Plus ça change: The Chronicles of a Juvenile Nation

There's a central preoccupation in Milan Kundera's work that revolves around the theme of the small nation experiencing the uncertainties of such a precarious condition. His superb intermingling of love and politics often crosses the boundaries between both, asserting once that we are witness to much larger forces than ourselves and often that we are capable of creating a path and a persona that are uniquely ours. What's true of the individual is also true of the small nation. In many respects, Lebanon's modern history has primarily been defined by being a small nation. Too often though, it seemed that Lebanon accepted that it is small, but never figured the nation part out. In what follows are some thoughts on how this failure continues to place the country in a perpetual state of emergency.

The Forensic Alternative to the Truth: Thoughts on the Nasrallah Speech and the Difficulty of Writing History in Lebanon

The artist Walid Raad (The Atlas Project) observed a curious aspect of the Lebanese Civil War: confronted by their own powerlessness in the face of car bombs, the police turned to recording meticulously all details of the crime scene without any serious hope of finding the perpetrators. The press would always report the license plate and engine numbers of the cars used in the bombing, as well as other details such as colour and make. Many questions about the war remain unanswered, but we have an encyclopedic record of all the secondary facts, and this is as close as we ever got to writing the history of the war. As the state disintegrated its agents went through the motions, reducing their official roles to that of skilled scribes.