastic in Lebanon that one can "stretch" it at will)
Mouawad: The Lebanese army and security forces have proven incapable of defending the democratic system against illegitimate weapons.(The man is a genius!)
Mouawad: The government´s decisions were politically correct, but the timing was wrong.(Acute Thinking! I don't think NowLebanon knows that "politically correct" has a double-entendre)
Mouawad: Hezbollah used its weapons against the inside when it invaded Beirut. The government´s decisions might have been a justification for its behavior, but they are not the primary reason. However, had the government not made these decisions, the party would have found another argument.(Sharp! Again, the "inside" here is hopefully not in reference to somebody's GI tract)
Mouawad: The 1960 electoral law does not mean the caza. The basis of this law is the division of Beirut into three electoral district(s).(Just superior!)
Can anyone argue that this young man is not destined one day to replace his mother, his father, his uncles and aunts, cousins and all the Mouawad baraka? His comments reflect such depth of thinking and clairvoyance that I would actually vote for his great grand children, if I am still alive in 2080 when they inherit the mantle. Perhaps, I should go to the notary and sign an affidavit or a proxy in which I cast my future votes and those of my children and their children for several future generations of Mouawads because they got the genes.
Lucky are the Lebanese for this lineup of current leaders, as well as the ones who are incubating today so one day in the future they will monopolize, pilfer, rob, kill, embezzle, massacre, receive divine inspiration, etc. over the lives of future generations of Lebanese.
In other words, here is a perfectly average guy - like many of the sons of other Lebanese politicians - who took the political mantle for the single criterion that he once was a sperm in his father's gonads that fertilized an egg in his mother's ovary. This is, of course, not unique to the Lebanese system: Just look at George Bush, or the Kennedys, or Bilawal Bhutto (the 19-year old son of Pakistan's Benzir Bhutto). But the difference is that in Lebanon and the Arab world at large, this is virtually an absolute rule, not an exception. Mubarak of Egypt is grooming his son Gamal, Syria's President Bashar Assad (the ultimate imbecilic ophtalomologist-wannabe who was "voted" President by default because not only his father Hafez died, but because his older brother, Bassel, also died), Mouammar Qaddafi's son Saif, etc. These inherited political mantles take place in so-called "republics" which once rebelled against a monarchy under the pretense of abolishing these arbitrary hereditary transfers of power. I have a lot of respect for the hereditary emirates and monarchies and sultanates because they don't pretend otherwise.
In Lebanon, this affliction is even more endemic, transcending religious and political party lines, with the political transfer happens almost instantaneously with the gonadal transfer of genes, and without waiting for the paternal gene pool to die off or the progeny pool to prove it is viable or worthwhile. In other words, genes in Lebanon trump up such other credentials as merit, competence, IQ, education or any such reasonably demanding criteria for political office.
The former Lebanese President "General" Emile Lahoud, the last of his class in the Officers School, became an officer and rose to the rank of General because his father pulled strings ("wasta" in Lebanese) to get him admitted into the school. But he was so bad that after he graduated, he was exiled to the Lebanese Navy, which is almost non-existent and one step higher than the lavatory cleaning regiment of the Lebanese military institution. So when the Syrian occupation made him a President because of his treason to his fellow Lebanese - often collaborators are chosen from the pool of degenerate imbeciles of the occupied country - he thought so highly of himself that he decided in turn to pass the mantle on to his son, whom he had named him Emile as well, like these American backwoods types in Texas who discover an oil well in their backyard and think they have become tycoons, so they create dynasties of backwoods tycoons carrying the same name for generations with the roman numerals I, II, III etc. suffixed to their names.
Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri is grooming his son Bassel, whom he affectionately named after Hafez Assad's other son who would have been, predictably, the Syrian President today had he not died in a car accident on Syria's deadly desert highways. Bassel Berri, for better or for worse, is therefore destined for a future lordship over the disgruntled, suicidal, dispossessed, disenfranchised, chronic liberationists, acutely resistance-inclined, eternally-victimized Shiites, notwithstanding the millions they make from the hashish (in Lebanon) and diamond (in Africa) trades and the billions they receive in aid from Iran.
Hassan Nasrallah, the divine Shiite prophet of Hezbollah, gave his son up in martyrdom long time ago, which means in this case that the gonadal transfer was quickly followed by a transfer to Paradise and straight into the lap of the 70 virgins, which pre-empted the political transfer. Come to think of it, why would anyone choose to lord it over 1 million bearded and veiled Lebanese Shiites, when you can bask in the delight of 70 virgins in heaven?
Amin Gemayel himself, the total-failure of a former Lebanese President, whose mandate among the hillbillies of the Maronite Christian mountain heartland is also divinely-descended since, the motto of the Phalange-Kataeb Party being "God, Homeland, Family", political power flows directly from God to the Country and straight into the DNA of the Gemayel family. What is unique about Amin Gemayel's example is that a single gonadal transfer was followed by four separate political transfers, each in the aftermath of a Grim Reaper action in the Gemayel gene pool: Amin inherited his uncle Maurice's parliamentary seat upon Maurice's death circa 1972, his brother Bashir's presidency upon the latter's assassination by Hafez Assad in 1982, his father Pierre's leadership of the Phalange Kataeb Party in 1987 when his father passed away, and lately his own son Pierre's parliamentary seat in 2006 when his son was assassinated by the Syrians. If he keeps his health going, he may in fact, inherit his own grandchildren after the next Lebanese war in another generation or so. This goes to show that genes, in gonadal-to-political transfers like this, are recyclable. Even if one is a failure in the first instance, he can keep trying not to be a failure in a second, third, or fourth attempt, as long as one has the genes. Nature, in Lebanese feudal systems, does not need nurture.
