Israeli bombing of Nabatieh, March 10 2026. Wikimedia Commons
Poem and commentary by Omar Sabbagh, in Beirut
Freedom In The Age of Trump
A simple bird once argued with a snake;
and it wasn’t because the one was
a creature of the air and the other
a soap-like, slippery soul bound to the hinterland
of the earth. Their two minds tussled
for days on end, the one, a fool’s last stand
following the dream of a sterling freedom, the other
wishing for chaos in its stead – the foil and fake
in the mirror of a more wholesome way.
The bird spoke in airy flights, the snake’s
tongue slithering with a sophistry
that proved compelling. Rules,
said the one, were the failsafe ground of a real
and working freedom. Play would follow
the base of an inbuilt core. No,
said the snake, pointing with the wickedness of its curves
at the world we live in with a slyness and a verve,
I would have all hoodwinked and duped,
thinking the loop of their liberty closed
when all we have today are strands of riven hope.
***
The bombs don’t usually land in the part of West Beirut where I live. So, I can say that I am relatively safer than others in other parts of Beirut and of course in Lebanon more generally. That said, I remember a conversation I had during the last war here in 2024. I was chatting to a security guard outside one of my university buildings before going in to teach. And he made a fair and frightening point. Even if this part of Beirut is comparatively safer, still, you never did know: if the wrong person happened to be driving by in your vicinity, the wrong person, that is to say, from the perspective of a remotely-manned drone, then you could be in trouble. The idea that ‘shit happens’ has never felt shittier. The idea that things, however much one tries to stay safe and well, are in their essence unpredictable here, is what frightens one most. Not that I or anyone really expects to be able to fully control his or her reality, but that having in one’s nerve-wracked mind a sense of zero control is perhaps the worst part of this hellish scenario.
Orwell’s 1984
In fact, at present I am teaching Orwell’s iconic 1984. Teaching online. And as part of our discussions, to deepen and inform them, I have introduced passages from Hannah Arendt’s pioneering study from the late 1950s, The Origins of Totalitarianism. And one feature of Orwell’s dystopia, logged in different ways in Arendt’s work as well, that stands-out as most typical of the workings of terror is the very unpredictability that whittles and whittles away at the victims of that sad vision. It’s not just the fact that people are ‘un-personed’ or become intersubstitutable counters in times of terror, but the radical uncertainty of how or when or why this might happen.
For instance, early on in the novel, Winston Smith logs in a kind of subjunctive mood how when another character has gone missing, there could many different ways of understanding it. He could have been killed by Big Brother; he could be returned into circulation soon; he could be returned to circulation soon, only to be killed later, after a little lag, in a year or two; he could be a heretic, and maybe that was why he disappeared; or, say, that his disappearance or death might just have been part of the staple working mechanism of the government, and so on…. All these outcomes are scary. But the scariest part is the uncertainty, the idea that you will never know why someone has been or is or is to be persecuted.
Dying or being wounded is one thing. Loved ones dying or being wounded is another thing. One’s fellow citizens dying or being wounded is another frightful thing. But having any of this happen without any real sense of any ‘real’ or logical, explanatory motive, is one of the worst parts of this quagmire. It might be a complaint as old as warfare itself, or, perhaps, as old as modern warfare. But still, it proves just one more horrible facet of all of this death and destruction.
As I say, I haven’t been a victim of the bombing as yet, nor has anyone I know or love, so far at least. I was awoken twice the other night though, by a huge thundering, thudding sound, which rattled the bones of the very ground – but which I was later told by my parents who are used to this kind of thing and can tell the difference was the sound of jets ‘breaking the sound barrier.’ When I enquired why they did this, if they weren’t going to drop a bomb, I was told that it was merely to keep-up the intimidation, like a wake-up call and reminder that while we’re not being bombed, we could be. Yes, we could be.
The other feature of this dehumanizing and depersonalizing reality, picked up in Orwell and in Arendt, is the idea that one’s death becomes meaningless in these kinds of wars where true innocents are being felled out of life and out of livelihood, not by accident (that might happen once or twice), but by the proverbial mechanism of spreading terror and enticing submission. As Orwell indicates and as Arendt articulates about the totalitarian mindset, it’s not just that human beings are being killed; it’s that humanity is being killed first, so that when human beings are then killed, there’s no gauge or measure left to trace the sheer human loss.
And while there are many, many people (millions if not billions) who are appalled, and many, many people who name the terror for what it is, yet the harebrained evil continues apace, emboldened even. To my mind, one of the worst aspects of this war is the brazen shamelessness of those who spread the terror. It’s uncanny, unsettling, unmanning, when your home is being bombarded by those who seem to be so lacking in any kind of common sense or decency.
