142 Between Private and Public
to the nation, what was destroyed of the infrastructure, the
army and the economy. As for the group responsible for the
war, it became clear that they didn’t do anything for those
who joined them. Only those close to them made profit.
This [Lebanese nationalism] is what the war destroyed.
Lebanon doesn’t mean anything to me. (Abu Juwad, Amal)
No one gained anything, but we all lost. We became “the sick
man of the Orient,” like the Ottoman Empire was before the
First World War. (Pierre, NLP)
I regret the sad destiny of Lebanon. Harām, it was a shame
what happened. Everyone used to envy us. (Karim, the LF)Reading these accounts one gets the impression that the fighters have
truly learned from the war. In the words of Hisham (PSP), “Perhaps the
only good result of the war was that it taught me who is my enemy; not
the Christians, but the responsible who are truly to blame.” However, this
solidarity between the victims against al-kibār is a partial truth. Other,
more reproachful and self-vindicating discourses also exist, produced by
communitarian solidarities which, if anything, have grown stronger since
the end of the war. One might suspect that the journalists or newspapers
have had their own agenda in bringing out a specific discourse. To bor-
row a term from Andrew Shryock, “off stage” and sometimes even “on
display,” many Lebanese still have grudges to bear.^51 The former Leftists
are an interesting example in this respect, since their solidarity cannot be
described as communitarian. Because their vision of a secular society lost
out in the war and the postwar period, many today feel that sectarianism
as a political system has “won” the war, and that they were in the right in
defending the Palestinians and calling for social and political change back
in 1975. As Ahmad, who is still a member of the Lebanese Communist
Party, explains:
I feel a personal loyalty towards those martyrs who are among
the cost which can’t be redeemed in the fight that was taking
place at that time. And maybe loyalty for the people who fell. I
can see how it has been overshadowed by the general fight for
a different nation.^52