By Nadeem El Zahr | Junior Editor of Opinions (English)

There comes a time during every prospective period of sociopolitical transition across history, when one must reflect on its impact and effectiveness, and ultimately form a final, personal verdict as to its success or failure. It would suffice – or at least be uncontroversial – to conclude that the civil uprising of October 17th, 2019 culminated in little to no successes on neither the social nor political front. Many might argue that the movement sparked the interest of a multitude of the youth to strengthen their knowledge of politics and social work and encourage their participation therein. However, while this may be a small victory on the social front, our political and economic reality has changed little, if at all.

In all candidness, I believe the dysfunction propagated so long by the incumbent political class has become even more entrenched and intransigent than before the uprising, under the pretext of sparing the country of the chaos that will unfold due to the political vacuum a revolution would create.

The social reaction to the uncertainty that came with the Oct. 17th movement has, for the most part, verged on reactiveness rather than proactiveness. Myriad individuals, who otherwise might have continued to push for a sweeping revolution, have “jumped back in their trenches” as a result of the anti-revolutionary fearmongering they have been subjected to by their political elites.  Many Lebanese people today who participated in the Oct. 17th uprising are holding on to the same identities they claimed to have liberated themselves from, and now feel they are under a graver, indefinite threat of annihilation.

Coincidentally, it happens that students who have come of age in the past 4 years – school and university students alike – are caught in the crossfire of this battle between old and new, traditional, and change-oriented, and have had very little agency over the matter since its beginning in 2019.

“Little agency? The AUB student body led crushing protests against a 10% increase in tuition fees in the early 1970s and was part of a national student union that coordinated mass protests and issued joint statements on behalf of the entire national student body! How did it get this bad?” 

The above is a question that many of us have asked ourselves after witnessing the myriad injustices the Lebanese student body endured throughout the uprising until today. Compared to the politically active student body of the 1960s and 70s, the present student movement is a mere shell of its former self. However, my belief is that it would be diligent to consider the role the deliberate omission of any meaningful instruction on Lebanon’s political and social history in school curriculums played to produce the political illiteracy we see today. There is no escaping the fact that our schools’ curriculums are tragically lacking and obsolete where civics, history, and social sciences are concerned. Resources detailing the country’s history post 1945 are virtually inaccessible to the average college student unless one takes the initiative to look deeply for information themselves – a tedious and time-consuming task to say the least. It is difficult to blame a generation that has been consciously restrained from accessing its sociopolitical history of being politically illiterate. Personally speaking, had it not been for my vested interest in the Lebanese civil war, I too would have remained ignorant of the intricacies of Lebanese politics and history – I still find my knowledge on the subject minimal even after extensive research, so one can only imagine how difficult understanding Lebanese history and politics is for students whose interests lie elsewhere.

Additionally, it does not help that those students who did choose to take their frustrations to the streets were met with fierce police and military presence and were subjected to brutal forms of suppression. With no true grasp of the quandaries of the nation’s political and economic structure, even the students who do participate in politics do not usually have a solid idea of how exactly their demands will be met – that is, if they will be met at all. With such a discouraging prognosis about the country’s future presenting itself at every fork in the road despite protestors and activists’ best efforts, and the absolutely real threat of grievous physical and mental harm befalling those who choose to protest, the political inaction of the Lebanese student body is not so striking.

One might argue that the students of the 1960s and 70s also faced the same forms of suppression, and I would agree. However, it is due to consider the tumultuous and transitional political climate of the time. The strong presence of long-established political parties, both Lebanese and Palestinian, in the majority of prominent Lebanese universities provided a structural base for the protesters to organize their action and give them legitimacy. The student body of the 1960s and 70s and even the early 2000s had the support of political parties that had presence on the Lebanese political scene, so student protests were often coordinated by the political leadership and fell under the umbrella of a wider national cause and were not strictly student led in that sense. In contrast to then, the groups spearheading student political activity today are often incoherent and disorganized, lacking political support, divided amongst themselves, and unable to lead a protest about a particular issue from start to finish without losing track of the initial demands, or maintaining an adequate ratio of protesters to security forces.

In conclusion, the revolution did not work, one can even go as far as to claim its results have been counterproductive, further pushing people to their sectarian niches as a result of the crippling uncertainty that came with it. The college student today, in less than half a decade, has seen the deterioration of the change movement to its tragic state, been through innumerous severely traumatic experiences, an unprecedented economic meltdown, and seen the brutal suppression of dissenting voices. It is expected, then, that the student political movement today is seeing timid numbers and futile outcomes. Pairing this with the current generation’s effective oblivion to its history and political schematics, the natural consequence is a youth that does not know its history, does not understand its present, and as a result is helpless to plan its future; thus the politically inert student body we see today.