Another God of the Lebanese political pantheon who "suffered" a similar fate is Ghassan Tueni. After a political career including an ambassadorship at the UN in the 1970s, Mr. Tueni, who holds one of the virtual monopolies on the Lebanese Press through his newspaper the An-Nahar, bestowed the mantle onto his son Gibran. Unlike many of the gonadal recipients in the Lebanese feudal system, Gibran did try to earn some of the mantle, and he deserves some merit. However, when Gibran was assassinated by a Syrian car bomb in 2005, his father Ghassan retrieved the mantle back and has now replaced his son in office, a case of upward politico-gonadal transfer, from progeny to parent. One word on the press monopolies in the Lebanese "free" press: You see, in Lebanon, you have to be a member of the Press Mafia (the Press Syndicate) to be allowed to start a newspaper or nowadays to have a TV channel, and in order to be a member of the Press Syndicate, the Dons and Godfathers (like Ghassan Tueni) have to induct you into the Syndicate. Which means that the political-feudal-religious conglomerate that runs Lebanon also controls the press and public opinion. In this Mafia environment, each politician or one of his crony poodles has a newspaper and/or a TV channel, and all public opinion in Lebanon is a charade of free speech since each of these media outlets is a mouthpiece for a politician or a religious group...). Ghassan Tueni, in the pantheon of the religious-political-familial-feudal Mafia is one of the "representatives" of the Greek Orthodox Christians in Lebanon.
Hariri and Aoun present interesting, though not surprising cases, of "reverse transfer" whereby gonadal supremacy over the political does not begin in the gonadal realm. It, in fact, starts - by virtue of money (Hariri) or power (Aoun) - in the political realm, from very modest gonadal origins. However, once established, the political charcater morphs into a gonadal dynasty that is then propagated strictly via gonads.
The list is long and I could go on and on with the Murrs, Hariris, Jumblatts, Salams, Frangiehs, Chamouns, and yes - even reformist Michel Aoun himself is surrounded by a couple of sons-in-law, nephews, and the like who, regardless of their competence or merit, are in the top echelons of the Free Patriotic Movement, simply because of their partial gonadal connection to the new patriarch Michel Aoun. I bet you if Lebanon was more advanced on women's rights, one of Michel Aoun's three daughters (he has no sons) would be running around in that top echelon and lining herself to inherit the political mantle. But eggs in Lebanon are still not as valued as sperm is. So it may be a while.
Back to what started this peregrination deep into Lebanon's political Fallopian tubes and Vas Deferenses: Michel Mouawad. Here are some of the great ideas that this budding genius was pontificating about the other day following the Doha Agreement:
March 14 General Secretariat member Michel Mouawad to LBC Television:
May 23, 2008 (as poorly translated into English by the NowLebanon web site that supports the dinosaur luminaries of the March 14 brew. Between parentheses are my comments to emphasize the genius of the young man and the bad translations of NowLebanon) (http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDetails.aspx?ID=44240)
Mouawad: Our biggest compromise was to give the opposition the obstructing third. It was done because of our fear that civil war would bring down the project of March 14. (Smashing! I am not sure what tract is the object of the "obstructing")
Mouawad: Lebanon cannot be rebuilt as long as the state does not have exclusive control over weapons. (Far reaching!)
Mouawad: The primary mission of the president who will be elected on Sunday is to strengthen presidential authority and stretch it all over Lebanese soil.(Brilliant! I had no idea that presidential authority was so elastic in Lebanon that one can "stretch" it at will)
Mouawad: The Lebanese army and security forces have proven incapable of defending the democratic system against illegitimate weapons.(The man is a genius!)
Mouawad: The government´s decisions were politically correct, but the timing was wrong.(Acute Thinking! I don't think NowLebanon knows that "politically correct" has a double-entendre)
Mouawad: Hezbollah used its weapons against the inside when it invaded Beirut. The government´s decisions might have been a justification for its behavior, but they are not the primary reason. However, had the government not made these decisions, the party would have found another argument.(Sharp! Again, the "inside" here is hopefully not in reference to somebody's GI tract)
Mouawad: The 1960 electoral law does not mean the caza. The basis of this law is the division of Beirut into three electoral district(s).(Just superior!)
Can anyone argue that this young man is not destined one day to replace his mother, his father, his uncles and aunts, cousins and all the Mouawad baraka? His comments reflect such depth of thinking and clairvoyance that I would actually vote for his great grand children, if I am still alive in 2080 when they inherit the mantle. Perhaps, I should go to the notary and sign an affidavit or a proxy in which I cast my future votes and those of my children and their children for several future generations of Mouawads because they got the genes.
Lucky are the Lebanese for this lineup of current leaders, as well as the ones who are incubating today so one day in the future they will monopolize, pilfer, rob, kill, embezzle, massacre, receive divine inspiration, etc. over the lives of future generations of Lebanese.
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