Lebanon & the Spectacle

Bibliography

"Dozens Mourn Man Who Killed Himself In Busy Beirut District". 2020. Reuters.Com. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lebanon-crisis-suicide/dozens-mourn-man-who-killed-himself-in-busy-beirut-district-idUSKBN24425P.

Richmond, Michael, and Jack Dean. 2013. "The Occupied Times – Media, Activism & Society Of The Spectacle". Theoccupiedtimes.Org. https://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=11489.

THE REACTIVE APPROACH TO LEBANONS TIME OF CRISIS

In the early evening of August 4th the final crack in the fabric of the once crowned jewel of the Middle East shattered the lives and ambitions of the Lebanese, until all that was left was broken glass and rubble. An explosion at a warehouse at the port of Beirut sent a shockwave throughout the city, destroying buildings within a five-mile radius, killing almost 200 people, wounding more than 6000 and displacing 300,000. Thousands more lost their homes, possessions and livelihoods. Many angry and desperate Lebanese told local television stations that the explosion did not only destroy their material possessions, but more importantly, their souls. What caused the explosion was 2750 kilograms of ammonium nitrate that was stored at the warehouse for seven years. Politicians were blamed for negligence and failure to dispose of the highly explosive material. The government was forced to resign under the pressure of mass demonstrations. It was the final straw in a country devastated by 15 years of civil war followed by a deep economic and financial crisis, mostly fueled by corrupt governments and politicians, the same warlords who dominated the country during the civil war. As the people of Lebanon were left in shock and despair, the rest of the world was aghast.

By August of 2020, the socio-political spectrum had already undergone the largest civil rights movement since the 1960s, faced the deadliest global pandemic since the Spanish Flu of1918, and struggled to deal with protecting those faced with famine and abject poverty in Yemen. Yet, when the explosion in Beirut surfaced at the forefront of all social media, Lebanon was met with the same level of conviction and empathy. #PrayforLebanon and #PrayforBeirut became the two top trending posts on twitter, whilst images of the damage and links to sites asking for donations for the victims filled all social media. At this exact point in time this can be considered a truly defiant act of unity in a time of true crisis for the people of Lebanon. However, what separated these two entities in this act of unity was that for the rest of the world Lebanon's time of crisis had only just begun, but the reality for the people of Lebanon was that they had been in a state of crisis for years. The explosion overshadowed the real crisis Lebanon was facing. The world chose to respond to an explosion and not the absolute corruption of consecutive Lebanese governments and the power grip of ageing warlords who brought the nation to its knees. The collective social media attention was gripped by the horror of the explosion whilst neglecting the root causes and the failure of corrupt officials to prevent such a tragedy in the first place. In turn, the world mistook their own reaction for that of activism.

The application of semiotics to print media revolutionised a whole industry and forever changed the medium by which the consumer receives and processes information. We now find ourselves at a major shift in the platform we choose to first receive information from. For the past 15 years social media has become the dominant force in the circulation of information. But the platform is still in its infancy and has a long way to go before it matures into a tool of sharing and receiving information. The main factor that separates social media from its predecessors is the information that presents itself on the platform has become inseparable to the semiotics that are required to validate it. Thus, a cycle of semiotic dependency forms in which the consumer of the information will remain apathetic toward what they are learning, unless some form of spectacle or imagery is provided. Taken from the article ‘Media, Activism & Society of the Spectacle', Michael Richmond states; “The spectacle, instead of being a mediator of the actions that are taken, now becomes an active player in how actions manifest. We find it impossible to entirely escape the spectacle and its power to formulate subjectivity.”

The current climate of online activism is now intertwined with the power of the spectacle. The result allows for instances of great misunderstanding toward the issue at hand. A recent example of this being the application of George Floyd’s symbolic last words, "I can't breathe”, being used as part of a face filter on Instagram. Communicating murder and injustice in such a manner does not establish and explain the gravity of the situation but commodifies and manipulates it. The use of semiotics within online activism better allows an individual to communicate their own virtue and concern for the situation at hand. But the process of sharing this information has been simplified to a dangerous degree. To voice one’s concern and empathy requires no more than a couple taps of a phone screen. There is no way of monitoring or understanding whether the number of images being posted can directly equate to the number of individuals who have chosen to educate themselves on the relative issue. The most recent example of this being #BlackoutTuesday. What was intended to be this mass online spectacle of all social media feeds being blacked out by a universally posted image of a black square proved to be of the more controversial forms of support to the recent civil rights movement. In this case once again the idea of spectacle presented itself as a more valid response to the spreading of actual information and detracted from the real injustice at hand. When a major crime or act of hate reanimates itself in terms of the response it receives, that response has the capacity to very much either validify or diminish the matter at hand if the response is not handled carefully. In the case of spectacles within activism the issue at hand is its ability to mostly inspire and mobilize a reactive response.

On the 3rd of July, a man walked into the centre of Beirut’s busy neighborhood of Hamra and shot himself in the head. All the man had left on him was a copy of a clean criminal record and a note in Arabic which translated to; “I am not a heretic, but hunger is heresy”. The man’s desperate act was an insight into the absolute financial despair of the people of Lebanon. In the past year, a breakdown in the country's banking system and skyrocketing inflation had triggered mass protests against the sectarian politicians, who have ruled the country since the 1975-1990 civil war and whose deep corruption is to blame for the economic crisis. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the World Bank projected that 45% of people in Lebanon would be below the poverty line in 2020. At the start of October 2019, a shortage of foreign currency led to the Lebanese pound losing value against the dollar on a newly emerged black market for the first time in two decades. The economic situation has pushed tens of thousands of people into abject poverty in a country with no welfare system and a bankrupt government. With such economic and political uncertainty national banks were forced to freeze everyone out of their accounts and savings as a way of protecting their own better interest. In the midst of all of that and despite the widespread street protests, the Western online and traditional media remained silent. Flash forward to August 4, Lebanon was now at the center of global social media attention, though for a brief time.

In regard to re-activism, what for the most part can be seen is that it is merely no more than an emotional reaction. A singular moment of concern triggered by an image you have seen. This automatically sets a subconscious timer on how long or how genuine a response to crisis can last for. The by-product of this is that one end of the cycle of ‘activism’ will require something more to happen or another spectacle to occur to warrant another global response. It is the choice to wait for the worst to happen before a collective societal conscious decides that they want to help, unaware of the cycle they are helping to perpetuate. In terms of the lives of people in the Middle East, it is a further assumption that a similar narrative will happen again and the factor that keeps this cycle sustainable is not one's genuine commitment to help but more so the loss of life that allows for a narrative of despair to be spun.

For the people of Lebanon, the explosion was the final straw. With mass intervention from respective governments from France and other nations in the EU, the government in Lebanon was forced to step down. A momentary act of change, but any move forward for a country regarded for its beauty and culture, requires a long-term plan based on sustainability and stability. For the rest of the world looking over Lebanon, they too can aid this change by channeling their active consciousness to act in the prevention of crisis, not to react to the preventable aftermath.

Written by Matt Limb

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