Trading guns for butter

Amid the threatening talk in the past month or so of a return to civil war if the opposition continues demanding a Syrian withdrawal, it is remarkable that there has seemed so little patience in Lebanese national culture during the past 15 years to investigate that war. It was particularly ironic that the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, an event harking back to the war years, targeted the very man who more than any other defended this amnesia in order to satisfy the national passion to pursuit of profit. If one were to catalogue the cultural works on Lebanon’s war, the results would be anemic. By and large, scholars, artists, filmmakers, playwrights and novelists have mostly been asleep. And when they have not, one must navigate through a mediocre wasteland indeed to reach an occasional oasis; for example the novel White Faces by Elias Khoury, Little Wars by