Charles Elias Chartouni/Hezbollah, Global Criminality, Political Subversion and the Parody of Lebanese Politics/شارل الياس شرتوني/حزب الله، إجرام عالمي، تخريب سياسي وهزلية السياسة اللبنانية

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Hezbollah, Global Criminality, Political Subversion and the Parody of Lebanese Politics
Charles Elias Chartouni/December 20/2020
شارل الياس شرتوني/حزب الله إجرام عالمي، تخريب سياسي وهزلية السياسة اللبنانية

The reports on global criminality networks run by Hezbollah, throw into sharp relief the inner connection between the three pillars which account for its role in different operational theaters.

Based on lawyers and intelligence reports, they spotlight the critical nexus between the variables on the basis of which proceed the subversive dynamics of Hezbollah.

This elaborate perspective helps us understand the gist of its strategy, relativize the role of Lebanese politics in its scheme, and get a better grasp on why its Secretary General, Hassan Nasrallah, downplayed the centrality of Lebanese issues in the general design of Hezbollah’s politics.

Lebanese politics are ancillary to an overall subversion strategy which harnesses the rules of the internal political game, and tie them to the objectives set by the Iranian commands and their domestic subsidiaries.

The successful hijacking of Lebanese politics testifies to the state of institutional simulacrum to which Lebanese political life is relegated, whereas the real power lies in the hands of Hezbollah and its different agencies that took effective control of the country’s strategic levers ( politics, finance, economics, security … ) and muted them into operational platforms to run their criminal and subversive activities worldwide.

The illegal trade mechanisms ( drugs, armament, car dealerships, financial fraud…. ) intertwining with money laundering schemes, front companies and complicit Lebanese banks and lawyers, have yielded a complex architecture based on cooperation between Hezbollah’s institutional conglomerates, Shiite diasporas, religious institutions and occasional partners ( al Qaida, Latin American drug cartels, international mafias ).

This power configuration cannot, by any means, adjust to the institutional mandates of a regular State, and therefore the plot around which spins the actual Lebanese political life, is a mere ploy to set foreclosures and solidify the dynamics of subversion.

The deliberate degradation of public life, the dismantling of the constitutional State for the sake of the predatory State, the politics of systemic corruption ( clientelism, patrimonialism, rentier politics and prebends, communal and individual plundering of State resources…. ) are antithetic to reformists attempts, and destructive of any sense of national belonging and civic boundedness.

The deliberate dispelling of the Lebanese national narrative, disseminated by various Shiite religious authorities, that relayed the terrorist attack of August 4th 2020, is no hazard, it conveys a brutal disengagement from the national, civic and moral compact, and the end of the Lebanese national comity and its attending civility.

Shiite fascism is in the business of overt political subversion, and the current political simulation is part of its choreography and transient political repertoire, and nothing seems to deviate from the initial political plan.

Lebanese have to reckon with raw political facts before re-engaging the fallacies which have concealed a long term subversive strategy and made it possible.