the ‘big five’ club comprising the united states, russia, france, the uk, and china imposes political and geographical influence over others and their colonial and cultural heritage, in addition to economic power and a nuclear arsenal.
there are countries that are similar in greatness and importance, such as india, germany, and japan, but they lack one or more of the above conditions of greatness.
president macron, is the president of a country that is a member of the ‘big five’, and the only president in history who decided to grant a citizen of another country and a different culture the highest official honor of his country, and for that he traveled, in very complex health and security conditions to her homeland, lebanon, and her home to deliver lebanon’s pride and icon, mrs. fayrouz, french legion of honor, personally, bypassing all formalities and protocols and ignoring all pillars of the state, and this has not happened in history and may not happen again.
lebanon is one of the completely failed countries that is not expected to rise from the bottom soon, but it and its people mean a lot to those who knew the reality of that country and the nature of its people, as was the case with president macron who broke all norms and protocols at his own risk for his belief in the uniqueness of lebanon. this leads us to wonder about the secret of lebanese magic.
lebanon is admired for its beauty and culture or for the will of its people and their creativity. the lebanese have succeeded in areas that were not originally part of their history. lebanon was for centuries a country of farmers and fishermen.
the mulberry trees on which the silkworm lived until the first world war covered most of its areas, producing silk and exporting it to the french city of lyon. cotton was a well-known southern product, but the ottomans eliminated it. therefore, it is not a country of businessmen despite that we find that the most successful businessmen in the region are lebanese, and so in industry and many other fields, and wherever i went in the world i found a lebanese working, legally or otherwise, and often in a privileged financial situation.
lebanon is a necessity for the region, as it and syria which was also destroyed, are considered the last of the countries of the east which are very diverse in everything, in language, ethnicities, cultures, sects, and religions and therefore some, the majority of whom are not lebanese, are trying to protect this country from ‘extinction’ and to maintain its co-existence between the sunni, maronite, shiite and alawi communities and the armenians (in their divisions), the ismailis, the copts, the orthodox (in their divisions), the syriacs, the chaldeans, the evangelists, the catholics, the assyrians, the latinos, the jews, the druze in addition to the kurds and the chechens, and others because there is no choice for all of these but to coexist in peace.
however, today everything in lebanon is eroding. queues of cars empty of gasoline and owners with pockets empty of dollars in front of empty gas stations, not to mention the tens of thousands of patients waiting for treatment and many of them, like kidney patients are threatened with death and doctors are exhausted, hospitals are missing everything and garbage is everywhere and the hours of power outages are increasing and there are problems in every alley.
we write and others write and we feel sad and they share with us their feelings but the rest do not seem to care, not because they have no feelings but because they are tired just like france will get tired of the gulf, and kuwait in particular. as long as the lebanese politicians continue to be stubborn, nothing can save this country from certain destruction.