thoughtmechanics

Over the last little while there’s been considerable mention in articles dealing with the troubles in Lebanon that many of the youth today, who are itching for a sectarian fight, are too young to remember the horrors of the previous Lebanese civil war. These article fail to mention though, the fact that most of these youth were brought up with stories of glory and bravery emanating from the civil war years.

If the Lebanese are anything like the rest of the people of the Mediterranean, then they’ve probably raised their children on a diet of stories from those year. Most certainly these would be stories about how an older brother, an uncle or a father were killed unjustly by others, or how justly they themselves killed others.

When I was a little boy, I was living in a small Greek village. My grandfather and grandmother told me many stories of both the second world war and the Greek civil war that followed. Of all the dead relatives and friends of the family I learned about, all had died in glory, either in a flash of bravery fighting the enemy, or at the hands of cowards who had set up a trap for them. All this, 30 years after the war had ended!

Now, imagine how fresh these memories are in Lebanon, and how vivid these stories must seem to the young minds who’ve heard all of them. Also keep in mind that we mostly never tell stories of cowardice and injustice about our own. Rather, we keep silent, or worse, we lie. These lies, and even this silence, will invariably lead another generation to its death, in Lebanon, and anywhere else people insist on glorifying the most inglorious of human enterprises…war….