The Dividing Narrative — Big Lies of The Lebanese Ruling Class (ep. #7)

Here are some of the main themes of the Dividing Narrative used incessantly by the Lebanese Ruling Class. I call them Big Lies:

(Taken from Part 3 of the book The Lebanese Disease. Full step-by-step guide on how to fight the Lebanese Ruling Class available as free PDF book)

• The Za3im must be strong in order to protect you from the Other. Nobody else can protect you, definitely not the weak State. The leader is your only savior.
• It’s bigger than you and there are ‘dark forces’ and ‘global conspiracies’ happening, so you must accept some suffering in your life for that cause.
• You agree on nothing with the Lebanese from the Other side.
• Lebanon will always be sectarian/broken/hostage to regional politics, so living conditions will always be unstable internally.
• You are worth nothing compared to the ‘greater cause’; your dreams and hopes are not important and you have no right to be selfish and ask for a good life for your loved ones.

The leaders of the LRC are very good at this game. And we the people keep participating and repeating that narrative, playing along to their macabre theatrical performance instead of forcing a discussion on practical solutions to electricity shortages, economic growth or other reforms.

Everyday Dividing Narrative Examples

• When a member of the ruling class goes on TV and accuses their ‘opponent’ of being in the way of reforms, claiming they have ‘files’ and that ‘names will be dropped’ (but never are), that’s the Dividing Narrative in action, aiming to keep citizens of one party perpetually in a state of rage (not anger, rage) against the Other citizens.
• When a so-called political analyst or thinker spends 3 hours on TV explaining in the smallest details why the unrelated visit of some US general to some capital in the region is the sign of ‘major moves’ and ‘risk on the country’, and that ‘we must wait and see what happens before making any major decision’, that is the Ruling Class using one of its propaganda agents to keep you and me in a state of fear, to divert your attention from the core issues of local corruption and theft.
• When a ‘spontaneous’ street demonstration, armed or not, takes over areas of the country on superficial matters like a ‘song that insults religion’ or ‘an attack on our values’ or ‘the politicization (tesyiss) of the work of a judge’, that is the LRC diverting attention in order to buy time or to get people to forget the current issue.
• When an LRC leader like Hassan Nasrallah gets on TV and spends an hour yelling about traitors and global conspiracies, while his people are starving, dying of disease and living without electricity, this is because the LRC needs to keep yelling so that both sides of the people stay in a state of shock and fear. That way we don’t have the time and quiet needed to think about who the true enemy is. Now is not the time!

For further proof, just open the local news and see for yourself what percent of the time is spent discussing talking points like the above. It’s a depressingly high number, the Dividing Narrative is everywhere. We are purposefully inundated with it.

You think the Ruling Class members don’t coordinate with one another on the above?

You think they don’t intentionally use such techniques and order their agents to act this way on TV or in places of worship, on specific days and using specific words from their Narrative?

You think they don’t give specific instructions to their men on the street, to only burn tires in predefined areas, on this road but not that road, after coordinating with the other members of the LRC?

Of course they do. This is their full-time job: The preservation of Power. Not fixing the electricity or prosecuting the corrupt or stimulating the economy.

Power. Power at any cost. All else is second.

No matter how many faceless citizens die. No matter how many explosions happen. No matter how many starve, or leave the country, or commit suicide out of despair, or die for lack of medical care, or take their children out of school to beg in the streets.

The Ruling Class, the Ghoul of Lebanon, must survive. It must stay supreme. Nothing and no one else matters. This is what every media person, man of religion, politician or other member of the LRC repeats to himself every single day.

Power. Power at any cost.

The Diving Narrative protects the dictatorship of the Ruling Class

It is true that LRC members are often openly in disagreement, particularly on matters related to power sharing (who gets how many seats in government), money (who gets what important foreign loan contract), influence (who gets to place the administrator of a public institution), etc… This is what is most commonly seen in the media and most often discussed among the general population.

However, at a deeper level the LRC members act with a sense of collaboration and unity, even brotherhood, when it comes to its most important, most supreme objective: The preservation of their existence as a Ruling Class that is above the law and that has control over all power and money and life in the Lebanese nation.

Therefore, and even though Lebanon is not in a one-party military dictatorship, the Ruling Class as a body acts effectively as a dictatorship.

This is one reason why achieving reforms and rule of law in Lebanon is so hard, because the LRC can act like a single dictator when it needs to (united list against independents in elections) AND use its multiple internal factions to play the citizens against one another when needed. The Dividing Narrative tool is flexible enough to serve them in both cases. The LRC is at times a snake with one big head and at other times an octopus with multiple arms that act like they don’t like one another. This is why it often feels like you’re fighting against smoke, that you can’t cause any damage to any politician. The Dividing Narrative helps them slip away each time.

We have allowed ourselves to be enslaved — we gave them the Power

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in our selves
- Shakespeare

The Ruling Class was able to brainwash us to give up Power willingly.

By keeping us divided using threats of violence and the Dividing Narrative, they were able to get re-elected in large majority during the 2022 Parliamentary elections. So yes, they planned for it, but WE gave them the Power, each time, to make our lives more miserable.

The Lebanese Disease = The Dividing Narrative once fully incorporated/downloaded into your mind, into every fiber of your being.

The Lebanese Disease is the Dividing Narrative becoming automatic in how you think, live and breathe. It is similar in that sense in how you brush your teeth without thinking — what hand you use, where you place the toothbrush, each movement repeated mindlessly. The Lebanese Disease is the automatization inside you of the Dividing Narrative.

The good news is that this narrative is man-made, and thus it can be un-made. More specifically, it can be replaced by another one, which I will call the Uniting Narrative and something that we will develop further in this book.

We must heal ourselves from this Lebanese Disease if we are to achieve real change in the country. Since we have shown that each member of the LRC protects the others, we must let go of any person we know that actively participates in the LRC. It has to be kellon yaaneh kellon (all means all). You need to let go of your Za3im as you ask other citizens to let go of theirs.

You must boycott any person that does not explicitly reject their previous affiliation with the groups that make up the Ruling Class. Even if they are visibly nice to you and you don’t think of them as evil, they are part of and refuse to leave a system that is
pure evil. They have blood on their hands, even if indirectly — even banking and media and religious personalities — because they have contributed in keeping the system alive. They are all the enemy.

Oh, and the charity some of them do would not be needed if they had allowed for a strong State and institutions to be built (steal the whole bread, give back breadcrumbs).

Some are more responsible than others, to be sure, and that will be for the courts and the Justice System to decide, once we have empowered them.

Make no mistake: We are at war.

Look around you. Look at the devastation, the human and physical destruction, the decay and despair. We are at war against a violent dictatorship.

The Ruling Class knows it is fighting for its survival and is using every weapon in their arsenal to keep us broken, to keep us down, divided and disorganized. Why do you think they keep their violent and aggressive way of speaking, even in this day of great suffering? Why are there fake new controversies every week, about women’s bikinis or teenagers’ music?

Lebanon is under occupation. Do you think the roadblocks, the massive stone fences, the big pictures everywhere, the aggressive music, are an accident? This is occupation by the Ruling Class, to show they own the space and the country. The message is the same online as well: We’re everywhere and we are popular. And you have no Power. And this will never change.

But remember, we gave them Power. This means we can take Power back.

We the people are not powerless, otherwise how could we have given it? This means that if we choose to let go of the Lebanese Disease and organize in good numbers, we can take away the Power they gained and transfer it back to the State and to the Justice system, where it belongs.

Continue reading in next post or download full PDF for free at https://linktr.ee/IntisarLB