Passive before imperialist power
But the current horrible mess we find ourselves seemingly locked inside has a longer pedigree. Two bits of anecdotal evidence, combined, might put our current cul-de-sac into perspective.
In 2003 I was watching what might be viewed (though the counters can shift in time, and periodicities are notoriously labile) as the opening gambit of the last two decades and more of imperial conquest. I was watching CNN at home, while the massacring bombs were displayed as they ransacked and gutted Baghdad and Iraq. And not by any means a stupid person nor apolitical, I caught myself in a brief obtuse stupor: for about ten seconds, I forgot about the ‘reality’ in front my very eyes. I caught myself in fact in the act of watching just another ‘Hollywood’ action movie; before then slapping myself in the face.
What this personal example illustrates to me, quite vividly, is that since the rise of the New World Order at the start of the 1990’s, after the fall of Soviet communism, though the ideology of globalization, including the newly globalizing technology, was that all this technical advance was ‘bringing us closer together’ – the truth was to the contrary. I don’t have to invoke what Derrida famously called ‘Archive Fever,’ to come to the conclusion from my own personal experience, that it was the very new media that had rendered me so obtuse before the dying thousands and thousands, in real time before my eyes; and that the very accessibility of the technology (in this case ‘Shock and Awe’ on TV), had isolated me from those dying and by way of such atomizing processes, rendered me more passive before imperialist power. That bit of ideology was exposed for me that evening in Spring of 2003.
Spontaneous revolution
The dovetailing point I want to make in this regard is to recall the curtailed ‘revolution’ on the streets of Lebanon in 2019. I wasn’t here in person, but I did read of the way that when the people were in the streets clamoring for change, spontaneously they began in miniscule to self-govern. People who had the wherewithal set up tents serving food and drink to sustain the protesting million or so. That movement eventually succumbed to the same old petrified sectarian mold of Lebanese politics. But one doesn’t have to be overly-clued-in to the machinations of said politics, as I am not, to realize that people even in as (politically) afflicted a public space as Lebanon can and indeed do relate and work-together, and that this common feeling and common action can often be spontaneous. And that its very spontaneity is revelatory. People do not have to be tarred with the brush of some claim about human nature being inevitably selfish or competitive. No. In times of crisis, the most difficult but also the most propitious times, people, ordinary people, know how to build relationships with the potential of their flourishing. This, in spite of the way an older order of things is as things stand still able to quash any real telling hopes for change.
But we must keep such historic moments – even when they fail to actualize into a palpably different world – alive, pulsing and beating still. Without a sense of history (and especially the plurality of a history not dictated by the victors) the present as much as the future are jeopardized. Without keeping faith with the stories of the vanquished we relinquish ourselves to a world where might is once more and may continue to be irrevocably right. And Orwell knew this in his bones.
In Orwell’s novel, and in Aldous Huxley’s earlier dystopia, Brave New World, the creation of passive solipsists as fodder for domination is inculcated as well by the eradication of history and of historicization. In 1984, the symbol of a completely ‘useless’ object, a trinket Winston Smith finds and marvels at in a junk shop, is there to remind him and the reader of the ‘objectivity’ of the past in a world so eager to eradicate any sense of history or context that would permit evaluation, judgment or criticism of the current system. When all we have is a perpetually eliding ‘present’, bereft of any historical gauge, we lose the objectivity, the truth as it were of subjectivity, of agency. It’s a bit like the illusion that the market and that supply and demand really are in essence ‘democratic.’ It’s an illusion because it’s not the case on the whole that I or you ‘vote’ with our dollar, say, for this or that product, in a vacuum, a-historically; rather, that we as demand are forged, formed, constituted by supply via the ever-improving techniques of marketing, advertising, digital and social media, analytics and so on. And the same goes globally. As the late Samir Amin argued, while the ideology of ‘capitalism in the age of globalization’ is that (without tariffs or subsidies, say) on paper and legally or formally all global traders are or were supposed to be ‘equal’ partners, the historical fact remains that, for just one instance, the US has the most almighty military behind it, has many of the most impactful financial centers, houses in its major cities, the UN, the World Bank and the IMF, has the pervasive use and influence of ‘Hollywood’, and so on. Which is to say that, in context, there’s nothing ‘free’ about such ‘competition.’
And so, whether it’s a kind of solipsistic uncertainty engendered in us, terrifying and incapacitating us, the atomization of peoples, hoodwinked into the illusion of living in some kind of ‘global village’ (rather than a global wasteland), or the eradication of history and by way of history the possibility of critical objectivity – in all these ways the whole notion of ‘truth’ is perilously close to evaporation. When blatant war crimes and genocide can be dubbed by the perpetrators with such open, obvious and unaccountable mendacity as kinds of ‘self-defense’, well, the world of Orwellian ‘doublethink’ is I think revelling in a heyday that is unprecedented.
